Kungfu Fighter, Hidden Sugar

Recognize that You Are Not a Leader and You'll Lead Better

Sounds strange, isn't it? The first step to lead better is to recognize that you're Not a leader.  In fact you are not defined by any title you may have, e.g. Manager, Director, Specialist. 

As a Leader, You Are NOT a Leader.  You Lead.  Short and simple. 

If you keep thinking that you're a leader, you will miss out the important things in leadership, which is to be alert to what's happening. You need to listen well, know how are people feeling, and really get to the bottom of issues.  But you can't do this unless you get rid of the thinking that you are the leader.  You must not have the mistaken belief that you are your job. Because such thinking only clouds your thinking and distracts you from leading. 

When you lead, you let go of any self-ego that you may have and you can be authentic, knowing who you are and where you are. 

It's only when you are where you are that you will become more curious about others than about yourself. A true leader is one with no credentials, he leads even when he has no title. He is humble enough to drop his storyline and carefully consider others in his work. He develops a powerful flexibility of mind and heart that not only instructs but also inspires others and builds mutual respect. He is truly responsible, because he leads, not because he has the title of leadership.  All the great leaders in this world have no title (e.g. Gandhi, Diana, Aung Sang Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela when he was in prison) and yet people follow wherever they go. 

A true leader leads because he knows his most important job as a leader is to bring out the best in his team, not bring himself up by having self-ego of 'being the leader'. He does nothing but lead people.  And that is Leadership Power. 

By Andy Ng, whose courses on Leadership Power and How to Be a Better Manager are now available for the market at an affordable rate. For details, call 6225-1784 Priya now. 

Powerful Tool Used by Successful Managers

Successful managers and executives use a powerful tool. Many people know this tool to be QUESTIONING. Yet many use it wrongly. Instead of getting the response they want, they end up getting something what they don't want. Sounds familiar? You can ask a Type A question like this: "What are the things we could do to improve the current work process?" This type of question puts your people's hands to their heads and as usual, there will be silence. So you as the manager end up having to answer this question yourself! And this defeats the purpose of asking question: if you cannot get an answer to your question, why ask? Case Study: How I use Type B Question When I was coaching my client to improve their manufacturing process, I ask them question that gets them into a picture: "Think about the last time you had to do a rework on a product. Consider the things that were the real problems; the things that got you frustrated; the things that worked very poorly, took too long, or just seemed to be a waste of time. The things that made you say, 'There's got to be a better way to do this!' What are some of those frustrating problems with our current manufacturing process?" In other words, pull, not push. This way you can get things done, not just things said. ***There are 4 key things to do: Coach Your Team, Set and Achieve Goals, Lead and Manage Change and Harness the hidden power of their mind. To know more about How to Manage, Coach and Lead Your Team Success, come for this course on starting on 22 Sep. 2009 Tuesday 9 am to 12.30 pm...Register on-line at www.asiatrainers.com

Powerful Secret of Successful Managers

From www.asiatrainers.com

Successful managers know a secret. Even though you may know the secret, you may not truly understand how to use it correctly. Therein lies the secret.

What makes this secret powerful? If power is synonymous with 'getting results', then this secret is extremely powerful. This secret can increase your ability to achieve results simply because it is linked to effectiveness and human motivation.

Case Study: How I learn the Powerful Secret

When I was doing management consulting at KPMG in the 1990s, I was called to consult a family-owned publicly listed financial institution. We would arrive with our army of bright people, interview those key players, develop a set of recommendations based on our interviews and experience, and create a 200-page Consultant's Report. We would go away and come back a year later, and if we were lucky, perhaps 10% of the recommendations would be implemented.

Not effective, right? Isn't this a very common approach taken by many managers, when they would tell the team what are the goals instead of getting the team to come up with their own goals?

How I Approach A Family-Own Business in Business Coaching with Action International (and now Asia Coaching Training)...

We come in with a small team of only 2 consultants or business coaches. Together we could have group interviews (facilitated sessions), that involved about 20 people. In the facilitated sessions, the participants, not the consultants, would create the recommendations. In most cases, they would come up with what we might consider only 60 or 70% percent of the solutions.

We would float ideas, and some ideas would be considered as not acceptable or implementable. When all is said and done, they might have created what we would consider 85% solution. Yet when we come back a year later, amazingly 80 to 90 percent of the solutions would be implemented!

Why is there such a big difference? Therein lies the secret: You can Achieve More Effective Results when Solutions Are Created, Understood and Accepted by the People Impacted.

In other words, coach, not consult. This way you can get things done, not just things said.

AndyTheCoach from www.asiatrainers.com

Secrets of Genghis Khan as seen in Microsoft, Dell and Wal-Mart

Nearly 800 years after his death, Genghis Khan is widely considered the greatest conqueror in history. Between 1206 and 1258 A.D., Genghis Khan and his immediate descendants conquered nearly all of Asia and much of central Europe. Only the death of Genghis Khan's son, Ogadai, in 1241 kept the Mongolian "hordes" from devastating the rest of Europe.

The Mongols are a fascinating organizational case study. How did nomadic tribes from a desert with no education, no technology, no money and no culture create the largest empire in history?

What were the management secrets of Genghis Khan? Indeed many scholars said that modern successful corporations like Microsoft, Wal-Mart and Dell share the same 3 secrets of Genghis Khan.

1. Ruthlessly Self-Disciplined: a Mongol general coordinated the movements of tens of thousands of men, across mountain ranges and in unknown territory, as precisely as movements on a chessboard. In battle, through a signaling system of colored banners, they could advance thousands of men at a time, send them back, turn them, and direct their charges without fear.

The Mongols' structure had attributes 21st-century companies strive for: disciplined and efficient yet flexible; accurate communicating of decision in real time; and efficient use of resources in a variety of innovative ways. General Electric's 6-Sigma is actually a replica of this.

2. Extreme Flexibility: The transportation and weapons of the Mongols are highly flexible and responsive to changing circumstances. The Mongols shot their arrows with great accuracy while riding at a fast pace and could even shoot accurately backward at a pursuer....

Wal-Mart, Microsoft and Dell are highly flexible. Eg. Dell quickly moved into distribution when they realized that they can't beat HP with mere 'sell direct' model. How about your organization?

Today I see many companies refusing to go into 5-and-a-half day week for fear of their staff not happy. Not knowing that working on Saturday gives them immediate 10% more response time. And in today's market, this can mean the difference between fulfilling a customer order or not.

3. Aggressive Process as a Strategic Weapon: The combination of organizational self-discipline, flexibility and aggressiveness allowed the Mongols to defeat larger armies of that era that were rigidly organized, and whose discipline was superficial.

The Mongols cultivated these efficient, collaborative qualities in their horsemen from an early age by their traditional hunt on the Mongolian steppe, where they would encircle large numbers of animals and gradually herd them together for butchering, rather than chasing them down individually.

See how aggressive is Microsoft: they corner the whole PC software business and slowly move into mobile phones, internet browser and now internet search. Today even search giant like Google has to take Microsoft seriously.

Secrets of Bill Clinton winning over a Korean Man

The world's most elusive leader Kim Jung II of North Korea, only wants to deal with Bill Clinton, not even the highly popular Obama or past president George Bush. What's the secret of Bill Clinton? Read on...

Most managers hate dealing with people, and salespeople prefer to deal with clients and prospects via email or letters rather than face-to-face. It seems that dealing with people is difficult.

Let me tell you a secret. It is not how impressive you are, but how connected you are. Nokia, the world's no. 1 mobile phone company, said they are "Connecting People". How about you? Are you staying connected, and how connected are you?

3 things you must do to connect with people:
1. Speak their language
2. Know what they want
3. Give them what they want, or let them know that they can have what they want if they do what you said.

AndyTheCoach
www.asiatrainers.com

5 Steps in Making People Decisions

There are no more important decisions within an organization than people decisions: staffing a job, placing people into jobs, promoting people, letting them go etc.

No matter how carefully you hire people, your people won’t perform if you put them into jobs that are the wrong ones for them. For example, putting an introvert on a job that requires him to be out most of the time making new people connections is a wrong fit. No matter how brilliant a company’s business or its strategy, they will produce results if the company’s people decisions do not work out.

Alfred Sloan, the man who built GM into the world’s largest and most profitable manufacturing enterprise, said that, “If the assistant plant manager of a minor division doesn’t perform; all our clever top-management decisions will not produce results”.

So it is obvious that your people decisions must work. Here are the 5 Decisions Steps in Making People Decisions:

1. First, carefully thought through the assignment. Please do not confuse job description with job assignment. The job description of a Business Development Manager is the same since Adam made the world’s first stool. Yet the assignment of Business Development Manager in this recession will be very different. For now we have to create business using little or low marketing cost. Following this example, make sure you get the right person, a person that worked on very thin cost and not a person that is used to big budgets.

2. Second, look at several qualified people. Formal qualifications are just a starting point. The most important qualification is that the person and the assignment fit each other. For example, a Business Development Manager must have the qualification of good in writing, good in finding new markets and good in sniffing out opportunities in this recession. So to get a good person you need to consider at least 3 to 5 good candidates.

3. Study the performance records of all your selected good candidates to find out what each did well. Look for the candidates’ strengths, and you determine if they are of the right strengths for this particular assignment.

4. The 4th step is the most overlooked yet most important: discuss the candidates with others who had worked with them. By asking for additional opinions, you can learn about strengths that impressed others yet were not noticed by you. Of course the best information comes through informal discussions with a candidate’s former bosses and colleagues.

5. Once the decision is made, make sure the appointee understand the assignment. The best way is to ask the candidate to think over what they have to do to be a success, and have him commit to the success in writing.

If you follow the above 5 simple steps in People Decision, you’d have avoided the many costly mistakes you made in the past and get a ‘more right’ person for the job. If the above fails, you must accept responsibility for it, otherwise you’re not really a manager but an overseer. More of this next week…

AndyTheCoach
www.asiacoachingtraining.com