Baldwin hits the nail on the head with his quote on change, doesn’t he? He begs the question of the importance of knowing yourself. Knowing yourself is one of the most important keys to avoiding career mistakes that will derail yours over time.
How you ever used checklists to improve your productivity … or perhaps your positive mental attitude? How well did they work for you? Do they refresh your thinking on important life success lessons?
Before we continue, let me ask you a question.
What works best for your career development? We would love to hear what it was. Please join the conversation below.
We often use checklists to achieve our goal to create an attitude that can see opportunity in every difficulty.
After college, I spent almost 2 years of training as a naval aviator. An important element of that training was the use of checklists in the learning and refresher process. Checklist utilization remains an important part of my business life.
It is always a good idea to have a helpful checklist for reminders of improvements for your business or your personal life.
I keep a stack of 10 or so checklists that I rotate and update occasionally. This is one of them, despite the fact that I am a retiree (at least part of the time). I pull out one checklist to read and contemplate for five minutes as a way to start each day.
I find it puts my thinking in the right frame of mind.
Related: The Story and Zen of Getting Things Done
Here is the checklist example on simple reminders to improve the odds of career tasks that I or my team may be doing:
Your career is not your life
This is probably the most difficult of the lessons, particularly early to mid-career. At least it was for me. To be successful in this lesson, you should develop breath to your list of activities and always put family and friends first.
To do both well, think about activities that maximize your friends and family, like coaching your children’s sports teams.
Career mistakes … knowing who you are
Your life will be in constant change mode, and that is a good thing if you lead change in the direction of your success goals.
To do that most successfully, you should have a good understanding of who you are and what direction you are going.
Certainly, you must know your strengths and weaknesses pretty well.
Career.
Aiming low
One of our most favorite quotations about aim and goals is one from Michelangelo:
The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it. Michelangelo knew a thing or two about high aim and goals didn’t he? Need we say anything more?
Career mistakes … avoiding change
I am a big believer in adaptation and change. You should always seek to be flexible and keep several alternative paths in front of you.
Always be on the lookout for ways to reinvent ways for self-improvement. Our most favored quote on change and adaptation is from Charles Darwin: It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.1
Just remember to substitute success for survival and you will have a very valuable tip.
Career mistakes … focusing on improving weaknesses
Again this tip starts with knowing yourself and honestly acknowledging your strengths and weaknesses.
Focus your work on building on your strengths and making your weaknesses irrelevant.
All of these lessons on success get better when you have a strong foundation in knowing how to stay happy.
One big part of being successful in happiness is learning how to share kindness.
It costs you nothing and you’d be surprised how much it can do for your own happiness.
Types of careers … no simplicity focus
Keep it simple in everything you do. And that is more difficult and significant than you probably believe. Our favorite quote on simplicity? Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple … that’s creativity.
That says it all to us.
Career mistakes … listening but not hearing
It doesn’t seem like a lesson that should be in the top ten for most of the younger generation, or that difficult to be an effective listener.
But most of us are wrong on both counts. Everyone needs to make listening to their #1 core competency.
Career mistakes … ignoring enthusiasm and passion
All of us can be enthusiastic and show passion for our favorite topics and on our best days. The secret sauce is to be as consistent as possible and make it contagious to friends and teammates.
There is a strong correlation to the item of kindness and happiness.
Career mistakes … fear mistakes and failures
While we don’t want to put failure on a pedestal, all of us experience failures in our lives and our careers.
The secret sauce is all about learning from them and moving on in our lives as quickly as possible. Realize that careers and lives won’t fall apart from them.
The bottom line
As I examine these lessons at the tail end of my career, it is easy to recognize how little I thought about most of them through at least the mid-career timeframe.
And, of course, wish I had. From my personal perspective, I was most vulnerable to lessons 1, 2, 4, and 8. I should have spent a lot more time on these lessons. What about you?
Remember to work on all the lessons … it is another great way to show people a positive mental attitude.
Could this checklist help you start your day?
Do you have suggestions to add to the list?
Be sure and walk the talk on these!
May you be so fortunate …
To be surrounded by people who will help you get untangled from the things that are binding you.
It’s up to you to keep improving your continuous learning performance.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your continuous learning?
Do you have a lesson about making your learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on continuous learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
The good news is that you can learn this in one minute.
I’ve summarized my life experiences into three main points that highlight why perseverance is the single most important character trait for you to develop.
Perseverance leads to mastery
A sustained effort over time will typically lead to mastery.
When I first started writing, a few of my friends laughed at my books. Rightfully so. It was full of typos, had terrible grammar and pretty mundane content. None of it was spectacular.
The perfect word to describe it: Mediocre.
And the book sales reflected that.
People will often ask, “How did you manage to get published?”
The answer is simple: Perseverance.
I spent two years writing a book, 318 Quora posts and 30 editorial pitches before I got published.
Even after this momentum, the website I just launched was slow in gaining subscribers. For example, in about two months I had only signed up around 520 subscribers. However, after those two months of churning out weekly articles, last night I had a breakthrough of 64 subscribers in just one night!
Over time my writing has improved dramatically. My writing volume has also increased. It used to take me a few days to write an article. Now I can write a short article in an hour, and the quality is better.
This all happened because I stayed the course.
So when in doubt, always remember: persevere.
Be useful for life … it makes you mentally stronger
I’ve failed a lot.
One of my first jobs, when I was in high school, was working as a salesperson at a tuxedo shop. A few months in, I missed one of my shifts and was fired. I was really upset with myself.
I once tried to be a professional actor and met with an agent. She told me to find another career.
I once tried to be a professional writer. My first book was called “Digital Marketing.” I think I sold a few Kindle copies. Mostly to family and friends. It was a long time ago.
I guess I could have quit writing. But why do that when it’s my passion? Better to learn from my mistakes and to keep improving.
Each of these experiences helped to shape me into who I am today.
Don’t spend time regretting your past. Do focus your energy on pushing forward.
Useful life example.
It teaches patience
Success isn’t built overnight. It’s built over many nights. Sometimes years. That’s why you’ve got to be patient.
This doesn’t mean you don’t create and build with passion and intensity. You want that. But if you don’t have patience, you might end up giving up at a time when you’re just inches from success.
If you see meaningful progress and continued improvement, then it may make sense to continue to persevere.
When I first started writing the “Digital Marketing,” I thought it would take a few months to finish it from beginning to end.
It took me an entire year. But despite all the times I got writer’s block or got a huge headache from proofreading the book, I never quit.
It’s the book I’m most proud of. And it was worth every minute.
Creating something worthwhile isn’t easy. Be patient.
Be useful for life … learning to give awesome compliments
How easy do you find it to pay great compliments? An authentic compliment. Difficult for you? Seemingly a common thing, right? But difficult to do uncommonly well, don’t you agree?
As a leader or even as a peer, great compliments have never been more critically important than today. Not because they are expected, but to help in team motivation and engagement. While everyone is wrapped up in their performance, people hardly take the time to recognize the work of others.
Whether you’re dealing with bosses, subordinates or peers, a well-placed compliment will make you valuable, noteworthy and better suited for leadership.
Why compliments?
When you recognize people’s skills and achievements, it makes you seem more selfless. Your attention to detail is appreciated. And if you believe what some scientific studies have to say on the subject, people who pay others compliments are seen as smarter. And more humble … a critical leadership quality.
Be specific
Understand what motivates people you work with and focus on paying compliments that will give attention to those things. For a business leader, it may be addressing and inspiring a crowd of subordinates. For a secretary, it may be her knowledge of office details. Regardless, compliment them accordingly, in the most natural way possible.
Timing is essential
Compliments are all about timing. They are usually most effective immediately after someone does something they deserve praise for. It’s right after the fact that most people want to hear that they did well. Let time pass, and they will calm down, or convince themselves that they did well and didn’t need anyone else’s approval.
But the timing also involves calibrating someone’s mood. If you see a co-worker in a slump, a well-placed compliment might motivate him and remind him that what he does is significant.
Useful life formula.
Be useful for life … get physical and mental exercise
… every single day. Yes, every single day.
Read and exercise for at least 15 – 20 minutes a day. It’s life-changing, and the body/mind needs it to function at the highest level!
You’ll feel much better mentally and physically almost instantly. The more consistent you are with it, the better and more consistent your life will become in almost every way.
Seriously, it’s very simple. Try it out. Make it a daily habit. You won’t regret it. 🙂Share
Be useful for life … better critical thinking
One obstacle to good critical thinking is our penchant for commitment and consistency. Once we’re on record expressing confidence in an idea, we have trouble changing our minds.
Here’s a tip that will make you a better critical-thinker and conversation partner.
Whenever you want to say “I know such and such” or “I believe such and such” or even, “I think such and such,” instead of saying, “one possibility is such and such, and here’s some evidence . . .”
It’s tough to catch yourself mid-sentence when speaking, so start with your writing instead.
This substitution does at least three good things:
It keeps you from backing yourself into a corner. It’s much easier to change your mind if you’ve merely presented a possibility. It’s more difficult if you’ve expressed commitment to the idea.
It makes you consider what your evidence is. More than once I’ve made this substitution and realized I didn’t have very good evidence for my claim.
It helps to create dialogue instead of a debate. A dialogue is a cooperative venture where the conversation partners explore claims and evidence together. A debate is a competitive venture where, in the name of achieving victory, each side ignores the evidence on the other side as best it can. For more on dialogue debate: 5 Communication Skills that Open People’s Minds
Be useful for life … a perfect handshake
Geoffrey Beartie, head of psychological sciences at the University of Manchester, came up with a formula for this:
If you weren’t a math major, here is the translation of this equation in plain English:
Make eye contact throughout.
Utter an appropriate verbal greeting.
Make a Duchenne smile.
Grip the person’s hand and give it a firm squeeze.
Stand a moderate distance from the other person: not so close as to make him/her uncomfortable or so far away as to make him/her feel detached.
Make sure your hand is cool, dry, and smooth.
Use a medium level of vigor.
Hold the handshake for no longer than two to three seconds.
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your continuous learning?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of a small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
Herbert Gerjuoy once said: Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the man who can’t read: he will be the man who has not learned how to learn. What is your choice for the top learning issues of the day? Learning to learn is our choice. Taught in schools? We have not found many that teach it. We were very surprised by this finding.
In earlier times, perhaps several generations or so ago, our great grandparents and their parents faced an entirely different problem of learning to learn. In their environment, both generations shared the same problems and basically the same solutions. Learning in this environment was a lot simpler. It was simply a matter of transferring information (facts) from the older generation to the newer one.
Related: How Good Is your Learning from Failure?
Enter the industrial age where the world had begun to change very rapidly and grow in complexity. Old solutions, old facts, were no longer enough. Learning needed to change to keep up, switching from learning old information to discovering and understanding new information and solutions. Clearly, a paradigm shift had begun. No longer dumping facts into a learner’s memory was going to be adequate.
In the information and internet ages, learning problems have gotten much worse. The amount of new technical information is doubling every 2 years … doubling. We are clearly living in exponential times.
So how do we improve our ability in learning to learn in such a complex environment? We have defined 10 ways we believe are essential in achieving this goal. Let’s discuss each of these:
Most of what we know, we didn’t learn in school. We learned it in the real world, actually doing, not reading or listening to about doing. Confucius once said: I hear, I forget. I see I remember. I do, I understand.
He appreciated that being a creator was the best way to learn. Make your learning be active learning and be creators as often as possible. We believe this the most critical of the 10 ways to improve your learning.
Watch this short video to learn more …
Define upskill … create curiosity
If we have the guts to think about what we don’t know, confuse our learners, perplex them, and evoke real questions, we can create curiosity. This curiosity can be used to tailor robust methods of blended learning. Curiosity must come first. Questions can be fantastic windows to great learning, but not the other way around. Build your skill of curiosity … it is a necessity for good learning.
Always practice imagination.
Learn and practice imagination
Albert Einstein once said: Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you anywhere.
He understood the complexities of the world today required imagination for the discovery of new ideas and solutions. Imagination requires lots of practice; it doesn’t just happen on its own. So start working on this skill to add it to improve your learning.
By observing life’s experiences around us and careful reflection of what we observe, we can gather facts and information to learn new solutions and methods. Increase your ability to ‘connect the dots’ around you. Take notes and revisit them often.
Embrace the mess of complex learning. In this new world of continuous learning, we are all teachers as well as learners. We realize learning is often an ugly task. Accept that the process of trial and error is an acceptable learning process.
Employ novelty
Our brains pay more attention to things in the environment that are new to our experience. So, seek out as many new experiences to try as you can handle and become an explorer.
Learning how to learn strategies … accept failure
We need to be learners that ask hard questions and explore what might work and what won’t. As a learner, we need to accept failure so we can use often times messy trial and error. Make failures and mistakes as learning sources (and the mistakes and failures need not be yours).
Use emotion
We as learners respond to things around ourselves that elicit emotion. Put emotional stories to work to create a stimulus-response learning process. Listen for inspirational and emotional stories and use them as experiential learning for yourself and those around you.
Explain the meaning
In learning, we respond best when we determine things are that are most meaningful. Find the motivational meanings that provide the meanings that motivate us to dig on.
Learning to learn … change and contrast
People learn new things best when they are in contrast to other information in the environment or to things that are in contrast to previous experiences. To improve learning, work on your experience of change … study trends and study changes going on around you. Step out into the unknown as often as you can.
Connect and collaborate
Connecting with others in the internet world is a great way to share ideas and solicit feedback, new views, and ideas. Once you have found some interesting connections who share goals, try a collaboration project or two. Collaboration is an excellent way to expand learning in a sharing environment.
Here is an example of learning we came across recently:
In 2009, scientists from the University of Louisville and MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences conducted a study of 48 children between the ages of 3 and 6. The kids were presented with a toy that could squeak, play notes, and reflect images, among other things. For one set of children, a researcher demonstrated a single attribute and then let them play with the toy. Another set of students was given no information about the toy. This group played longer and discovered an average of six attributes of the toy; the group that was told what to do discovered only about four. A similar study at UC Berkeley demonstrated that kids given no instruction were much more likely to come up with novel solutions to a problem.
Several of our ways to improve learning to learn methods in this example, isn’t there? It’s amazing what we can come up with when we put our minds to it, isn’t it?
If we as learners embrace the new paradigm of active learning, curiosity, and imagination, we could offer a spark to others around us and may even build a new movement.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you.
It’s up to you to keep improving your abilities for learning to learn. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
It’s up to you to keep improving your continuous learning from all around in your environment.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your continuous learning?
Do you have a lesson about making your learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
The Nine Most Valuable Secrets of Writing Effective Copy
How Good Is your Learning from Failure?
Continuous Learning Holds the Keys to Your Future Success
Like this short blog?Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn or add us to your circles for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, stories per week.
My 30 years of leadership in a variety of positions has afforded me the opportunity to work with some of the best, and worse, leaders around. What I’ve discovered as a result that regardless of one’s particular enabling leadership qualities, a leader can always become better if they set their mind to it.
These are enabling leadership qualities.
Indeed, the difference between an average leader and one that many would consider exceptional is the willingness and dedication to improve. As the old adage suggests, all you have to do is work at it.
With that,
here are suggestions to help you to become a better leader:
What being a leader means
Well, according to Google a “leader” is a person who leads or commands a
group, organization or country.
I’ll take that, and add a bit to it:
I believe a leader is someone who has a certain amount of
expertise in whatever industry or niche they are in, and that they
actively share their insights with
those around them through writing, speaking, and taking action.
But how exactly do you go
about becoming a better leader?
“When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.” -Ben
Franklin
There has never been a faster-changing marketplace than the one we live in today. Leaders must be flexible in managing changing opportunities and challenges and nimble enough to pivot at the right moment.
Stubbornness is no longer desirable to most organizations. Instead, humility and the willingness to adapt mark a great leader.
The most effective leaders – whether they are coaches or CEOs – are passionate about what they are doing and why it works.
If your team is to join you in pursuing a goal, show them a reason to reach it. It’s not enough for you to believe in reaching a higher, better standard; the skill of leadership involves inculcating that same fervent, passionate belief in others – that they can reach it.
Enabling leadership qualities … passion: do not be lukewarm
The best leaders see how each person on the team can contribute to the overall goal – and inspire them to strive for that goal every day.
To inspire higher aspirations in people, show them that what you’re doing matters by making your messages personally relevant – demonstrate that you see the problems they face, the qualities they bring to the table and what their personal needs may be.
By understanding those you lead, by leveraging their strengths and pushing them outside their comfort zones toward that shared aspiration, you can inspire people to believe in their own abilities to reach exceptional heights.
Listening
“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never
listen.” – Ernest Hemingway
Listening is the foundation of any good relationship. Great leaders listen to what their customers and prospects want and need, and they listen to the challenges those customers face.
They listen to colleagues and are open to new ideas. They listen to shareholders, investors, and competitors.
“The only way to do great work is to love the work you do.” -Steve Jobs
Those who love what they do don’t have to work a day in their lives. People who are able to bring passion to their business have a remarkable advantage, as that passion is contagious to customers and colleagues alike.
Finding and increasing your passion will absolutely affect your bottom line.
The boss maps out how strong teams communicate and come together to work through conflict.
In any team, there will be conflict. More important is how the team functions as a whole and how skilled its members are.
The most successful teams communicate well, building on each other’s ideas. They agree on the team’s overarching mission, but they also each have a meaningful, internalized objective that makes the broader goal their own.
They have an ordered internal process in place which, though it may evolve, receives the attention and commitment of all involved. Ultimately, the roles of each team member are clearly defined, but they exist in a state of independence and true partnership.
“Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into
the world today.” -Robert McAfee Brown
Storytelling
After listening, leaders need to tell great stories in order to sell their products, but more important, in order to sell their ideas.
Storytelling is what captivates people and drives them to take action. Whether you’re telling a story to one prospect over lunch, a boardroom full of people, or thousands of people through an onlinevideo – storytelling wins customers.
Great leaders tend to use stories to get their ideas across. Work on crafting engaging and informative narratives as a way to communicate and inspire and watch how your leadership cred grows within your organization.
“Individuals play the game, but teams beat the odds.”
-SEAL Team Saying
Enabling leadership qualities … team playing
No matter how small your organization, you interact with others every day. Letting others shine, encouraging innovative ideas, practicing humility, and following other rules for working in teams will help you become a more likable leader.
You’ll need a culture of success within your organization, one that includes out-of-the-box thinking.
A flashy or selfish play might be fun in the short term, but harmful in the long run.
Types of leadership skills.
Humility: know who you are
Narcissistic teammates tend to be flashy and demonstrate self-confidence and comfort with risk-taking – and sadly, these traits may lead to the initial perception that they are impressive.
But studies show that they are also more likely to disparage others, take more than reasonable credit, hog opportunities for themselves, engage in impulsive behavior and respond defensively to feedback.
The boss teaches “Don’t think too highly of
yourself.” The competition is fierce. They are gunning for you. Look at
your firm objectively. How can you improve?
We are not perfect.
What can we do to improve our client experience? Your success is because of
many team members’ contributions. How can we up our game and train players to
perform better so we can enchant our clients?
“As a small businessperson, you have no greater leverage than the truth.” -John Whittier
Transparency
There is nowhere to hide anymore, and businesspeople who attempt to keep secrets will eventually be exposed. Openness and honesty lead to happier staff and customers and colleagues.
More important, transparency makes it a lot easier to sleep at night – unworried about what you said to whom, a happier leader is a more productive one.
The best teams help each
teammate become a better version of themselves, How can we help our colleagues
– and ourselves – bring our ‘whole selves’ to work? Unfortunately, many of us
will run into situations in which the person we want to be may be in conflict
with the expectations of our organizations, our bosses, even our peers.
Servanthood: make teammates better
On the other hand, if team
members feel that their values align well with the team’s overall goals, they
can feel comfortable and find room to grow, even when things go wrong.
“I had no idea that being your authentic self could make me
as rich as I’ve become. If I had, I’d have done it a lot earlier.” -Oprah
Winfrey
Authenticity
Great leaders are who they say they are, and they have integrity
beyond compare. Vulnerability and humility are hallmarks of the authentic
leader and create a positive, attractive energy. Customers, employees, and
media all want to help an authentic person to succeed.
There used to be a divide between one’s public self and private
self, but the social internet has blurred that line. Tomorrow’s leaders are
transparent about who they are online, merging their personal and professional
lives together.
Emphasize gratitude that the
team has done well and that they have been able to grow and learn.
Thankfulness: learn from each circumstance
Be thankful each morning for
the gift of life – another day to embrace your learning journey. Give thanks
throughout your day to those that serve you, help you and who are kind and giving to you.
Give special thanks each day to
your loved ones and teammates – remembering that no one achieves their full
potential by themselves. We all need others to be all we can be.
Gratitude must be a
constant drumbeat of your dialogue. Infuse your conversations with appreciation
of your team’s acumen and determination to improve.
“Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to
it.” -Charles Swindoll
Responsiveness
The best leaders are responsive to their customers, staff,
investors, and prospects. Every stakeholder today is a potential viral
sparkplug, for better or for worse, and the winning leader is one who
recognizes this and insists upon a culture of responsiveness.
Whether the communication is email, voice mail, a note or a a
tweet, responding shows you care and gives your customers and colleagues a say,
allowing them to make a positive impact on the organization.
“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of
thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” -Gilbert
Chesterton
Gratefulness
Likeable leaders are ever grateful for the people who contribute
to their opportunities and success.
Being appreciative and saying thank you to mentors, customers,
colleagues, and other stakeholders keeps leaders humble, appreciated, and well
received. It also makes you feel great! Donor’s Choose studied the value of a
hand-written thank-you note, and actually found donors were 38% more
likely to give a 2nd time if they got a hand-written note!
To close, give
these ideas a try. Done well, you will become a brilliant
leader. Keep in mind, though, it does require effort and a
commitment to continually develop new leadership skills and behaviors on your
part. With that, the sky is the limit.
The bottom line
Need some help in capturing more improvements for your staff’s leadership, teamwork, and collaboration? Creative ideas in running or facilitating a team or leadership workshop?
Call today for a FREE consultation
or a FREEquote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what
you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and
apply new ideas.
When things are not
what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Do you have a lesson about
making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any
questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder
of Digital Spark Marketing,
a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business
experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your
business. Find them on G+, Twitter,
and LinkedIn.
Digital
Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change.
We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a
free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.
More reading on teamwork from
Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
So You Want To Be a More Influential
Leader?
The Zen of Distinguishing Your
Leadership Behaviors
If You Are Demotivating the Team Here’s
the Action to Take
14 John Wooden Leadership Qualities for Your Career
What skill matters most if you are a leader of a small business? Or perhaps for any business leader? We agree with John Maxwell’s motivational leadership traits. The most critical is the ability to motivate.
For a small business, to develop the best qualities in creating a motivational leader is more critical to the daily operations.
Why? Because there is much less leadership to be involved. And fewer employees so you need everyone fully engaged and motivated.
The key to successful leadership today is INFLUENCE, not AUTHORITY.
– Ken Blanchard
So … you need to pay attention to the development of your motivational leadership abilities if you are a leader of a small business.
Here are some of John Maxwell’s important motivational leader qualities for your thinking and improving your ability to influence. Do you, as a business leader:
John Maxwell’s motivational leadership traits … put people first
People should always come first, they are your business. No matter what the job is, leaders always want to look for the best people and then take care of them. They are the lifeblood of the business.
When you’re leading a business or an organization, you’re leading people. Many leaders work to have relationships with their employees. Taking them out for coffee and getting to know them better is common, an important element of being a leader. Here are two additional perspectives from exceptional business leaders:
You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.
– Walt Disney
You have to treat your employees like customers.
Herb Kelleher
John Maxwell’s motivational leadership traits … develop strengths
Focus on recognizing and developing the strengths of your people. Build on strengths … work on weaknesses.
Some companies follow the motto: “hire for character, train for skill.” You hire people that are eager to learn and are very “raw.”
They don’t have a ton of skills; but as a leader, you teach them, and they become better. They grow with your company and contribute to its success.
You see this with football coaches. In football coaching, it’s almost unheard of for someone with no experience to be hired as the head coach of a team.
Most people start in a low-level position and gradually move up.
The same occurs in business. George Bodenheimer is the former president of ESPN. He started out working in the mailroom of ESPN.
It would have been very difficult for him to rise to the presidency if he hadn’t had a boss who wanted to help him grow and succeed in the company.
If you’re a leader, help your employees grow. You might have a great employee waiting to be a star, but if you don’t help them grow, you’ll never see it.
Worse, they might leave the company to go to an employer who will help them grow.
…effective executives do not start out by looking at weaknesses. You cannot build performance on weaknesses. You can build only on strengths. Make weaknesses irrelevant.
– Peter Drucker
John Maxwell’s motivational leadership traits … develop self-esteem by mentoring
Mentor and develop self-esteem and a positive attitude. We have written on employees’ positive attitude on several occasions.
Employee attitude is so critical that it can’t be overemphasized. It often trickles down from leaders, but it needs to happen more by design. Your business can never be what it can be if you don’t focus on employee happiness.
If you’re an entrepreneur, you’ll have dozens of people criticize you. Customers, current and former employees (whether you know it or not), and family and friends may give you constructive criticism.
It can be stressful to hear or read, and it can be easy to pass on criticism to employees. But it doesn’t help that much. As a leader, you should ensure employees have high self-esteem in their job.
Leaders should make employees feel good about themselves. Constantly criticizing and pointing out the flaws in an employee is a sure fire way to decrease morale and performance.
John Maxwell’s motivational leadership traits … listen and observe
Listen, hear, and observe closely. Find the unspoken messages. Make listening and observing your core competencies.
You don’t gain insights by talking. Ideas can come from anywhere, so it’s important to keep your ears open to new ideas and insight.
Leaders need to be good listeners for everyone, from customers to employees to business colleagues. They need to listen to what other people say and not just hear it.
Listening also helps a leader to get multiple perspectives. When making a decision, a good leader always listens to some different people. They know they own the final decision but always make sure they get input from multiple people.
It was much later that I realized Dad’s secret. He gained respect by giving it. He talked and listened to the fourth-grade kids in Spring Valley who shined shoes the same way he talked and listened to a bishop or a college president.
He was seriously interested in who you were and what you had to say.
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Respect
Be a connector
Want to be a connector?
Be social … walk around and connect on multiple levels. Connected leaders quickly become multiplier leaders.
Multiplier leaders know that at the apex of the intelligence hierarchy is not the lone genius, but rather the leader who knows the importance of bringing out the smarts and capabilities in everyone around them.
We love to use this quote from Marty Kohr, as it is key to being a connected, multiplier leader:
The key is to be part of people’s lives. People will always prefer to do business with friends.
John Maxwell’s motivational leadership traits … inspire and energize
Share your passion. Show compassion and share positive energy always.
A quality of great leaders can articulate ideas and get people excited and inspired by them. It’s not selling people on an idea; it’s inspiring them.
Getting a person to work with a leader when they’re not obligated is more than just inspiring them. It’s about ensuring people have fun and are energized with passion.
Many charities get people to volunteer for them by inspiring and energizing a noble cause. They say that if you donate, you’ll be spending your time working toward something greater than yourself.
This inspires people to take a few hours to work for a charity promoting a cause they believe in.
People want to be part of something larger than themselves. They want to be part of something they’re proud of, that they’ll fight for, sacrifice for, trust.
John Maxwell’s motivational leadership traits … problem solver
Be a problem solver. Resolve issues before they become problems.
Let people know you care about their problems enough to clear them out of the way.
Have balance
Your job is just a part of your life. It is not your life.
There is much more to life than work … find things you love outside of work. Find a balance that works for you and then show it works to your people.
Follow these tips, and you will be well on your way to becoming a more motivational leader.
Here is the bottom line
Our favorite motivational leader of all time? There would be many we like and studied. But our favorite would be Abraham Lincoln.
He worked to achieve mastery of law and politics. He gave his toughest rivals power and autonomy. In fact, he surrounded himself with rivals who excelled in areas where he was not strong.
He gave credit where it was due and wasn’t afraid to accept the blame. He genuinely sought out and listened to other people’s point of view.
His motivational leadership style was rooted in two higher goals: freeing the slaves and keeping the nation intact. Big motivators for most Americans, yes?
Who would be your example of the best motivational leader? Any questions or comments, please add them below.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you.
It’s up to you to keep improving your continuous learning. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Do you have a lesson about making your continuous learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add to the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on continuous learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of a small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
Far too many professionals today look to their managers to manage their career path and trajectory. However, in fact, this is yours and yours alone to manage. It’s so easy to get caught up in our work that we lose sight of our career. So, how do you manage your career with confidence? Here is what Jack Welch taught me about career planning.
Is there a secret to why some people have successful careers and others don’t? Research shows that IQ or abilities often have no cause and effect relationship. Certainly, the socio-economic background does have significant influence but no guarantee.
You are accountable for your success. As such, it is your responsibility to discover your special gifts, attributes, and capabilities that can give you a competitive edge and the greatest probability to have a flourishing career.
Career management requires quality networking, being in the right place at the right time, earning a voice at the table, knowing your unique value proposition and how to use it, managing your personal brand, being influential – to name a few essentials.
But in the end, all of these factors require one important thing: a personal commitment to manage and invest in your career the right way.
On the surface, this sounds simple – but it is quite time-consuming and requires strategic thought and planning. Making an investment in your career requires you to know what you should invest your time, money and resources in.
Think of it like the stock market; most people rely on financial experts and online tools to help them manage their portfolios.
They are based on a multitude of factors that include: the amount of money they are willing to invest, how much risk they are comfortable taking, what type of commitment they will make to manage their investment decisions and keep track of their desired outcomes – amongst many others.
Similarly, when you invest in your career and personal development, you must do it with the end game in mind.
For example, what performance improvements and career advancement outcomes do you expect, and when will you be able to see favorable financial results and lifestyle changes as a result of your investment?
I have seen too many people waste time and money on making career investments that don’t align with their passionate pursuits and ultimate career ambitions.
They can’t see the opportunities around them that they can effectively seize for their advancement and personal satisfaction.
This is what initially happened to me when I started my career. My older brother (a successful executive in his right) wanted to direct and guide my career. He wanted me to be like him.
What he failed to realize was that we were different people, with different skills and completely different personalities and character traits. This is an example of why many people get career anxiety.
They begin to hate their jobs and become dissatisfied with the succession track they are on – because they are now regretting the career choices they made based on how they were influenced by others along the way.
In my case, I soon realized that my brother’s well-intentioned attempts didn’t make sense for me as I began to lose touch with my goals and aspirations.
To invest properly in your career, you must know yourself extremely well. Knowing yourself requires you to understand the factors that positively inspire you to achieve something substantive and relevant – with passion – every day.
For some people, this takes a long time to discover. For others, they know themselves well enough to make good career investment decisions.
What do you believe are the most important areas for your career investment? What areas have you already invested in and what were the outcomes? What areas are you currently focusing on now?
As a one with many years of leadership experience, I’ve talked to scores of experienced executives and managers about their careers over the two decades. They’ve shared their innermost fears, secrets, and hopes for the future with me.
A constant theme for both high-performing and high-potential professionals has been the pitfalls and promises of corporate politics and finding the keys to career success.
Jack Welch management philosophy.
Here are seven ways Jack Welch taught me to start managing my career:
Jack Welch taught me … set measurable goals
The key to getting what you want is knowing what you want. You must know what you want out of your career, and you should be clear about these goals with your manager and your mentor.
These goals are also great ways to measure your progress through the year and years in your regular performance reviews.
Think about what you want to achieve in your career
Study the trends that are shaping your industry and niche. Pay attention to what the experts are saying. Know your strengths, and which skills are marketable?
Take an assessment test if you have to. Map a path to get to where you want to go in your career, knowing that you will have to make changes as the work environment changes.
Based on what you are seeing and hearing, what skills do you have to acquire to become more valuable to yourself and future employers? Acquire those skills and make learning a part of your day.
Jack Welch taught me … take responsibility for managing your career
Don’t wait until you’re fired, laid off, burned out or fed up to revitalize your career. Manage your career on an ongoing basis, particularly through the good times.
This reflects a belief you should embrace—“take responsibility for everything that happens in your life;”
Jack Welch taught me … be open to volunteering for new tasks
When a new project comes up, and it aligns with your goals, raise that hand. Let your manager or HR team know that you want to learn some new skills or gain new, more advanced experience. Be clear on what you can offer to the project and get involved.
Apply to speak at industry conferences
This is another opportunity to build your networks, but it also allows you to build your personal brand. And more importantly, when you speak at a conference, people will view you as an authority in the field.
Another possibility is to host a webinar on behalf of your organization, which is good both for the company and yourself.
Engage online which is an essential part of building your brand. Go one step further than most people who use social media – create a LinkedIn and Facebook group, publish on the LinkedIn publishing platform, or host a Twitter chat.
Do what most people are not willing to do – invest in your career. And take the time to grow the number of connections online.
Jack Welch taught me … maintain an open feedback loop
The hardest thing to do is to hear honest feedback because it isn’t always positive. But, the ability to listen to all feedback and adjust accordingly is what will elevate your career.
Be sure you are open to the good, the bad and the ugly feedback. This will help you adjust your work and your goals.
Jack Welch taught me … seize the initiative
Never stop learning. This begins by investing your time to acquire the right intelligence and know-how that will accelerate your career advancement.
For example, most people want to build their personal brand – yet don’t invest in the process of developing one and thus miss opportunities along the way.
Never assume that you don’t need to get smarter, wiser and more strategic about how to better manage your career.
Be proactive. Get to know the goals the industry you are serving desires to achieve and how you can contribute. Build relationships with key thought leaders.
Identify the best executive search firms that can support the career path you seek – and get to know what your direct competitors are doing to secure the position(s) you may be targeting.
Jack Welch taught me … be ready
If you don’t have the right skills (public speaking, social media, whatever) for the next big job in your sights, get them.
Also, check out online the jobs you think you want. What are the full descriptions and necessary requirements? How can you position yourself to be a better candidate for those jobs?
Take on one thing a week that nurtures your success
For instance, attend a speech by someone in your industry or write a blog about your field. Go on YouTube to hear a motivational speech by someone wickedly successful, like Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg. And use this kind of time, too, to develop your “Big Mouth list” (all the people you email with important professional news about yourself).
The bottom line
There are no magic potions or formulas for career success. It requires sustained effort, street smarts, and insightful strategies, much like the focus of successful organizations.
Need some help in capturing more improvements for your staff’s leadership, teamwork, and collaboration? Creative ideas in running or facilitating a team or leadership workshop?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy innovating your social media strategy?
Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More leadership material from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
Spritz shows one word of an article or book at a time inside a box. Each word is centered in the box according to the Optimal Recognition Point—Spritz’s term for the place in a word that the eye naturally seeks—and this center letter is colored red.
Spritz has yet to launch anything related to its technology, but there is a bookmarklet called OpenSpritz, created by gun.io, that lets you use the Spritz reading method on any text you find online.
The Spritz website has a demo on the homepage that you can try for yourself and speed up or slow down the speeds as you need.
Improving reading skills … Blinkist
Along with Spritz is the new app Blinkist. Rather than a reimagining of the way we read, Blinkist is a reimagining of the way we consume books.
Based on the belief that the wisdom of books should be more accessible to us all, Blinkist takes popular works of non-fiction and breaks the chapters down into bite-sized parts.
These so-called “blinks” contain key insights from the books, and they are meant to be read in two minutes or less. It is very similar to Cliff Notes.
Though the way the information is delivered—designed to look great and be eminently usable on mobile devices so you can learn wherever you are—makes it one-of-a-kind.
Surely we can agree that it’s a lot easier to read more when a book is distilled into 10 chapters, two minutes each.
Focus on the four levels of reading
Mortimer Adler’s book, How to Read a Book, identifies four levels of reading with each step building upon the previous step.
Elementary reading is what you are taught in school.
Inspectional reading can take two forms: 1) a quick, leisurely read or 2) skimming the book’s preface, table of contents, index, and inside the jacket.
Where the real work (and the real retention begins) is with analytical reading and syntopical reading.
With analytical reading, you read a book thoroughly. More so than that even, you read a book according to your rules, which should help you with the context and understanding of the book.
Classify the book according to the subject matter.
State what the whole book is about. Be as brief as possible.
List the major parts in order and relation. Outline these parts as you have outlined the whole.
Define the problem or problems the author is trying to solve.
The final level of reading is syntopical, which requires that you read books on the same subject and challenge yourself to compare and contrast as you go.
As you advance through these levels, you will find yourself incorporating the brain techniques of impression, association, and repetition along the way.
Let’s face it, close reading isn’t often a skill that comes naturally with many of us.
Our first instinct is often to race to the finish line rather than engage deeply with a text.
Getting readers to slow down, engage with the text in different ways, and reflect as they read are the goals of close reading.
There are specific close reading skills you can learn that will help.
The key is learning how to annotate effectively. Nurturing these skills takes time.
Once you are familiar with close reading in one content area, expand the process to other texts and content areas.
Remember what you read
A great place to start with book retention is with understanding some key ways our brain stores information. Here are three specific elements to consider:
Impression
Association
Repetition
Let’s say you read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. You loved the information and want to remember as much as possible.
Here’s what is recommended:
Impression– Be impressed with the text. Stop and picture a scene in your mind, even adding elements like greatness, shock, or a cameo from yourself to make the impression stronger.
If Dale Carnegie is explaining his distaste for criticism, picture yourself receiving the Nobel Prize for Peace and then spiking the Nobel Prize onto the dais.
Association – Link the text to something you already know. This technique is used to great effect with memorization and the construction of memory palaces.
In the case of Carnegie’s book, if there is a particular principle you wish to retain, think back to a time when you were part of a specific example involving the principle. Prior knowledge is a great way to build the association.
Repetition – The more you repeat, the more you remember. This can occur by literally re-reading a certain passage or in highlighting it or writing it down then returning to it again later.
One of the most common threads in my research into remembering more of the books you read is this: Take good notes.
Scribble in the margins as you go.
Bookmark your favorite passages.
Write a review when you’ve finished.
Use your Kindle Highlights extensively.
And when you’ve done these things, return to your notes periodically to review and refresh.
I’ve tried this method for myself, and it has completely changed the way I learn and connect information from perceiving the books I read.
Kindle has a helpful feature online, too, where it shows you a daily, random highlight from your archive of highlights. It’s a great way to relive what you’ve read in the past.
One of the obvious shortcuts to reading more is to read faster. That’s likely the first place a lot of us would look for a quick win in improvement.
So how fast do you read?
Staples, the office supply chain, collected speed reading data as part of an advertising campaign for selling e-readers.
The campaign also included a speed reading tool that is available for you to evaluate. Go ahead and take the test to see how you compare to others.
The Staples speed reading test includes data on how other demographics stack up in words per minute. According to Staples, the average adult reads 300 words per minute.
Third-grade students = 150 words per minute
Eight grade students = 250
Average college student = 450
Average “high-level exec” = 575
Average college professor = 675
Speed readers = 1,500
World speed reading champion = 4,700
Is reading faster always the right solution to the goal of reading more? Not always. Comprehension is as important or maybe more. Some reports say that speed reading or skimming leads to poor retention.
Still, if you can bump up your words per minute marginally while still maintaining your reading comprehension, it can certainly pay dividends in your quest to read more.
Tim Ferriss, the author of the 4-Hour Workweek and a handful of other bestsellers, is one of the leading voices in lifehacks, experiments, and getting things done. So it’s not surprising he has a speed-reading method to boost your reading speed threefold.
His plan contains two techniques:
Using a pen as a tracker and pacer, like how some people move their finger back and forth across a line as they read.
Begin reading each new line at least three words in from the first word of the line and end at least three words in from the last word.
The first technique, the tracker/pacer, is mostly a tool to use for mastering the second technique. Ferriss calls this second technique Perceptual Expansion. According to Ferriss:
Untrained readers use up to ½ of their peripheral field on margins by moving from 1st word to last, spending 25-50% of their time “reading” margins with no content.
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your continuous learning?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.
More reading on learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
9 Things to Know About Creative Visual Design Content
8 Presenter Mistakes That Are Rarely Made Twice
Know These Great Secrets of Collaboration and Co-Creation
How Good Is Your Learning from Failure?
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
Coach Mike Krzyzewski said leaders should be reliable without being predictable. They should be consistent without being anticipated. You should certainly learn from Mike Krzyzewski personal leadership, shouldn’t you?
Spot on. I have been in the military and business world for forty years, and I often get asked what leader qualities contribute to the best leadership.
Developing these qualities is a lifelong learning process. You are never done learning. Every great leader always looks for ways to improve all of these qualities.
Leadership can be especially challenging for entrepreneurs. Balancing the need to run a business (i.e., products, investors, customers, etc.) and the need to lead company personnel is quite a task.
Effective leader qualities as an entrepreneur mean that you can “make things happen,” instead of just “letting things happen.” The quality of leader influence involvement is required in many activities. It is involved in a variety of situations and problems, from the very simple to the very complex.
Leaders must influence others to achieve goals, and they must gain the respect of followers to influence them. This is no easy task, but if you want to have the respect of your followers, you have many trusted leader qualities.
Here are 13 Krzyzewski leader qualities Digital Spark Marketing uses with clients to improve their ability to develop to be the best leaders they can be:
Krzyzewski personal leadership … foster teamwork
Coach K made an interesting point when he said that leaders don’t train themselves not to say “I.” He’s implying that leaders innately work with others and let the team get the credit. They don’t force themselves to say “we.” “We” is natural for them, and it’s the way they’ve always thought.
We believe that employing an “employee of the month” or a “who gets credit for what” attitude is not a good process. You work as a team when you don’t care who gets the credit.
Krzyzewski personal leadership … encourage growth in others
Some companies follow the motto: “hire for character, train for skill.” You hire people that are eager to learn and are very “raw.” They don’t have a ton of skills; but as a leader, you teach them, and they become better. They grow with your company and contribute to its success.
You see this with coaches. In football coaching, it’s almost unheard of for someone with no experience to be hired as the head coach of a team.
Most people start in a low-level position (i.e., video coordinator, quality control assistant, scout, etc.) and gradually move up if they become successful in their roles. Sometimes it takes more than thirty years before they finally get a chance to be the head coach.
The same can occur in business. George Bodenheimer is the former president of ESPN. He started out working in the mailroom of ESPN. It would have been very difficult for him to rise to the presidency if he hadn’t had a boss who wanted to help him grow and succeed in the company.
Show courage.
Show courage
Always demonstrate your courage in making tough decisions, knowing that bad decisions will be penalized. Remember that doing nothing is always an option.
Krzyzewski personal leadership … boost employee confidence
Employee attitude is so critical that it can’t be overemphasized. It trickles down from employers. Your business isn’t optimized if you don’t optimize for employee happiness.
Leaders should make employees feel good about themselves. Constantly criticizing and pointing out the flaws in an employee is a sure fire way to decrease morale and performance.
A leader … Mike Krzyzewski.
Listens firsts and acts second
Someone who jumps to conclusions without first seeking to understand has made a fatal error—for themselves and their team. To lead people effectively, you have to take the time to listen and see things from their perspective. You have to put yourself in their shoes and fully understand the situation.
Always empowers their people
Many of my leadership philosophies were learned as an athlete. My most successful teams didn’t always have the most talent but did have teammates with the right combination of skills, strengths and a common trust in each other. To build an ‘overachieving’ team, you need to delegate responsibility and authority. Giving away responsibilities isn’t always easy. It can be harder to do than completing the task yourself, but with the right project selection and support, delegating can pay off in dividends. It is how you truly find people’s capabilities and get the most out of them.
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Krzyzewski personal leadership … get people to follow you
You earn leadership by what Anne Mulcahy calls “followership.”
“I think sometimes we forget that we’re not anointed leaders, we have to earn it, and we have to have people that trust us and are willing to follow. I think that is the differentiator between great leadership and average leadership.”
-Anne Mulcahy, Former Chairman, and CEO of Xerox Corporation
Even if a leader is anointed, it doesn’t mean that they’ll have followers. The leader needs to gain the trust of the followers. It has to be earned because not many people will mindlessly follow a leader.
Inspire people
Inspire and motivate to get the most from each team member and succeed based on your ability to work with others.
A quality of great leaders can articulate ideas and get people excited and inspired by them. It’s not selling people on an idea; it’s inspiring them.
Krzyzewski personal leadership … wear your passion and enthusiasm
Always wear your passion and enthusiasm for what you are doing. To do that, you must find those things that you love. Follow the passion; it is what gives you the strength to overcome the obstacles to everyday tasks. Passion is power. It is what keeps you going when everyone else gets tired and gives up.
Be a continuous learner
Observing and learning from those around you makes you stronger, better. Never fail to see its value. Your peers, as well as competitors, can usually teach you more than your friends. Let them. Learn from them. To be a great leader, you need to have a strong will and an even stronger stomach. You need to remind yourself that your job isn’t to make everyone happy, but rather to improve the organization as a whole.
Good leaders are constantly trying to improve, surround themselves with the ablest people they can find. They look squarely at their own mistakes and deficiencies, and they ask frankly what skills they and the company will need in the future. And because of this, they can move forward with confidence that’s grounded in the facts, not built on fantasies about their talent.
Always work hard at being a little better than you were the day before. Continuous learning is one of the most important attributes in the work and personal environment.
Krzyzewski personal leadership … show persistence
Always show persistence.
Persistence is key. Always keep up the effort as you will never know how close to success you may be.
Think about your energy. It’s not just about what you like best, but about what feeds you and what depletes you. And who. Do what you can to increase the good stuff and decrease the bad. You just need to realize you have the power to accomplish it. Much more than you may have imagined.
Limit your fear of failure
No matter how confident someone may seem, everyone is afraid of failing. All of us are afraid of screwing up or afraid of looking stupid.
But great leaders know that everyone they interact with is also afraid.
These people are successful because they act in the face of fear. They go after what they believe, seek change and, ultimately, make a difference.
They also believe they can take a risk because even if they fail, they’ll be able to learn from it and overcome it. Their fear doesn’t hold them back. Instead, it springs them into action, because they know not stretching themselves is worse than failing.
Krzyzewski personal leadership … stay optimistic and positive
To achieve greatness, you must create a culture of optimism. There will be many ups and downs, but the prevalence of positivity will keep the company going. But be warned: This requires fearlessness. You have to believe in making the impossible possible.
The bottom line
Mike Krzyzewski’s simple reminder is that leadership skills, like swimming, cannot be learned by reading about it. It takes lots of consistent practice. You need to dive into the pool as soon as possible.
Great leaders know that every step they take, every decision they make, matters in the end. They know they must strategize carefully, and then act decisively. They know they must think ahead — not just to their next step — but to the many steps after it.
Practice these leadership behaviors often and think ahead for your greatest leadership advantages.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you.
It’s up to you to keep improving your ability to lead. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, history may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
It’s up to you to keep improving your leadership learning and experience from all around in your environment.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your continuous learning?
Do you have a lesson about making your leadership better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add to the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.
More reading on continuous learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. An excellent quote from Wayne Dwyer. Do you like to occasionally review lessons Steve Jobs taught on work motivation? I certainly do. Nothing
Do you do a lot of reading? I love to read … why? To be entertained, to learn new things, and to stimulate thinking. Steve Jobs was a favorite author of mine, especially when his writing dealt with his thoughts on technology and product development. I have learned a great deal from lessons Steve Jobs taught.
I have a set of five authors that I selected over a decade ago to be my silent mentors … they mentor through their writings and presentations. Steve Jobs was one of those five mentors.
Yes … they all do stimulate a lot of thinking and learning, but they all have a great knack for entertaining while they teach and silently mentor. What all awesome mentors should be doing. They also share many other common attributes that makes them such successful mentors for me.
Related: Should a Business Send Customers to Competitors?
It probably is not necessary to tell you about Steve Jobs, is it? But here are a few words to put us on the same page. He was an American icon entrepreneur, marketer,and inventor, who was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple Inc. Through Apple, he is widely recognized as a design-driven pioneer of the personal computer revolution and for his influential career in the computer and consumer electronics fields, transforming many industries through digital disruption.
Steve Jobs.
Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of Xerox PARC‘s mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to the creation of the Apple Lisa and, a year later, the Macintosh.
In this blog, I have selected my 10 favorite topics of Jobs and used quotations and a compendium of ideas from many of Jobs ‘ books, articles, and presentations to focus on what he taught on each. We use these thoughts regularly in our work with our client teams.
Lessons Steve Jobs taught … passion for life
We all know about his passion, don’t we? He exhibited it in everything he did. And he had a great way to express his feelings also. When I need a reminder on living with passion, I’ll watch one of my favorite presentation videos that Jobs created.
Lessons in motivation … trust yourself
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
He knew how to give great advice.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
Work motivation psychology … simplicity focus
Steve Jobs believed in simplicity above most other things. Think simple was a key thought.
That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.
Lessons Steve Jobs taught … steal great ideas
Jobs always was shameless about stealing great ideas. Everything is life is really just a remix, isn’t it?
Don’t lose faith
Sometimes life just doesn’t go as planned. Don’t ever give up and don’t lose faith.
Choose carefully
Most people think focus means saying yes and then settling in on the issue. It really means saying no to hundreds of good ideas. So you really have to choose carefully.
Work motivation.
Creativity and innovation
Steve was a firm believer that dreams and not products were the end state customer utility that counted the most.And that held true in his own life also.
Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.
Thoughts on creative innovation were his first priority.
The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament …
Lessons in motivation … love what you do
Your work is a very large part of your life. The only way to be satisfied is to do your best. And to do that you must love the work, yes?
Always be a measure of quality. People like environments where quality is expected. Make the homerun quality happen.
Take your brain but follow your heart.
Follow your heart
Remembering that nobody leaves the earth alive is a great way to avoid the trap that you have something to lose. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
What is the most memorable motivation you remember from Steve Jobs? Please share your thoughts.
Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy creating innovation in your social media strategy?
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Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
Check out these additional articles on customer insights from our library:
The Story of How JetBlue Turns Customers into Advocates
Should a Business Send Customers to Competitors?
An Actionable Approach to Target Market Segmentation
WHAT inspires a chef to create a new recipe? What inspires a child to learn? What impels an explorer to venture to faraway places? What makes a child ask so many questions? More often than not, it is your curiosity skill.
Are you struggling to get your messages heard by your customers? After all, there are tons of competition and many, too many messages for your customers.
Have you tried creating some mystery or curiosity to gain attention?
If you want to stimulate your customers’ curiosity, as a marketing technique, make them aware of something they don’t know.
Find the information you can use to raise questions about their perceptions. Chances are, you’re either withholding all the specifics or presenting it all.
Your curiosity skill … a motivating example
Curiosity, of course, has its positive side. Consider the case of Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century German naturalist, and explorer after whom the Humboldt Current, off the west coast of South America, was named.
At one point in his life, Humboldt said: “From my earliest youth I had felt an ardent desire to travel into distant regions, which Europeans had seldom visited.”
This desire arose, he said, when he felt “an irresistible attraction in the impetuous agitations of the mind.”
At the age of 29, he traveled to Central and South America on an expedition that lasted five years. With the information that he collected, he compiled a 30-volume chronicle of his travels.
Everything attracted Humboldt’s attention —the temperature of the ocean, the fish that lived in it, the plants he found in his path. He climbed mountains, explored rivers, and sailed the oceans.
Humboldt’s research laid the foundation in several fields of modern science.
It all began with his intense curiosity, and his insatiable desire for knowledge accompanied him throughout his life.
In the words of American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Humboldt was one of those wonders . . . who appear from time to time, as if to show us the possibilities of the human mind, the force and the range of the faculties.”
Would you like to improve your curiosity? Here are some interesting ways you can:
Get contextual
One habit that we can cultivate is to always get contextual first. All problems are problems in a specific context and the same thing can be a desirable thing in a different context.
So, it is extremely important to understand the context in which we are observing the situation or the problem.
We then look at the same problem with different context. In the case of potato chips, we can look at the situation from the view of the chef, the customer, the inventor of packaging, restaurant owner, etc.
Understanding the context then gives us the ability to find out if and how our solutions will work in similar contexts. What will happen if the context changes?
Will our solutions still be relevant or needed in that situation. Is there a way that we can flip the context so that there is no need to solve the problem, as it no longer remains a problem?
One of the things that we all know is that there are very few things in the world that are completely new.
Everything else is either copied from elsewhere or inspired from something or a combination of different ideas coming together. What this means is that in order to come up with creative output, we need creative input.
This means that we need to constantly look out for inspiration all around us. Inspiration is the fuel which keeps our curiosity going.
Seek inspiration out by looking beyond obviously related contexts, fields, and networks, industries.
Here is a suggestion. Make a notebook where you collect interesting, weird and inspiring stories, actions, art or whatever. Share this with all your teammates.
Go back to this notebook every time you feel stuck with something.
Read widely following your interests
John Lloyd was a hugely successful TV producer and director until one day he started to encounter a string of failures. This led him to depression.
He dealt with it by taking time off work, going on long walks, and reading voraciously. He read about “Socrates and ancient Athens. He read about light and magnetism.
He read about the Renaissance and the French impressionists. He had no method or plan, but simply followed his curiosity, wherever it took him.” All this reading eventually led to his idea for the BBC quiz show QI, which is loved by millions for its “ability to make anything—from quantum physics to Aztec architecture—entertaining.”
Here is the takeaway lesson. B. F. Skinner said, “When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.”
“The feeling of being interested can act as a kind of neurological signal, directing us to fruitful areas of inquiry.”
Visit a physical bookstore or library and browse shelves
In the era of Google searches, we have no problem finding the exact answer to our question, but we may be less likely to serendipitously encounter information that is not specific to our question.
Visiting a bookstore or a library allows us to encounter other information in a way that is not dictated by the structure of the algorithm. “A serendipity deficit makes innovation harder because innovation relies on unexpected collisions of knowledge and ideas.”
Curiosity is also about discrimination. It is about which knowledge we want to explore.
Take away lesson: Get out from behind your computer and explore.
Sir Ken Robinson’s TED video “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” has been viewed over 4 million times. But Leslie argues that “Robinson has it precisely the wrong way around when he says that a natural appetite for learning begins to dissipate once children start to be educated.”
“Progressive educationalists like Robinson frame existing knowledge as the enemy of new ideas. But at the most basic level, all of our new ideas are made up of old ones…to create a smartphone, you need to know about computers and phones.”
“We romanticize the curiosity of children because we love their innocence. But creativity doesn’t happen in a void. Successful innovators and artists amass vast stores of knowledge which they can then draw on unthinkingly.
Having mastered the rules of their domain, they can concentrate on rewriting them. They mix and remix ideas and themes, making new analogies and spotting unusual patterns, until a creative breakthrough is achieved.”
Here are more ways that curiosity enhances our well-being and the quality of our lives:
Studies have shown that curiosity positively correlates with intelligence. In one study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2002, researchers correctly predicted that high novelty-seeking (or highly curious) toddlers would have higher IQs as older children than toddlers with lower levels of curiosity.
Researchers measured the degree of novelty-seeking behavior in 1,795 3-year-olds and then measured their cognitive ability at age 11.
As predicted, the 11-year-olds who had been highly curious 3-year-olds later scored 12 points higher on total IQ compared with low stimulation seekers. They also had superior scholastic and reading ability.
Other studies have shown that high levels of curiosity in adults are connected to greater analytic ability, problem-solving skills, and overall intelligence. All of which suggests that cultivating more curiosity in your daily life is likely to make you smarter.
Social relationships
Curious people are inclined to act in ways that allow relationships to develop more easily. In one of my studies, participants spent five minutes getting acquainted with a stranger of the opposite sex, and each person made judgments about his or her partner’s personality.
We also interviewed their closest friends and parents to gain added insight into the qualities that curious people bring to relationships.
Each of these groups — acquaintances of a mere five minutes, close friends and parents — characterized curious people as highly enthusiastic and energetic, talkative, interesting in what they say and do, displaying a wide range of interests, confident, humorous, less likely to express insecurities, and lacking in timidity and anxiety compared with less curious people.
Curious people ask questions and take an interest in learning about partners, and they intentionally try to keep interactions interesting and managing playful.
This approach supports the development of good relationships.
Reconnect with play
We can add play and playfulness to almost any task, and the attitude of play naturally builds interest and curiosity.
This dynamic was captured wonderfully in a National Public Radio story about an assembly-line worker in a potato chip factory whose job was to make sure that the chips rolling down the conveyor belt were uniform and aesthetically pleasing before being bagged.
This man found the job dreary. So he developed a game that made it more interesting: He searched for potato chips resembling famous people and kept a collection (imagine silhouettes of Elvis, Charles Manson, Marilyn Monroe, and Jimi Hendrix).
Because he was constantly scanning odd and bizarre shapes for celebrity resemblances, the day moved quickly. He also became incredibly efficient at catching misshapen chips.
Explore your passions
Be curious about yourself. What are your values and motivations? What makes you tick?
Are there activities that make you feel fully engaged in life that you haven’t revisited since you were younger? What are they? Do one of them.
The bottom line
I am sure that by spending a lot more time in the problem space, using your curiosity, there is a much better probability that you will identify the right problem.
There is a better chance that you might even eliminate the problem without even having to try to solve it.
Don’t just try and keep pace with your competitors. Always use your curiosity to your advantage by striving to leapfrog them.
Use your curiosity to not define the best practices but the next best practices.
Need some help in improving the creativity of you and your staff? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your toughest competitors?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote for a workshop on creativity. Learn about some options for creativity workshops to get noticeable results.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new creative ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy improving your creativity, innovation, and ideas?
Do you have a lesson about making your creativity better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on creativity from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
