Five Conditions That Can Make or Break Your Success
There is an immense difference between being a good leader and a great one. Effective leaders, like Olympic champions, are developed through training, experience and mentoring. The most successful executives understand that their success is reliant on the fact that they continue to challenge themselves – both in their thinking and through their performance. Becoming a true champion comes with practice, practice, practice and key coaching to refine skills and accelerate improvement.
Great leadership involves the ability to create positive momentum in times of high change. This requires mastering skills such as casting the vision, executing communication, weighing possibilities and seeking new opportunities. Great leaders are highly skilled in cultivating synergy among employees to ensure a company has both direction and growth. All of these attributes are critical and necessary to the success of any company – perhaps even more so in a down economy.
John Kotter says, “Leaders set direction, leaders align people by communicating their vision at all levels and leaders motivate and inspire.” InitiativeOne’s curriculum is based on just that – refining some of the core skills that allow leaders to decide direction, align people and inspire.
Leadership is truly all about influence – are you working on the skills that enable you to influence others through motivation and direction in order to achieve your company’s goals? There is a vast return on this investment both professionally and organizationally – even in today’s economic environment.
At an organizational level, leaders must know the basic conditions that generate the greatest chance of success. According to a recent article in the Harvard Business Review titled “Why teams don’t work”, there are five critical conditions that make the difference between success and failure – all of which are included in InitiativeOne leadership training. These are:
- Teams must be real – People have to know who is on the team and who is not. It is the leader’s job to make that clear.
- Teams need a compelling direction – Members need to know – and agree on – what they’re supposed to be doing together. Unless a leader articulates a clear direction, there is a real risk that different members will pursue different agendas.
- Teams need enabling structures – Teams that have poorly designed tasks, the wrong number or mix of members, or fuzzy and unenforced norms of conduct invariably get into trouble.
- Teams need a supportive organization – The organizational context – including the reward system, the human resource system and the information system – must facilitate team work.
- Teams need expert coaching – Most executive coaches focus on individual performance, which does not significantly improve teamwork. Teams need coaching as a group in team processes – especially at the beginning, midpoint and end of a team project.
If you wisely choose to invest in your leadership development or your team’s leadership development, we hope you’ll choose InitiativeOne. We have many offerings from a “Dr. Fred Online Tune Up” to Executive Coaching to our Signature, nine-week process of comprehensive skill building and leadership development. Contact us directly at 920-246-5175 or info@initiative-one.com.
Our business is based on word of mouth referrals, so don’t forget to mention us to a friend/company you know who could benefit from expert help in the area of leadership development. And, don’t forget to ask us for examples regarding the effectiveness of our work – we have worked with hundreds of companies and have many references!