Image

Category Archives: Development Exercises

These are things that you can either do for yourself or with your people. These items have been used by proven leaders and have been found to be effective in one way or another.

Posted on by Leave a comment |

Are customers important?

We all know the answer to this question… or should… Are customers important? YES!! important and without them none of us would be in our current roles in any organization that we are a part of. The following exercise helps determine our thought process when we are stuck between providing an SLA (Service Level Agreement) and between providing the best support that we can with our current customer.

The question is this: Which is more important, the customer you are speaking with or the customer next in line?

Let me know your thoughts in the comments or direct via email.

Jared

Posted on by

Strengths and Weaknesses for Leaders

Everyone in any role has heard of mapping out their strengths and weaknesses. This is a great practice for everyone to help develop their skills and teach them where to focus the majority of their time.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths and Weaknesses

 

 

 

 

If you have worked with your own strengths and weaknesses in the past then I am sure you did something like the paper above. Again I cannot stress the fact that this is a good thing enough. This is something that EVERYONE should do on a regular basis. Once you move into leadership you need to change this a little bit, when you sit down to do your strengths and weaknesses you need to add additional people.

For each person that reports to you, as well as your peers and superiors (If you are comfortable doing this with your superiors) so that you can get a good idea of the people that you surround yourself with. One of the most difficult things that I have learned moving into a leadership role is the fact that I am not alone. You have to rely on your peers/superiors and even your agents at times to help fill in where you have weaknesses.

You should develop a spreadsheet similar to the one below.

Me
Strengths Weaknesses Support
Communication Saying “No” John
Planning Time Management Bob
Execution Work Life Balance Jason

 

Now you are going to see something different on my Strengths and Weaknesses chart that you do not normally see. There is a column for “Support” that is normally left out of these exercises. This column is extremely important not only when you first start out in leadership but whenever you have a weakness that you need to work on. This support structure is going to be there for you and be the people that help to hold you accountable when you do not actively work on your weaknesses. You should make sure that you have advised these people that they are going to be your support structure as well, not that you wouldn’t in the first place, but if you don’t they will not be able to help you to the best of their ability.

The next step is to do this with your people.

Team
Agent Strength Weakness Mentor Leader?
John Consultation Tech Joe Yes
Amber Tech Consultation Samantha No
Shaun Closing Consultation Bobby No
Chelsea Rapport Tech Joe No
Samantha Consultation Tech Randy Yes
Bobby Consultation Tech Joe Maybe
Robert Closing Tech Randy Yes
Randy Tech Closing Samantha Maybe
Tom Tech Consultation John No
Joe Tech Consultation John Yes

 

Now when you look at your team you are going to see a couple more columns as well. The Mentor and Leader columns are added in from the standard Strengths and Weaknesses layout to help identify the support structure that you can have for yourself and for your people. Assigning mentors is something that is huge for all types of agent development and this is simply pairing people who excel in areas that someone else is deficient.

The most important item of this spreadsheet is determining who on your team has leadership potential. These are the people that you need to focus additional time on developing because they are your bench and the people that will replace you one day.

By assigning your leaders people to mentor you will show them that you have trust and faith in them and it will help them to begin developing your other agents. By doing this you are now effectively increasing the management staff that you have on your team by making “mini yous” to work with your agents that may or may not have the natural leadership abilities or the drive to get into leadership.

My challenge for you is to create a spreadsheet like the one above for your team and for yourself. If you are confident in it then you can also build one for your peers and for your supervisors and work with them to help them improve as well.

I hope this exercise helps some of you to determine not only your strengths and weaknesses but also to determine your support structure and those people that can help you develop your agents.

If you are having a hard time coming up with your own strengths and weaknesses you can check out this Link

Thanks again for your time and attention.

Jared

Posted on by

Listen to Understand not to Respond

We all have heard the phrase listen to understand not to respond. This is something that was told to me early on in my leadership development by my mentor. I had a hard time with this initially coming with a technical background and focusing on fixing problems and getting results immediately so this is something that I had to take to heart. There are still times that I find myself listening solely to respond to the statement as opposed to understanding what the person is saying and something that I have had to think about during meetings and one on ones.

“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.”― Stephen R. Covey

ListeningWhat does it really mean, “listen to understand”. Anyone can listen to respond to a question or statement but it takes someone skilled in communications to listen and truly understand what the subject is saying. You have to formulate and restate what they have told you in your head until it makes perfect sense to you. This is not a skill that comes easy and a lot of the time it requires you to ask a lot of questions from your subject or your audience to make sure that you truly understand the subject and are not just responding to their statements.

Here is a challenge in the art of listening to understand. The next time you have a one on one with one of your agents or your manager stop and take a minute to truly listen to what they are saying. Repeat it in your head a few times and ask a question if you do not truly understand it. You have to be honest with yourself in this regard because if you do not understand you need to.

Let me know how this goes for you, post a comment or kick me an email.

Jared

Posted on by

Developing Leadership in your Organization

Developing leaders is no easy or simple task. It is something that you have to invest in and something that you have to continue to work at and build up over time. In the book “5 Levels of Leadership” the authors talk about people with the innate ability to lead and those who do not have this ability naturally. While anyone can learn to be a leader it takes some form of natural ability to become a great leader.

Developing leadership can come in many forms but most of the true learning is on the job and happens in the moment. Most managers are in their role to manage the day to day operations of the department and make sure everything keeps running. This can make things very difficult for the organization as a whole because there is no one focusing entirely on the development of leadership within the ranks.

Some organizations push developing leadership onto the manager or supervisor role while still expecting them to manage the day to day operations. This can result in managers dividing their time between the daily tasks and developing leadership in their employees. This is a hard balance to find and sometimes can cause tension in the ranks of a large corporation.

A big part of developing leadership in any organization is done through delegation of tasks. This is something that is crucial for any new manager to learn and learn quickly because without delegation they can end up buried and unable to perform the day to day tasks required to keep the organization running. The best way to determine what should and should not be delegated to your supervisors or agents is to determine what they can and cannot learn from.

There are always going to be constant daily tasks that need to be completed and these lower level tasks can be provided to your employees as long as they are delivered properly. This should never be delivered as a way to reduce your workload unless it is to spend more time developing leadership through the organization. Each task that you delegate should have a form of education included with it, whether that is learning the manager tasks or helping to build relationships with others in the organization.

It is the job of a manager to be constantly developing leadership throughout the organization. Managers should be devoting, at minimum, 60% of their day towards the development of future leadership. There has always been a stigma that in order to be a proper manager you need to spend your time in your office managing the day to day operations. This has been developed over the years of organizations requiring this in order for them to keep functioning.

My challenge to any supervisor, manager, director or VP that sits in an office every day is to get out of it. Go sit with your people, sit with your future leaders and provide them in the moment coaching so that they can hone and develop their skills more. I promise that if you do this now the gain will out weigh what you put into it.

Jared