Are you listening for your leadership wake-up call?

At a company retreat this month, I discovered a big problem my team's been struggling with.

Me.

More specifically, my team's been struggling with the way I have been prioritizing the needs of our clients ahead of the team's needs. Once I understood the issue it was smack-the-head obvious what I had been doing. Yet up to that moment I had managed to distract myself by focusing on how important our work is for clients, and in turn how important our clients are to the success and longevity of Trebuchet Group. I had deluded myself that I was doing the right thing for the team by honoring my clients more than I was honoring the team.

Luckily my team was able and willing to provide much needed feedback to help me see the light.

Too much doing, not enough leading

"Chris, you're a fantastic consultant helping our clients...and we need more of you as CEO and leader."

"Chris, your work is bringing in much needed income...and without your help we can't grow the business past you."

Ouch.

I'm reminded of an old commercial for aftershave where the subject would get slapped in the face yet would respond with "Thanks...I needed that."

I did say thanks, even though it stung a bit. And I did need it.

It's "cobblers kids don't have shoes" ironic that I, mentor to CEOs, get feedback from my team about investing too much energy in results and not enough in being a leader. The good news is that I've seen this before - many times - with leaders I help every day. And I have my own leadership mentor and business coach to lean on as I get back on track and lead my company the way it needs and deserves to be led.

This all just reinforces to me how universal the challenge is of knowing how you show up as a leader. No matter if your organization is large or fairly small, you are likely feeling pressure to be both the leader and a doer - and it's just tough to do both. So here are two ways you can make sure you know how you're helping your team.

Actions you can take today

• Set aside 10 minutes to discern how you're showing up with your team. Ask yourself: Are you more concerned with results you can achieve personally, or with the results you and your team can achieve together? Are you enabling the team to win, or trying to win for them? Bonus points if you can get confirmation from a trusted agent who tells you what you appear to be focusing on.
• Pick one area where you're not showing up as you like. Select one small thing you want to change, and make it happen. Note the impact on you and your team. Bonus points if you find people paying attention to you a little differently than before. Extra bonus points if you make another change.

Ready to learn more leadership techniques to help get better results?   Visit our blog.  

To learn more about services we provide to help leaders succeed, visit the Trebuchet Group website or give us a call at 970.672.4749.

A Special Offer for Leaders

Increase Your Company's Performance with our new Leader Assessment™

Did you know that one of the most effective ways to improve a company's performance is to improve the leader's performance? In other words, the best place to start in taking your company to the next level is with you.

We hope you've benefited from our last three newsletter articles, covering how leaders interact with their organizations, their people, and themselves . Read on for summaries, and then learn about our offer to go beyond these ideas to start improving your leadership effectiveness:

Where You Look Is Where You Go

• Many things that go wrong in a company seem to be due to influences outside of the leader's control.
• Some of these things - such as dead-ends, surprises, and frequent strategy changes - can actually be minimized if you take a different approach.
• It's easy to think about day-to-day details because they're immediate, but your job as a leader is to look ahead and deal with the big picture.

Things Only Get Done When I'm Here

• As a leader, one of the most important things you can do is empower your team to function without you.
• To empower your team, you must engage them.
• To engage your employees, get them involved in the process and planning, not just carrying out tasks.

Your Organizational Problem is Closer Than You Think

• The harsh truth for you as a leader is that if your company is dealing with challenges, you are most likely contributing to them.
• The remedy to making the impact you desire is to make sure you are aligned as a person first.
• Make sure make your strengths, desires, passion, and actions are all in alignment before you tackle any organizational issue.

Introducing your jumpstart to improved leadership: Trebuchet Group's new Leader Assessment™

The impact of leadership improvement can't be overstated - its effects ripple out to employees, the organization, and beyond. Improved leadership can have a profound effect on your company now and many years into the future.

We're very proud of our work helping our clients improve their leadership, and our leadership mentoring and coaching participants tell us they appreciate results like:

• Engaged team members doing their best work
• A deeper sense of satisfaction and increased capacity to lead others
• Ability to better deal with challenging situations
• An enhanced personal sense of purpose
• Improved overall results from their teams

Yet there's a challenge. Most of our coaching engagements last 9-12 months - and while we know they're highly effective, we've found many leaders and companies aren't yet ready to commit that much time, energy, and funds to improve their leadership.

So to help more people get started improving their own leadership, we created a new product that includes only the initial assessments and interpretation portion from our standard leadership coaching.

Our Leader Assessment™ is built to allow you to quickly learn where you can focus on improving for the greatest benefit to your business - without having to make a long-term coaching commitment.

This valuable package includes a 360-degree review of leadership behaviors, and assessments covering personality strengths and core values. We also provide personal and confidential guidance on how to begin using your results.

The investment for a Leader Assessment™ is just 8 hours of your time and $2,500 for the materials and coaching. While direct impact of work like this is often challenging to calculate, our clients frequently tell us that going through this set of assessments has had a great immediate, and long-lasting, impact on themselves and their businesses.

We're ready to help you improve your leadership. Are you?

To take advantage of this new offer, call 970. 672. 4749, or send an email with the subject "Yes! I want to improve my leadership" to assessments@trebuchetgroup.com

This pricing/offer is good through December 31, 2012.

Your organizational problem is closer than you think

Businesses today face a host of problems - for instance:

• The company used to be successful, but is now flat and starting to decline.
• Team members are not really committed their work.
• Everyone is wasting time in unnecessary details.

Leaders who suffer from these kinds of conditions tend to try to "fix" the people or the structure. And while your situation might be different, most of the time these are symptoms of problems with the personal practices of the leader.

In other words - the bad news is that you are probably the biggest contributor to the challenging problems in your business.

The good news is that you are in a great position to affect the person responsible.

Address the root cause (and it's probably you)

For example, one of our clients was frustrated with a lack of engagement from his senior leadership team. People wouldn't say what they really felt - until after the project failed. This leader began to question whether the team was capable of success. With our support, he did a bit of probing.

"Our opinions don't matter - so why do you ask us?" was the response.

Turns out this leader would say he wanted input from his leadership team, yet his actions demonstrated that he really just wanted validation of his own ideas. Once he got that validation - often in the middle of the team member sharing his or her thoughts - he would become visibly disinterested and break off the discussion. Team members became confused and withdrawn. One member said: "Why bother to offer thoughts when they don't matter? Why step up when we are being treated like little kids?"

The leader had to do some soul searching. He decided to change his approach to get better results - he had to make it clear to his team that their input was really valued, and also be clear when he just needed validation. With coaching, he learned to be clear about his needs when requesting people's perspectives. He stated his needs up front and invited the other person to participate. And we set up the condition that if the other person had further thoughts to share after the CEO got his needed validation, they would together decide if that discussion should be held right then, or if they should schedule a meeting later.

Project failures dropped dramatically, and the team's performance took off.

As a leader, you get what you project

Leaders often fail to recognize just how big an impact they have on the operations of their companies. The key to making the impact you desire is to make sure you are aligned as a person first.

In the example above, what the leader said, what he did, and his desire to personally drive results were out of alignment - and people withheld their best efforts as a result. When the leader began earnestly doing what he said and respecting people, they responded in the same way.

When you as leader make sure your strengths, desires, passion, and actions are all in alignment, the people in your company know where you're coming from and will be more effective.

Even better, your example will encourage them to strive for the same alignment within themselves.

10 minutes to better leadership

1. Spend some time thinking about what's most important for your company. What does it need? How do those needs align with who you are and what you want to do? Note where the needs and strengths reinforce each other and start doing more of those things.
2. Think about a problematic situation happening now. How is the company affected? How might you be contributing? Bonus: What's the personal payoff you get for doing things the way you're doing them? Can you get that payoff another more helpful way?

For a free checklist on how to get yourself better aligned, check out our blog post on the topic.

To learn more about ways we help leaders succeed, check out how we can help you on our website, or give us a call at 970.672.4749. 

“Things Only Get Done When I’m Here”

We hear this complaint a lot from leaders.

Whether this is true at your company or not, one of the most important things you as a leader can do is empower your team to function without you. Yet many leaders continue to find themselves baby-sitting team members, cleaning up their messes, and even doing their jobs for them. Accompanying symptoms include low levels of customer and employee satisfaction. What's going on?

Our experience: it's likely the leader isn't engaging his or her employees.

Grudging compliance versus empowered engagement

Most employers strive for employees to be merely compliant - simply following orders, completing a checklist, or carrying out a routine process.

The implicit goal is simply to get it done - and keep the boss happy.

(This works best when the boss is around.)

On the other hand, when employees are involved in the process, they can become invested and engaged. They are not merely following orders; they are helping to shape what those orders should be, and they feel empowered to find better ways of carrying them out.

The implicit goal is to get it done well - and help everyone connected to the business.

Collaboration is key

When employees are engaged, productivity, efficiency, and customer satisfaction all improve. The key to engaging employees is collaboration-working together with them to understand what needs to be done instead of just telling them what to do.

Having this "what" and "why" background information leads to greater engagement by the employee and therefore greater satisfaction and better results.

10 minutes to better leadership

• Prior to a project, sit down with the person tasked with it, and ask: "What do you see as the most important goal for this project, and why is the goal important?" Fill in the pieces they haven't yet gotten. Bonus credit if you walk away with better outcomes than you started with.
• Ask one of your employees: "What's powerful about what we're doing together?" Listen for how that person is engaged. (Hint - watch for passion and energy!) Figure out how you can do more of those things for all your employees.

On our blog learn about the Five Ways Leaders Discourage Engagement

To learn more about improving leadership, check out some of our offerings, or give us a call at 970.672.4749.

Where you look is where you go

If you examine any organization’s results, you might be tempted to think dead-ends, surprises, and frequent strategy changes are due to things beyond the leader’s control – like the economy, business cycles, the wrong staff, the wrong suppliers, and so on. To a certain degree, these elements certainly affect the stability of the business. Yet there’s another element that plays an even bigger part – and it’s fully in the control of the leader.

Imagine for a moment that your organization is a bicycle, and you are the rider. If you only focus on the front wheel, the bicycle will be wobbly and unstable and it’s only a matter of time before you crash into something. If instead you look where you want to be – that is, down the road – your ride will naturally smooth out and you can easily dodge those parked and moving obstacles. In other words, the job of a leader, just like a bike rider, is to look ahead to see what’s coming.

When a business leader focuses only on day-to-day details, the organization will be wobbly and unstable – experiencing things like surprise product flops, unexpected competition, and derailed marketing campaigns –endless shifts in direction that drive staff crazy!

So why do leaders do this?

Because it feels easier and safer for us to focus on the day-to-day stuff. It’s something we know and it’s something we can control.

In contrast, setting direction is hard. You don’t really know if what you’re doing is right, and you know you have yourself to blame if the direction is wrong. Yet as a leader you must be the one to look at the big picture and set the organizational direction, because no one else has the authority to do so.

As a leader, you must continually focus ahead of your comfort zone, so you can lead the organization to get where it needs to go.

10 minutes to better leadership

Exercise 1:

• Get out a piece of paper or open a fresh Word document and jot down the last five things you focused on. Was it public relations? A proposal for a new client? Defining the color scheme for a new brochure?

• Now, assign a value to each item on the list: long-term, medium-term, or short-term. Do you see a trend? If it’s long-term, great! You’re on the right track. If it’s medium-term, think about how you might be able to shift even more into future thinking. If the trend is short-term, it’s time to rethink your focus.

Exercise 2:

• Ask a trusted colleague or two how they see the organization primarily focused: short-term or long-term. How people perceive the direction of your organization will tell you a lot about where you are focusing as a leader.

Read about how one leader got it right. Check out this week’s blog post.

To learn more about services we provide to help leaders succeed, click here or give us a call at 970.672.4749.