This is the first of five guest posts by my friend Tal Shnall. He attended 2014 Global Leadership Summit (#GLS14) and shares some great insights he picked up.
Bill Hybels founded the Global Leadership Summit and is the best-selling author of more than 20 books including Courageous Leadership, Axiom and Simplify (August 2014). These are the major highlights from his session regarding leadership…
Leaders are visionaries by nature. We see pictures of the future that produce passion. However, many people in positions of leadership with the highest levels of achievement often have the lowest awareness of the spirit of the team. To improve your leadership, the following need to be considered as priorities:
- Use an outside agency to evaluate engagement levels. It gives you the opportunity to understand the real health of your organization.
- Own the culture turnaround (don’t delegate to HR). Your culture will only ever be as healthy as the senior leader wants it to be. [TweetMe]
- Insist on mandatory training for everyone who leads or manages people. People join organizations; they leave managers. You will never reach your full potential as an organization unless every manager is leading and loving people well.
- Raise the level of candor in annual performance reviews. Tell people what they should start (it raises their level of impact), stop (detrimental to both their effectiveness and growth of the organization) and continue (on course). This is anchored on three ‘Ms’: Move something ahead; Modify what isn’t working; and, Motivate the people you lead. [TweetMe] Everyone wins when a leader gets better.
- Ruthless commitment to resolving relational conflict. Have a ‘Reconcile’ book where wrongs are addressed and relationships restored. When this is working, conflict becomes viewed as an opportunity to strengthen a relationship.
Great leadership is by definition relentlessly developmental. Five top ways to develop emerging leaders:
- Put them in high challenge roles. This pushes them out of their comfort zone.
- Assign to a short-term task force. Success or failure must be possible and emerging leaders must take full charge. They must work with a wide variety of people and involve real pressures and a deadline. The end product must be evaluated by senior leader
- Provide real time feedback. This is very helpful especially to avoid any misunderstanding and keep the engagement on course.
- Coaching and mentoring must be embedded in the culture of the organization [TweetMe]. Growth becomes relational since you (the leader) are available to the people you are growing into leaders.
- Classroom courses and seminars. Resourcefulness is one of the greatest weapons in a leader’s arsenal. Resourcefulness requires determination, creativity, collaboration and ability to learn. When was the last time you assigned an emerging leader to a high-challenge task force to evaluate them?
Find and develop leaders with a legacy mindset. Leaders need to discern between hireling-types and ownership-types. Hirelings have a short-term, ladder-climbing mindset. They will not sacrifice for long-term goals. Ownership-types, on the other hand, are legacy leaders. They subscribe to a long-term culture that has sustainability in mind. No one drifts into legacy leadership; it takes intentionality.
What do you want your legacy to be?
About Tal Shnall:
A leadership blogger, coach and leadership team development at Renaissance Hotel in Richardson Texas. You can read his blog, Leadership Cafe, where he is delighted to engage with you in leadership conversations. You can follow Tal on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.
About the Global Leadership Summit:
This is a two-day event that is telecast LIVE from Willow’s campus near Chicago every August. Throughout the fall, Summit events take place in an additional 350+ cities, 105 countries—translated into 50 languages.
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