101 Tips for:

Leadership

 

by Mark Sanborn, CSP, CPAE President, Sanborn & Associates, Inc. Developing

Leaders in Business and Life                

 

 

303.683.0714 303.683.0825 fax 10463 Park Meadows Dr. Suite 213 Lone Tree CO, 80124

www.marksanborn.com

Leaders are people who respond to the challenge. Leaders set the course for themselves and their organizations. Leaders and managers differ; leaders are a valuable asset to their company, their team, and their employees. Leaders use the future to motivate people

and always believe that things can be better than they are.

Managers and leaders differ in several ways. Managers perform tasks; leaders seize opportunities. Managers have employees; leaders win followers. Managers monitor people; leaders inspire

them. The managers who make the most impact are the ones that perform as leaders.

Leaders are needed at two different levels. These challenges come at both a social and a personal level. Social challenges involve information and technology as well as global competition. Leaders at a personal level strive to find meaning in a material world.

Leaders are needed to meet the challenges of our day. Social issues such as illiteracy, homelessness, AIDS, hunger, terrorism, child abuse, health issues, environmental issues and more are challenges

that need dedicated leadership to be overcome.

All leadership is personal. To be a good organizational leader requires that you first understand your motives to lead. Two of the most important characteristics of leaders in the 2000s will be flexibility and the ability to live with uncertainty and ambiguity.

Personal leadership means understanding those values that never change and providing a foundation for the future.

Leadership is the ability to help people and organizations surpass themselves. If the impact you have on ten people yields a 10 percent increase in productivity per person, you will have, in effect, created an entire additional unit of human contribution.

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To understand the differences between a manager and a leader, you need to look at the root meanings of the words manage and lead. The Greek root of the word manage means "to handle" while the root of the word lead means, "to go." Managing can

be static (creating and monitoring processes) while leadership is dynamic and vital. Leaders take people from where they are to where they need to be. Some managers focus on what is necessary, but all true leaders focus on what is possible.

Power over or with people? Management is power over people. It's positional power. Leadership is power with people. This people power is developed from six skills that include: self-mastery,

stewardship, visioning, persuasive communication, empowerment, and service. Leadership is seen through the behaviors that are expected by employees and the results that are expected by management. Developing these six behaviors creates great leaders.

Leaders develop self-mastery. Self-mastery is the ability to achieve your own personal maximum potential. Self-mastery is achieved through seven components: security of self, a sense of purpose, clearly defined values, positive expectancy, discipline,

credibility through experience and confidence, and emotional growth through study and introspection.

Self-mastery requires a healthy sense of self. Self-mastery requires that you become so secure in your sense of self that you are not concerned with the opinions of others and their

perceptions of you. Rather than taking others' opinions of you as the determinant of your self worth, take the opinions of others as feedback on your performance.

Purpose powers leadership. Leaders get out of bed in the morning because they have a clearly defined sense of purpose. Leaders enjoy the journey even when it is difficult because they

are passionate about where they’re going

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Values make sense out of passion. Passion is created out of a sense of purpose, but passion alone isn't always the best thing. Hitler had great passion, but was still a war criminal and caused the deaths of untold millions of people. Your values will direct

your energy as a leader, so you must be crystal clear about what you value. There are three questions you much ask yourself to determine your values.

Leaders ask themselves, "What Gets Me Excited?" Petty people get excited about petty issues, but significant people get excited about significant issues. You can tell a lot about people by what excites them. We have plenty of sports fans, and that is

great, but we also need to be fans of values that have lasting meaning.

Leaders ask themselves, "What Do I Personally Stand For?” Don't compromise your personal values. One of the most important concepts for motivation in the next century, especially for leaders, is to align yourself with people who share the same

sense of purpose, the same values, and the same commitment. If you can’t change the value system present where you work, a second option is to realign yourself with an organization that shares your values and commitments.

Leaders ask themselves, "What Do I Do About My Values?" There are two kinds of belief, or faith: intellectual belief and pragmatic belief. Intellectual belief is mental

agreement. The more important kind of belief is pragmatic belief—this is less about what you believe in than about what you do about what you believe. The old standard “actions speak louder than words” holds true.

Positive expectancy is more than just a positive attitude. Do you focus on the setbacks in life or the things that will move you forward? Dr. Martin Seligman, of the University

of Pennsylvania, states there are two basic explanatory styles: positive and negative. Our explanatory style at age 25 is one of the best predictors of our health at age 65. What we believe to be intuitively true is also valid and quantitatively true. So, how you view the world and what you expect from it impacts you and your sense of self-mastery as well as the confidence of the people around you.

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Self-mastery requires discipline. We cannot demand excellence from others if we do not command it from ourselves. We need to always command our best from ourselves. A good example of why we should always demand the best from

ourselves is to consider the pilot on an airplane. You certainly wouldn’t want the pilot of a plane you are flying in to determine his day’s work according to his mood or his lack or sleep last night. In the same manner, you should strive to provide your best performance in all that you do.

Discipline means choosing long-term gratification over short-term gratification. The choice is there every day, and you must consciously decide. Will you choose what satisfies you just for today? Or will you forego instant gratification to benefit

in the long run?

Everyday, once a day, do something tough and challenging. This means choosing to do one thing a day you don’t particularly want to do, or feel like doing, but something you know you should do just because it's good for you. Every day

we can prove to ourselves that we are in control and that we can choose what needs to be done, not just what we feel like doing. We need to take care, however, not to lose our spontaneity and flexibility.

Everyday, once a day, do something just for the fun of it. Balance is the key to developing discipline. It is much easier to develop the discipline to do that one challenging thing everyday if we balance it with doing something else just for the

fun of it. Life is filled with simple pleasures, so don't delay—start today.

Self-mastery requires credibility through experience and confidence. A leader’s credibility doesn’t come from having a perfect track record of success. Instead, credibility in leadership comes from having learned your lesson from

unsuccessful experiences. Learning from your mistakes builds credibility. Develop credibility through confidence. Credibility comes from being famous for something. Find some aspect of your job you can do better than anyone else. Own some aspect of what you do for yourself. Acquiring ownership requires three sub masteries: mastery of craft, mastery of interactions, and mastery of process.

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Understand your level of craft mastery. People who are really good at something appear to be almost magical, as if naturally born to the task. There are four levels of craft mastery. Unconscious incompetence refers to people that do not know,

but also do not know that they do not know. Conscious incompetence is when you know you have some deficit of skills you have to develop. The third level is called conscious competence. By concentrating and working very hard you are able so have some level of mastery over what you are doing. Leaders move into the fourth area: unconscious competence. You have done something so often that you appear to do it with almost no effort; you have integrated that skill. This is mastery of craft.

Become a master of interactions. You can't master people for a very simple reason: we cannot change other people, at least not at a level we call mastery. We can understand what is known as the law of behavioral flexibility. The greatest freedom you

have is the ability and willingness to change yourself. To be a master of interaction means that you choose to control your interactions and responses with people. That will give you complete control over any situation.

Become a master of process. In one of my favorite books, “Executive Odyssey” by Frederic Harmond, the author says the building block of success in the workplace is the complete act. The complete act is when you have a very clear picture of what

you’re trying to accomplish, and you’re able to accomplish that task completely and successfully. There are three subtle components to a complete act. The first is the physical component, the detail part of the complete act. The second component of the complete act is called the mental component. I call it the thinking part of the complete act. The third component, often overlooked, is the psychological component. I call it the people aspect of the complete act. These three components comprise a complete act, which is how you develop the mastery of process.

Self-mastery requires a beginner’s mind. Michelangelo is reputed to have said at the peak of his career, “Still I am learning.” That’s the final challenge of self mastery. It’s important that we get outside of the world that we live in most of

the time, and expose ourselves to new experiences. One of the basic skills of leadership is unlearning the lessons of the past. We can’t hold too tightly to the lessons of past experience because in a rapidly changing world whatever we learned last week, last month, or last year may no longer be relevant or applicable.

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Get more from your life experiences. There are two keys: precede every significant life experience with study, and follow up every significant life experience with introspection. Become

of student of ideas in people. The way that we increase the lessons of experience is to precede that experience with relevant study. There’s a more important step. After we’ve had that experience, we should always ask what lessons we have learned. Introspection is reflecting not on what you did, but on how you felt about what you did and what you learned from it. Experiences without introspection become relatively void of value. The lessons really come from thinking about what has just happened rather than just experiencing it. The best high-impact leaders don’t just learn from their business lives, they learn from all areas of their lives.

Leaders are good stewards. In leadership, the most valuable resource of all is people. Leaders have only three true resources: their time, their energy and the time and energy of their team.

Leadership then is the strategic allocation of those three resources.

Use focus to create results. Here’s an important leadership axiom. Managers try to put more time into their lives but leaders try to put more life into their time. Realizing that time is a limited resource, we’ve got to strategically deploy that very

precious resource. The ability to focus effort and attention is what creates results for most leaders.

Use focus to gain leadership credibility. Focus on what is important and followers will know you have worthwhile goals and objectives. Focus on what is trivial and you won’t be taken

seriously. What does your focus say about you?

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Create a leadership agenda. If you try to accomplish everything, you’ll most likely accomplish little. Prioritize those things you most want to contribute and be known for. Success

does not respect intelligence as much as it respects focused attention. Focused attention and effort will beat brilliance every time in the market place of human affairs.

Be effective and efficient. Efficient means no waste of time, energy, or motion. It means doing things right. But effective means doing the right things. It doesn’t matter how efficient we

are as leaders or managers unless we’re focused on the right things.

Identify MVP activities for yourself and the people you lead. In sports the term MVP means most valuable player. In business and in life, MVP stands for Most Valuable and Profitable activities. Make a list of the ten activities you could

and should be doing each day to give you the biggest payback on your investment of time and energy. Develop a top ten list for every employee in your company and see how you can become effective, personally and in the organization.

Think in 3F: future focus, past focus and present focus. Future focus is dependent upon strategic anticipation. Positive expectancy requires having a positive, yet realistic attitude regarding the future. Hope for the best, yet plan for the worst.

Managers ask, "What if we fail?" Leaders ask, "What do we do if we fail?"

Learn from the past. The biggest value in past experience is discovering what works and what doesn't work, and how to apply that knowledge to the present.

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Be present-focused. Leaders know that most of us are preoccupied with the past or the future. They also know that that we should live in the moment of now. The key to being present

focused is to anticipate the future, learn from the past, but spend the majority of your time focused in the present.

Beware the danger of perfectionism. Most people don't know the difference between excellence and perfectionism. You have probably heard that "anything worth doing is worth doing

right." Actually, that is simply not true. Some things are worth doing and getting done. Some things are worth doing well. Some things are worth doing very, very well. Excellence is the ability to know the difference. It means investing additional time and energy as long as it adds noticeable value to the product or service for the end user.

Learn to cast a vision for the future. Managers provide people with a destination. Leaders provide people with transportation. It's one thing to be able to envision the future, it's quite another to be able to show people how to get there.

Theodore Lovett of Harvard Business School says," The future belongs to those who see opportunities before they become obvious.”

Begin at the end and work backwards. Vision always begins with the simple question, "What am I trying to accomplish?" Many people are reactive. They wait for things to happen and then they respond. Some people are proactive,

people who make things happen. Today's leaders are interactive. Being interactive means having the ability to adapt and change very quickly.

Reinvent the way you do business. I call this the pursuit of more, better, faster and different. The pursuit of more is quantity. The pursuit of better is quality. The pursuit of faster is speed. And the pursuit of different is innovation.

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Do a little bit more a little bit better. A favorite restaurant will often gain repeat customers by providing larger portions at less cost - a little bit more for your money. A reputable

manufacturer will increase sales by producing a product that is a little bit better than the rest.

Get a little bit faster. Domino’s Pizza taught the country about a little bit faster with its "delivered in 30 minutes or its free" campaign. Is Domino's the best pizza in town? No, but they

are the fastest and that has made them one of the most successful pizza chains in the world. Leaders understand their followers’ and their customers' needs so well that they anticipate those needs and fulfill them before they even know they have them.

Become a little bit different. Being a little bit different—being an innovator – will set you apart from the rest of the pack. The Tattered Cover, a bookstore in Denver, is a great example of a business doing things a little differently. They have more than

400,000 book titles available in 41,000 square feet. They take special orders, mail a notice when it’s in, follow up with a phone call, and even then, if it isn't just what you expected, no problem. They eat the cost. This just isn't done in the book business. They offer a range of services, hire only the best employees (who like their jobs!), and don't even ask for an ID with a check.

Live your philosophy. When I asked Joyce Meskis, the owner of The Tattered Cover, how she defines success, she said, "To The Tattered Cover, success is doing business in a way that is

true to our own philosophy and is good for the community." She "sweats the details" of her business. She says problem solving is best accomplished by pushing the problem down to where it happens and that they empower people to make judgment calls on their own. Management deals with problems only when an employee feels uncomfortable handling it alone. She sees her role as a leader as a joint effort rather than a singular effort. "I don't spend much time thinking about my role. I just do it."

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Know the difference between creativity and innovation. Managers attempt to be creative. Leaders strive to be innovative. The difference? Creativity is a head game, innovation is a doing

game. Leaders combine creativity with an ability to innovate to actually get something done.

Innovate by daring to be different. Managers try to fit the mold, but leaders try to create their own mold. Go outside your industry for ideas on how to improve the way you conduct your business. If you only do what's been done in your industry

before, you'll never be known as innovative. Next time you have a problem, ask somebody who doesn't know anything about your area of expertise. A non-expert can give you an entirely new perspective that will be helpful in creatively solving the problem.

Innovate by answering the right questions. In business, the answers we come up with are often correct but we're constantly answering the wrong questions.

Innovate by searching for all the right answers. Psychologists who specialize in creativity believe that between the ages of 5 and 7, a child loses 50% of their innate creativity. What happens at that age? Right. A child begins school. I am not saying there is anything inherently wrong with our

education system, except for one unfortunate by-product. Our system teaches our children to search for the one right answer to a problem. Creativity is a search for all the right answers. To generate quality solutions requires options. To be innovative, do not search for the one right answer. Search for all the right answers and then choose the best option.

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Innovate by learning to act on incomplete information. We often problem-solve by gathering information, conducting research, and doing our homework until it’s too late to make an effective decision. Being informed does not necessarily mean we

have complete information. Sometimes incomplete information is sufficient because we can use our intuition to make the leap from incomplete information to the best solution to a problem.

Innovate by being willing to make more mistakes. To be a leader, be willing to learn through imperfection. But it doesn’t do much good to make mistakes if you don’t learn from them.

Be daring, not foolish. When leaders are informed, they can leverage problems into the awareness level of followers and then exercise an option. It's been said that managers are problem solvers, but leaders teach others to solve their own problems.

Now there's a higher evolutionary phrase: Managers, if they're lucky notice opportunities, if they're around them, but leaders exploit those opportunities.

Exploit opportunities. Exploitation is negative when it’s done to people, however, it is perfectly all right to exploit opportunities because to exploit simply means to seize and take advantage. The high impact leader teaches people to solve

problems and then recognizes and helps people exploit the opportunities that exist in the workplace.

Learn persuasive communication. Managers tell people what to do. Leaders explain why it should be done. Leaders sell, and that’s persuasion. Persuasion is a learned skill – it takes

practice and training.

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Don’t settle for being impressive – be influential. The impressive salesperson is usually a poor sales person. After an impressive salesperson leaves the customer's office, the customer has been impressed with the salesperson, their

product, their service, their company, but the problem is the customer didn't buy anything. Impressing people is a head game and changes what people think. Influencing people is a behavior game and changes what people do.

Meet the needs of followers. Do you meet the needs of the people who follow you? The needs they have are (1) solutions to the problems facing them personally and organizationally and (2) feeling good about their interaction with you. Leaders

provide both. Relationship building is one of the most powerful skills of leadership. But, before you can be persuasive as a communicator, you’ve got to understand what people need and want.

Sell yourself first. The most important sale you’ll ever make is selling yourself first. That’s because only when you have the passion and the commitment of truly loving what you are trying to sell can you truly persuade others.

Be positively discontent. In a competitive world, the status quo is a myth. If you and I stay the same, the people around us will continue to improve and in a very real sense we will lose ground.

Leaders have to make people uncomfortable with the status quo because in a competitive world “good enough” never stays good enough for very long.

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Improve everything. Inevitably, if you tell enough people to make their job, their products, their services better, you will hear, “Hey if it ain't’ broke, don’t fix it.” The high impact leader responds, “If it ain’t broke, make it better anyhow.” That’s the

power of positive discontent and it’s one of the toughest things about being a leader. You should be proud of what you’ve accomplished, but don’t allow yourself to become content.

Learn the skill of diplomacy. You can’t always tell people what they want to hear, but you can always tell them in such a way that they’ll be willing to listen. That’s the key to tact and diplomacy. We need leaders who are brave enough to tell us not

only what we want to hear, but what we need to hear.

Learn the art of storytelling. Storytelling makes the intangible tangible. The reason why storytelling works is (1) it gets people to commit to values and principles, not just facts and statistics, and (2) it’s a way of giving people examples.

Learn the three keys of storytelling. Three of the best ways to accomplish storytelling are analogy, metaphor, and breaking preoccupation. Analogies are figurative language. It’s using two things that are otherwise dissimilar to make a point. Using a

metaphor is using something people already understand to help them figure out what they don’t understand. Before you can use metaphors, analogy, or storytelling, you’ve got to remember to break preoccupation. All listeners are preoccupied with the circumstances of their own life. Before you can inform or persuade, you must first capture the listener’s attention.

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Learn to grab their attention. Here are five specific techniques for breaking preoccupation. Number One: Begin with a challenge. Number Two: Ask questions. Number Three: Begin

with a shocking statistic or illustration that gets people into the proper frame of reference. Number Four: Make a personal disclosure. Number Five: Use a relevant news item.

Work from a persuasion checklist. The ancient Greeks, who studied the art of persuasion extensively, knew that the leader delivering a message must include three elements: ethos,

pathos, and logos. Ethos is character, credibility, and support. Before we can convince another person to see things our way, we must earn their respect and trust and make them feel comfortable and at ease. The next ingredient is logos, or reason. Logos is telling people information that makes sense to them. The third ingredient is pathos, or emotion. Emotion is essential because the persuasive communicator has to get a follower’s passions running in the direction of what they want and need to do.

Sell followers on what is good for them. One of the paradoxes in society today is that as people expect more options, they also expect an expert to guide them in exercising those

options. That’s the role of leadership. Make it easy for people to do the right things.

Create an immediate sense of legitimate urgency. If they don’t, you’ll find your people have no real compulsion to be accountable in time. Accountable in time means evaluating people not just on what they get done, but on how long it takes them to do it.

Call for action! I call it “what’s next” thinking. After every conversation, after every encounter, after every meeting, end by asking the person that you’re communicating with, “What’s next?”

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Love people. The first step in empowering people is taking time to get to know them and to understand them. If you really love your people, if you’re really committed to them, it then becomes your objective to create value for them in every

interaction.

Deliver delight. Number One: If they got less than they expected from you, they feel cheated. Number Two: If you only give them what they expected, they feel satisfied. And that’s it.

My challenge to you today is Number Three: whenever you interact with another human being, leave them feeling delighted. People—both customers and colleagues – who are delighted feel that they have received more than they expected at a time when they least expected it.

Clarify values. Roy Disney put it eloquently when he said, “Decision making is easy when values are clear.” We can’t create rulebooks and policies and procedures that will dictate how an employee acts or behaves on the job because there are too many

unknowns, too many unforeseen circumstances. The best we can hope for in leadership is to clarify the values that shape the decision-making process for employees.

Be trustworthy. How does an employee evaluate whether a leader is trustworthy? Telling the truth, even when it isn’t easy, is essential.

Don’t be a mind-reader. One of the dangers a leader faces is thinking she or he knows what someone wants or needs without asking. We’ve got to listen because employees believe and trust managers who listen.

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Be a champion for your people. A champion is a leader who will go to the wall for their followers so their followers don’t have to. A champion is a leader who will put himself or herself at risk

so the people who follow them don’t have to put themselves at risk. Leaders need to remember that they actually have two jobs. The first is to represent the needs of the organization to the followers. The second is to represent the needs of the followers to the organization.

Create commitment through involvement and participation. Ownership obligates. Here are four questions you can ask the people you lead to keep them involved and committed. The first question: “What have you learned this

week?” Question number two: “What do you think encouraged dissention?” Question number three: “How do you feel about what happened?” Question number four: When there’s a conflict or a problem and you have yourself in the difficult position of disciplinarian, ask that person who you must discipline: “What would you do if you were in my shoes?”

Appreciate, recognize and encourage. Managers try to be heroes. Leaders try to make heroes. Leaders have found that when you focus the spotlight on your followers, the reflection on you is even brighter. When a leader gives credit where credit is

due, more credit is given to the leader who was the catalyst for making it happen in the first place.

Lead through contribution. What motivates the leader? Here’s one of the most important things I know about human motivation wrapped up in one sentence: Everyone has a passion

for significance.

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Be a victor of circumstance. Regardless of what happens we can choose to be victims of circumstance or we can choose to be victors of circumstance. You can’t always control what happens to you in life, but you can always control how you respond to the

event. That’s what it means to be a victor of circumstance.

Recognize your responsibility as a steward. There is an Indian proverb that says we do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our grandchildren. It is possible for leaders working through their organizations to make a positive

difference in their facility, community, and in their country. The goal is not simply to take from the system, but to repay the debt, to put something back into the system.

Change something. You aren’t going to read an ebook and then change everything that’s wrong in the world. The tragedy, of course, is that you read this ebook and then change nothing.

We know we’re not going to help everybody in our organization, but the tragedy would be not helping somebody. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “The greatest tragedy of our social transition is not the noisiness of the so-called bad people; it is the appalling silence of the so-called good people.”

Do something significant. The premise of leadership is simple: leaders are people who respond to the challenge, take up the reins, and set the course for themselves and for their organizations. Along the way, you can face some deadly

assumptions that, if put into practice, can cause you to lose control. I’d like to share some of those assumptions and then offer the realities in which leaders operate.

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Copy carefully. Many employees are so busy trying to survive they leave no time to contribute to the bottom line. Typically, we look at what leadership and management are doing and try to emulate them. We assume that if those behaviors have made

them successful, they will in turn make us successful. In some organizations this creates a perpetuation not of success, but of stupidity. If we have poor leadership role models and if we emulate those poor behaviors, then those behaviors perpetuate themselves over time. One common false management assumption is that “customer service” is the strategic edge. That’s just not the case. Service itself is the strategic edge.

Don’t ‘do’ service, ‘be’ service. There is an important difference between customer service and the service ethic. One of the reasons organizations are in trouble is because we have lost all sense of the service ethic. Sometimes the phrase

“customer service” suggests that unless somebody is a customer they do not deserve to be served. Therefore, we find that we are not tuned in to serving coworkers, employees, managers, vendors or the people we live with each day. Service is the heart of leadership. Those who lead best are the people who have a desire to serve not just the customer, but all the people that they come into contact with each day.

Relationship rules. The soft skill of relationship building translates to the bottom line. Leaders are those who want to better serve the people they live and work with.

Let your customers and employees make you smarter. Here’s another false assumption that creates havoc in businesses across the country: we are smarter than our customers. I call it the trap of the expert. We think that because we are in a

particular business we know what our customers want or need better than they do. Here is the important reality: our customers are at least as smart as we are. But together, leader and follower, salesperson and customer, we are even smarter. There is a certain synergy that occurs when we combine what we know about our product or service with what the customer wants and needs.

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Educate employees and customers on the value they’re receiving. If people don’t understand the benefits they’re provided, they won’t appreciate and value them. Make sure your people know about the things that you and your organization do

for them.

Focus on the possible. Anyone can achieve the probable. Leaders aim higher. They survey their situation and look for the biggest and most exciting possibilities to pursue.

Break down barriers that keep people from doing better. Identify the obstacles your team faces and use your leadership to remove them. If you want to know what’s holding

your people back, just ask them.

Design your systems and procedures for people. Examine the systems you have created and ask, “Do those systems truly leverage the knowledge and skills of the people who make the products and services we provide?”

If your employees aren’t learning, you aren’t leading. Developing those you lead should be a top priority. People rarely get better by accident.

Coach everyone. In many organizations, new employees come on board with little or no coaching. One of the key roles of leadership is surrounding ourselves with talent and that begins at the recruiting and hiring phase.

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Learning is NOT achieved through osmosis. We assume that because someone is competent at what they do, they should be competent at teaching other people how to do it. Performance is not achieved through osmosis. Performance is achieved

through coaching and practice. Probably the second greatest weakness in American business leadership is the lack of time devoted to coaching. You can immediately improve the performance of the people you lead by (1) devoting more regular coaching time one-on-one, and (2) spending time on skill development so that they’ll have a chance to apply what they’ve learned.

Asking for help is NOT a sign of weakness. In reality, not knowing when to ask for help is a sign of stupidity. There is a difference between independence and interdependence. Americans believe highly in the concept of independence, in the

self-made individual and yet, independence has its limitations. An organization’s success is endangered when people are unwilling to ask for help. The key for the future will be interdependence, which is shared dependency.

Training is NOT a luxury. Training and development is a necessity, and the best leaders and organizations know it. This dedication to improvement is reflected in their calendars and in their budgets.

Teach people to do things that can’t already do. Sometimes training and development is about teaching people how to do what they already do better. Good training is teaching people how to do what they aren’t already doing. There is a difference between what we call adaptive and generative

learning. Adaptive learning means learning how to solve day-to-day problems. It’s problem-solving skills as they relate to the workplace. In other words, it’s problem-solving the “same ‘ol” way we’ve done it for centuries. Generative learning is about teaching people how to create and exploit opportunities.

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Don’t promote people to their level of incompetence. There is the assumption that a high performing employee will automatically make an effective manager. Often this just isn’t the way things work out. The reality is that some of the best

performers make some of the worst managers. The best organizations today are creating dual career tracks for employees so that people can stay in their area of expertise and make more money by assuming more responsibility without necessarily managing other people. That in itself is a prime example of leadership.

Employees value control over their environment. Personal control over environment is empowering. When your employees’ voices are heard, everyone wins. Their sense of ownership is increased, and you may just learn something valuable.

Lead change. First, make change a requirement, not an option, or people will opt out. The second step is to clearly identify the outcome of change. Paint a vivid picture of the destination. The third step addresses this fear of the process of change. Involve

people in how the change will take place. Step number four is to sell the benefits of the change. Last, but certainly not least, the cornerstone of any good program of improving performance is to reward those people who change.

Don’t waste time: yours or your followers’. Frequently ask the question, “How do I personally (or how do we organizationally) waste our employees’ time?

Give people a chance to use their strengths. In reality people are created with equal value, but certainly they are not created into equal circumstances. Everyone has special likes, dislikes, skills, and abilities. Make sure people get to shine by doing what they’re good at and enjoy doing.

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Direct competition outward. Harness competition’s power by directing the people you lead to compete outward, not inward. No team ever gets ahead by competing against itself.

 

Promote the future. That means getting followers excited about what the future holds in store and believing that no matter how good things are now they can always be better

Demonstrate directness, openness, and honesty. This idea may be the single quickest way to improve not only the results that you produce with your followers, but also the relationships that you enjoy with them as well.

Ask for what you need. What a radical idea! Be specific about what you need from another person. Don’t expect followers to read your mind.

   Mark is the president of Sanborn & Associates, Inc., an idea lab for leadership development. Leadershipgurus.net lists Mark as one of the top 30 leadership experts in the world. In addition to his experience leading at a local and national level, he has written or co-authored 8 books and is the author of more than two dozen videos and audio training programs on

leadership, change, teamwork and customer service. He has presented over 2400 speeches and seminars in every state and a dozen countries.

Mark's book, The Fred Factor: How Passion in Your Work and Life Can Turn the Ordinary Into the Extraordinary is an international bestseller and was on the New York Times, Business Week and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists. His latest books include You Don't Need a Title to be a Leader: How Anyone, Anywhere Can Make a Positive Difference and The Encore Effect: How to Achieve Remarkable Performance in Anything You Do and Up, Down or Sideways: How to Succeed When Times are Good, Bad or In Between.

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Mark holds the Certified Speaking Professional (CSP) from the National Speakers Association and is a member of the Speaker Hall of Fame (CPAE).

In 2007 Mark was awarded The Ambassador of Free Enterprise Award by Sales & Marketing Executives International.

Follow Mark at: Twitter: @mark_sanborn

Facebook: www.marksanbornspeaker.com

Additional Resources from Mark Sanborn:  

The Sanborn Store: Mark’s best selling books, e-books, video tapes and training materials are available in our online store and at finer bookstores everywhere. The Fred Factor eCoach: An extraordinary training program available online. Mark Sanborn’s Email Newsletters: Monthly insight for those who want to learn to lead and server better at work and in life

  Bring Mark to Your Organization:  

Mark is a Hall of Fame speaker whose impact extends well beyond his presentation. To discuss having Mark take your next event to the highest level, call us at (703) 757-1204. Email us at helen@marksanborn.com or visit us on the web. Electronic Press Kits available upon request. Preview Videos available online.

Sanborn & Associates, Inc. 10463 Park Meadows Dr. Suite 213 Lone Tree, CO 80124 (303) 683-0714 (303) 683-0825 fax email: Mark@MarkSanborn.com