Answer to last weeks leadership question of the week

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Answer to last weeks leadership & team development question Info ThreeBrainSynergy – Monday, August 24, 2009

Here is Friz Glaus’ answer to last weeks leadership question along with a video interview with Fritz  sharing his views on the subject. Watch the video on You Tube

Leadership question of the week of August 17th 2009:

 

What type of person and what style of leadership are required in a leader intent on developing a team of managers and/or vice-presidents reporting directly to him who are self-directed and fully autonomous?

 

 

I would like to deal with this question in relation to a specific group of business people rather than to leaders in general. The basic leadership  requirement will be the same, but I would like to focus on the specific business leaders that ThreeBrainSynergy is addressing, namely company owners (Presidents or CEO’s) whose innate style of leadership is that of quick action. They decide and act quickly themselves and they expect quick action from the vice-presidents and other executives who report directly to them. They also expect their direct reports to be able to carry out such action without the need for detailed explanations.  Read more

Leadership & Team Development Question of the Week. Join in on the discussion

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Strong leadership and team development is more crucial now than ever before for your organization if it is to make it through rough waters and to ride the tides of good fortune.

Leadership that drives high performance in an organization does not just happen but is a decision that comes from understanding what motivates and drives people to perform. To help you remove any ambiguity in your thinking about what makes for great leadership we are offering you to participate in our leadership and team development question of the week.

This weeks question is:

What type of person and what style of leadership are required in a leader intent on developing a team of managers and/or vice-presidents reporting directly to him who are self-directed and fully autonomous?


You can post your answer in the public forum on the Three Brain Synergy website. To access the forum, register for FREE as a Basic Member and then log in to the basic membership area and click on Forum. You will see the question, and you can post your answer right there.

We are offering a prize of our complete Know-Yourself e-learning to the first person to post the correct answer i.e. an answer that agrees with the TBS philosophy. This is a value of $197.00. We will post the answer next Monday on August 24th on the forum.

Participating in this discussion will help you to clarify in your own mind what kind of attitude it takes to be the leader of a high performance organization.

Stephen Goldberg

http://threebrainsynergy.com

Leadership and team development performance management process; case study

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This post continues my case study of a client with whom I am coaching on implementing a win-win agreement process with the goal of building a high performance management team. The idea is to provide the support to implement what was learned during the Leadership Styles and Team Development workshops that took place recently. Please refer to my previous posts in this category to see the progression of activities that took place up to now.

I met again with the president last week to finalize our win-win agreement together. This included completing his performance commitment form that I had modified after our last meeting. He needed help writing the personal development goal relative to the tendency of his type that was most important to overcome. In his case the tendency was being to dominant and he realized that it is easy for him to take charge and direct people to do things according to his perspective. He realized that this closed the door for his managers to participate more in the decision making process and to become more autonomous.

We also completed our discussion and agreed on the support performance commitments that he required from me to be successful in his commitments to the process. We also identified how we were to measure progress towards his expectations.

In this system we developed a way to measure each commitment based on a rating scale of 1 to 10. This is prepared by each party before a review session and then there is an exchange to discuss each person’s rating and perspective. This is also where both parties need to practice skills such as active listening and coaching, as well as keeping the others person’s motivation and needs relative to their type in mind.

This week I will conduct a performance review using the aforementioned approach and form and then discuss how to set up the win-win  agreements with his direct reports.

Stephen Goldberg

New Case Study on Leadership & Team Development

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I just completed delivering a six week leadership workshop on Styles of Leadership and Team Development with a new client in the telecom industry. There were six half-day sessions spread over the six weeks.

I met the owner earlier this year to discuss opportunities to improve the people side of business rather than the processes or systems. Most small business owners are caught up in keeping their sales funnel full and on managing the processes to deliver the goods.

This company is small with about 50 employees in total and most of them working out of the home office in Montreal. There is a sales office in Western Canada and in Europe.

The organization is quite flat in structure with only six people in management roles including the president/owner. Most of the managers had never had any formal training in leadership and had been promoted to these positions as the company grew.

I curently use only one approach to leadership development, the Styles of Leadership & Team Development program developed by Fritz Glaus. I do this because it has contributed to producing the best results for my clients. It is part of a complete approach to help the business owner or CEO free himself from the day to day decisions regarding how the company of organization operates. This allow him to act on new opportunities and use his talents to solidify the organization in whatever way he sees best.

It takes a leader or business owner that is at the point of realizing that greatness is about bringing out the best in people and helping them fully understand and use their qualities to the benefit of all. This then required the leader to start by understanding himself and his direct reports.

The Styles of Leadership and Team Development program incorporates the types of people approach that Fritz Glaus has applied to the training workshops. The program also lay the framework for people to be open to change and continuous personal development. They learn that we all have strengths and weaknesses and this is normal and not to be feared.

During each session over the last six weeks I could see the managers opening up a little more and making attempts to apply what they were learning. Before the third session one of the direct reports of one of the managers participating in the workshops came to me with a big smile and said that she could already see some change from the managers, especially the person she reported to.  She said that they were making a distinct attempt to communicate more often and recognize people’s efforts and contributions.

The program integrates the types of people approach to self-knowledge and understanding of others with the principles of participative management and continuous improvement. Each person identified a key restrainer that interfered with fully using their qualities and set a goal to lessen the impact of this restrainer on their performance.

I met with president a week after the last session and he said that he could see the managers making an effort to apply what they learned. He could see them holding more effective meetings and using the problem solving techniques that were taught.

The next phase of the mandate is to establish win-win performance agreements between the managers and the president. The system we developed has the manager, with our help, formulate a win-win performance commitment with his boss along with support commitments from his boss.

I had the first meeting with the president to begin this process and will submit a new post about that soon.

Stephen