Lacking Leadership?

Symptoms:

• Performance: you don’t want to micro-manage, but can’t they find value-added tasks to do on their own?
• Engaged: are they more interested in the text messages on their phone or their task today?
• Herding cats: why are they are wandering in many directions often in conflict or competition of each other, can we all move in the same direction to the same drumbeat?
• Retention: replacing an employee costs $60k or more (estimated at 50% of the salary for the position) in recruiting, training, and lost productivity!

I do believe that you can teach an old dog new tricks. If a pup wants to learn something new just for your attention, the old dog needs a little more convincing. Maybe you need to present what’s in it for them besides a pat on the head; maybe you need to show the long-term value of the new process, vice another parlor trick that will soon become tiring.

Ed Tate, champion motivational speaker, presented “Making Managers into Leaders” to our PMI chapter event. He was very dynamic in his presentation and captured everyone’s participation as he acted out the differences between Management (the hard part) and Leadership (the soft part), we had so much fun!

Can we focus on more than one thing at a time? As a leader are you focusing on the problems? Weaknesses, failures, and what doesn’t work?

If we get more of what we focus on, let’s focus on our strengths, what’s working and where we are going!

If you focus on the soft part, your team will manage the hard part and provide the solutions to achieve the organizational goals.

Do we only do “post mortems” on the project failures, or on all projects?