Ten Attributes of High Performing Leaders

I was asked yesterday by a CEO client to list what I thought were the essential characteristics of high performing leaders and team members. After giving a disclaimer about high levels of competency and a deep expertise in their respective areas, I provided my top ten list of suggested attributes for leadership and team effectiveness.

1. Passion: Successful leaders and team members have one idea that has grabbed hold of them and won’t let go. They can genuinely, enthusiastically and readily talk about their idea and the linkage to an uplifting and desirable future. They are passionate communicators and use powerful language to infuse hope and optimism in others.

2. Curiosity: Successful leaders and team members have a deep curiosity about people and what makes them tick. They are continuously looking at and discussing how to build greater effectiveness with and through people as well as technology. They are also curious about their brand and are committed to enhancing it. Their curiosity has them traveling to diverse places, reading broadly and being intellectually engaged both at work and at home.

3. Courage: Successful leaders and team members have the courage to turn their back on what has made them successful in the past. They still experience fear but see courage as essential for accomplishing something noteworthy. They embrace their fears and move forward confidently knowing they are smart enough to learn and grow from whatever they experience.

4. Credibility: Successful leaders and team members recognize that being able to make a contribution takes personal influence. They know that people will willingly follow them only if people believe them to be authentic, credible and believable. They agree with the admonition that people only believe the message if they first believe the messenger, and in turn they strive to be exceptional role models.

5. Urgency: Successful leaders and team members have a healthy dissatisfaction with their current performance. They are continuously thinking bigger about their own personal leadership as well as their role in creating a culture of continuous learning, experimentation and risk taking. They also believe that speed coupled with passionate dedication can achieve something noteworthy.

6. Ownership: High performing teams have members who take responsibility not only for the performance of the team, but they also take complete responsibility for the quality of their personal and professional lives. Simply put, there are no victims on high performing teams. The prevailing mindset is one of “what can I do to make a difference and if I can’t make a difference then I need to make an exit from the team.”

7. Tenacity: Successful leaders and teams don’t give up. Once they have a clearly defined desired future (one they are passionate about and have the courage to pursue) they exhibit deep reserves of resolve and determination. They believe in progress not perfection and are tenacious in the face or adversity.

8. Agility: The world of work demands that leaders and team members be comfortable with ambiguity and that they don’t expect all aspects of their work to be expressed in black and white terms. They have the ability focus intently while remaining open to recalibrating their course of action whenever they learn of a better course of action.

9. Discernment: The ability to filter large amounts of information and determine the one or two most salient actionable points is essential for leaders and teams. Effective leaders listen to gain information, ask questions to understand diverse points of view, and act confidently even in the face of competing ideas and or demands.

10. Results Focused: Successful leaders and team members recognize the difference between taking action and getting results. Their focus is on results and use all of the preceding traits and characteristics to drive their team, department or organization forward.

I have three questions for you:

1. Which of the ten attributes do you do best?

2. Which one challenges you the most?

3. If you could leverage your greatest strength more while also reducing the effects of the attribute you feel challenges you, what impact would that have on your performance?

7 Principles of Transformational Leadership

This week we are launching my new book, The 7 Principles of Transformational Leadership: create a mindset of passion, innovation, and growth. I’m excited for two reasons. The first is that the people who have read the book so far have said that it is approachable, practical, and inspirational. For these compliments I am really honored.

I’m also excited because this book was eight years in the making. It took a long time for me to write it. Not because I didn’t have something to say, but because I was tentative and uncertain. But, when I leveraged the content from my Mastering Your Mindset and integrated it with the 7 Principles of Transformational Leadership, I got transformational results. Specifically, I went from the idea of the book to a book proposal, an agent, to a commercial publisher and a completed manuscript in five months.

There are three benefits you’ll receive from reading my book and one thing that you’ll commit to doing in order to get transformational results. The three benefits are:

1. A way to live your life with unbridled purpose and passion.

2. You’ll execute on your strategic priorities faster and with greater results.

3. You will cascade excellence throughout your entire organization.

That’s great, Hugh, but what do I have to do in order to get these benefits?

You’ll need to articulate your leadership purpose. Leadership purpose is a game changer. It changes the game with regards to the value you provide to your customer and employees. It is the catalyst for living your life purposefully and passionately, executing with greater effectiveness and greater results, and cascading excellence throughout your entire organization.

Ladies and gentlemen, the purpose of the book is to show you how to achieve these types of results. If you’d like to experience the same types of results I did, there is a link at the bottom of this blog post and it will take you to the landing page where there are three offers about how you and I can engage with this content. We can engage with you as an individual or with you as a team or organization. Check out the landing page. I am very proud of this book and believe it can be a game changer for you personally, organizationally, and professionally.

Have a flourishing week and I’ll see you again next week.

Click here to go to the book landing page

Five Reasons People Stop Learning and Don’t Change

I spoke with a client last week that told me of a leader who lost her job because her employees had lost trust in her. They were demoralized because their customer satisfaction scores were the lowest in the organization. After multiple sessions of talking about strategies to reverse the situation, and the development of detailed plans, nothing in the leader’s behavior changed. There was plenty of talk but no action.

There are many reasons why leaders don’t change, but in my consulting and coaching work, I’ve found five common reasons:

1. Inertia. Inertia is seductive. It’s easy to get lulled in to doing your work in ways you’ve always done it even if it doesn’t work anymore. There is a tendency to become enamored with the simplicity of replicating the past and remaining content to do uninspired and pedestrian work. Work that is not creative but is safe and predictable.

2. Ignorance. You can be smart and ignorant simultaneously. For example, a leader can be ignorant about employees’ or customers’ hopes, dreams and aspirations. When leaders lack the knowledge of how to win the hearts and minds of those they work with, those leaders need new information and insight as to how to build personal engagement and commitment.

3. Incompetence. Incompetence in a leadership context is not having the talents and skills to do transformational work while also navigating adversity and change. People who are incompetent are fully capable of doing meaningful work, but need training and mentoring in how to become an exemplary leader. Incompetence is not a pejorative word unless the fourth barrier is also an issue.

4. Indifference. Indifference comes from not having a clear and compelling leadership purpose. While achieving financial results is essential to remaining relevant as a leader, financial metrics as a purpose counter-intuitively ensures lower performance. Making a meaningful difference in employees’ lives as well as customers’ lives, on the other hand, jettisons indifference and brings forth greater creativity, energy and a willingness to grow.

5. Insecurity. Low levels of self-worth and self-esteem are prevalent at all levels of an organization. When I worked with a Senior Vice-President of Operations the biggest factor affecting his effectiveness was a deeply rooted insecurity and belief that he was “the wrong person for the job”.

When I’m asked how to counteract these five barriers I suggest one overarching strategy that not only shatters the barriers, but also catapults leaders to once unimagined heights. What’s the one strategy? Master your mindset.

Monday Morning Mindset Challenge:

Download your copy of the Mastering your Mindset Special Report and isolate the primary negative thinking habit that holds you back. Choose one of the success strategies and implement it starting today.

You can find the report using this link.

Be Brief – Be Succinct – Be Effective

This week I want to talk to you about being brief, cutting to the chase, being succinct.

I was in a meeting this week that reminded me of the benefits of being brief. Imagine seven people in a room making introductions to one another as they had not met each other before. I was asked to go first, and I said, “My name is Hugh Blane and I run an advisory firm that serves executives and entrepreneurs. I help them dramatically increase the quality of their leadership, the quality of their business, and the quality of their life.” And then I shut up. I turned to the next person in the hopes that the fifteen or twenty seconds I took would be replicated. Do you know how long it took the next person? No, you would not know because you were not there. It took them seven minutes…SEVEN MINUTES! In turn it took thirty minutes to introduce seven people. It was an inefficient and unnecessary use of time.

The reason why this is germane to the Monday Morning Mindset is that in order to be crisp in your communication; which means articulating something succinctly, with brevity, with the bare essentials of what people “need to know” versus “what you can tell them”, requires a sharp and crisp mindset to do so. The thinking that you as leaders, executives or entrepreneurs bring to how you communicate is of paramount importance. It is of paramount importance because people have a shorter attention span, less discretionary time and take clues and cues about how you think from how you speak.

This week, be brief. Be succinct and then ask if anyone has any other questions. If they do, they will ask. If they don’t they won’t ask and you can move on.

Hugh’s Brevity Recommendations:

1. Remember that less is more powerful and compelling. The Gettysburg Address for example.

2. Share what people need to know and not what you know about a subject. When asked for the time avoid a discourse on making watches and tell the person it’s 5:45pm.

3. Brevity, when done well, respects a persons time. By cutting to the chase you are acting in service of the person you’re speaking with.

I will now stop talking and say that is the Monday Morning Mindset. If you want to have a fabulous week, be more succinct, be crisp in your communication, and if you do, you’re going to create a fabulous week.

Listen to Understand and Not Respond

Notes:

This week I want to talk to you about listening to understand as opposed to listening to respond. Listening to understand is an influencing tool or technique I think is incredibly powerful.

Let me ask you this. Do you think that the vast majority of people are listening to understand you, or are they waiting for a gap so that they can respond based on something that you’ve said? Are they listening to respond or to understand?

Let me role model this for you. If you’re having a conversation and someone says, “you know, I had a wonderful weekend.” Someone who is listening to respond may say, “we did also, you know what we did? We went to the mountains, we went hiking, we went fishing, we had a BBQ and an overall wonderful time.” They just completely overshot what you said, didn’t acknowledge it, and told you what they did. They were waiting for a gap in the conversation so they could respond about what they had done.

Listening to understand sounds something like this:

“We had a wonderful weekend.” “Really, what made your weekend so wonderful?” “Well we went down to the waterfront and we did the ferris wheel.” “Was that the first time you rode the ferris wheel? What was it like? Were you afraid of the height? Did you like the view from up there? Who did you go with?”

Listening to understand why an event or experience is important to someone is transformational in your relationships. Why? Because what you’re doing is expressing an interest and concern for the other person. By doing so you are communicating how important the person is to you. When someone isn’t important you don’t listen to them. Listening is a powerful influencing tool in that when someone feels listened to they feel heard, they feel valued, they feel important, and they feel that you were the person that helped make them feel that way.

This week, if you want to have a more effective work week, find one person you will listen to understand as opposed to simply responding. If you do that, and when you do that, you are going to have a much more effective work week.