The first thing I need to say is I have worked with clients and staff from all over the world, and I continue to find that people are people. Leadership must build a culture of engagement, connection, and inclusion. Those changes take real work and an honest effort to create trust, allowing performance to reach optimum levels.
A client recently told me, “Sometimes I feel like leadership is a combination lock with the combination changing every week or so. When I think I have the skills, they change. How can I fix that?
My answer to my client is a continuous commitment to life-long learning.
A multi-cultural organization can be challenging to lead without the leadership being committed to new lessons and techniques. Forging a new path can be difficult, but I continually see the investment of time and energy pay huge dividends when leaders are willing to learn new skills and reap significant rewards.
Leadership must be the head or the spear, continually learning and growing.
Here are my thoughts on how to do just that. I believe organizations are living, breathing entities because they are made up of living, breathing people. And all must evolve to solve issues and challenges as they develop.
Here are the four accepted styles of leadership and my definitions for each. Each style has a specific place based on the needs and maturity of the people within the organization.
- Autocratic – “Do what I tell you when I tell you.” This style is only needed when dealing with urgent or chaotic situations. The authoritarian style requires someone to reign in the team and make prompt and practical decisions to deal with an immature (young in the job at hand) and poorly trained workforce.
- Democratic – This approach involves the leader’s willingness to gather information from all team members and even include people from other departments and possibly clients, which help them all become a part of the success process. This approach allows everyone some level of input in decision-making. Leadership still makes the final decision, but including others gives everyone a sense of value and engagement in a successful outcome. This level of transparency and inclusion builds trust and inclusion because projects are now enhanced when positive contributions come from all sides, not just the top down.
- Laissez-faire – don’t let the title fool you. Laissez-faire does not mean “Who cares?” but it means leaders empower employees, stay hands-off, and trust them to accomplish the task without constant questions or micromanagement, but be available to help if needed.
- Transformational – As leadership evolves to transformational, it builds a trust-based connection amongst all stakeholders. Stakeholders continuously collaborate to develop and execute a clear vision to win support and engagement throughout the organization. Transformational leadership creates an energetic, focused, and independent workforce. This style builds and sustains a true community. When everyone has a sense of community, they exponentially raise positive change and productivity.
The most influential type of leadership is Transformational, which strengthens the team and encourages staff to create and implement successful solutions on the concepts of inclusions, connection, and engagement, BUT is also the hardest to achieve.
The steps to Transformational Leadership
To effectively lead and guide a multi-cultural, multi-national, and multi-generational organization, leaders must be must remember these three objectives,
- Know
- Like
- Trust
Older management styles (an example is #1 in the list above ) will not work in today’s fast-paced decentralized organizations.
So how do we create leadership that we know, like, and trust?
As leaders, we must become more human, more open, honest, and more emotionally vulnerable. In many cases, leadership will find these changes in behavior very uncomfortable. But all new behavior is awkward, and if we are to lead change, then we must practice the uncomfortable until it becomes comfortable. If leaders don’t champion these changes, stakeholders will not follow.
My book The Daily Six explains how leaders can set themselves on the right path daily. These simple steps will begin to create the path to engagement, connection, and inclusion, which we know as,
- Know
- Like
- Trust
Here is the answer of how rot build Know, Like and Trust.
“How The Daily Six Works at Work.”
I want to give you an overview of how to change focus, minds, and culture. These concepts are not just a warm and fuzzy plan. Here are practical and tangible examples of why these ideas work and how you can get them to work in your organization.
I remember speaking at an event where Les Brown was talking too. He said two things that have always stuck with me:
1. I will not say anything new tonight,
2. If you do what I suggest, it will change your life forever.
So change is in the doing, not in the knowing. These six tenets are very much like that. They help individuals and organizations reduce stress and anxiety and help leaders develop, maintain, and enhance a sense of balance.
Individuals who regularly use The Daily Six say they have a sense of focus and calm and can maintain peace of mind under all circumstances.
Organizations that utilize these ideas become more: open, productive, connected, and positive.
When we look around at the current issues in today’s headlines, we see behavior allowing for bad decision-making and a systemic breakdown in corporate culture across many industries. Organizations and individuals who run them need to find and use a clear and easily discernable daily path to rebuild confidence with people both internally and externally. This path provides a simple universal compass of positive change everyone can follow.
When everyone is clear and headed in the right direction, people learn what to expect and what actions are positive and which are not, making the right decisions a simple by-product.
Let’s build this moral compass together. It starts where everything must start, with willingness.
Willing to pick the right path, not some wishful unrealistic path but one that leads not just to high ethical standards but also increased productivity, low turnover and absenteeism, and a quicker and more agile organization.
*Read this excerpt from a client
How does a company like XYZ Plastics Corporation maintain an average return on equity of more than 22% for 34 years? Indeed, its capacity to focus on customers, innovate, take intelligent risks and manage its growth from 13 people to more than 2,000 are some of the reasons for its successful and profitable standing. Yet the people who built this high-performing plastics organization quickly advise that these admirable organizational characteristics are secondary to the essential ingredient for its success: its People Process Culture!
Leaders at all levels of the organization must consistently practice the established values. It may take months or even years to build a strong culture and trust, but a leader’s behavior only takes a few seconds to destroy people’s belief in the honesty of the organization’s values.
Willingness creates an open and honest mindset across the entire organization. People stop moving at the “speed of don’t screw up” and begin to accelerate productivity. Innovation and results are valued over the rules and status quo. An entrepreneurial spirit starts when people feel they can question established policy and direction without fear of backlash or reprisal. Departments communicate both horizontally and vertically because they understand and value that success for one means success for all. People understand and appreciate their personal and departmental contributions to organizational success. Leaders are approachable and connected to their people, personally and professionally. Success breeds success. This mindset will strengthen any division, organization, individual, or family.
People and organizations that practice willingness read more learn more and share more. Management supports and focuses on the success of those below them, and when people feel someone else cares about and focuses on their success, production will reach record levels.
With willingness, you will: believe in and find the highest actual value in yourself and others; with willingness, you will step outside your comfort zone; learn to be open and lead a much more innovative, interactive, productive, and profitable organization.
Here is an explanation of the other five concepts.
• Quiet Time – If you take five minutes in the morning and evening and get back your entire day. QT helps you start, end and restart your day with focus, perspective, and clarity. QT brings you a sense of confidence and strength that builds trust, strength, mood, and transparency in others.
People follow confident leaders. Quiet time helps you focus on your goals, allowing them to materialize quicker and more effectively.
• Service –changes your focus from a focus on my needs to a focus on the needs of others. When you care about the success of others, they will relax and begin to work to their genuine capacity. Service builds spirit and values that strengthen the leader and the team of any size. It changes your focus from “What’s in it FOR me” to “What’s in it FROM me.”
• Love & Forgiveness – Love – is defined as: “Seeing the needs of others and treating their needs as important as your own.” These concepts work at home, in sales, or customer service. Showing genuine care and interest in the success of people around you strengthens the sense of community and blows the top off of productivity. Forgiveness –allows you to move forward with a clear head each day. Don’t let the grudges of past experiences distract you from the present moment. Move from judging to serving and supporting. Leaders have hard decisions to make. Make them and move on. Let past pains, resentments, and anger go. Move positively into each new day.
• Gratitude –underlies the whole program. Focusing on gratitude frees you from the bondage of negative emotions, which block the positive effects of the first five steps. Being grateful for and valuing your life, family, work, and co-workers change your whole perspective. You live in the moment: the only way to affect real change. You learn something from every experience and embrace both the good and bad. When people feel valued, they know it, and performance soars.
• Action –separates The Daily Six from every other plan for positive change. Without action, this is simply an intellectual exercise that does not facilitate change. Action, only action facilitates change. Leaders need to take action. As leaders become driven by simple actions daily, they create a shift in focus. When all the efforts are combined, you build confidence and effectiveness for yourself and others in your organization.
As you become focused, caring, and supportive using The Daily Six, you will become a strong, confident, and supportive person. You will attract people with skills and qualities, creating a circle of success that repeats daily and year after year.
Use these concepts and see your organization of diverse people come together and move forward positively and productively.
