Aligning Purposes

Dear Managers and Leaders!

The other day, I participated in a webinar about personal leadership given by David Bernard-Stevens (another member of the Leaders’ Cafe Foundation). One of the central messages of the webinar was that at the core of personal leadership lies your dream or purpose. You cannot lead your life, lead yourself, without first having a vision of where you want to go. To truly feel alive and important to this world, you need to find your purpose and direct your actions and energy towards it. According to David, without alignment between your life and the purpose found within yourself, you will never feel satisfied with your accomplishments.

After the webinar, I started to think about David’s purpose-life alignment message in relation to team leadership. It soon became clear to me that if misalignment between life and inner purpose brings frustration, then misalignment between team’s purpose and team member’s purpose must also brings problems. If purposes are not aligned, then the team will drive its members in a direction that will take them away from their dreams, from their purpose. The team will ask its members to spend time and energy away from their purpose which will inevitably lead to frustration and lower performance levels.

To achieve maximum team performance, team members’ purposes must somehow align with the team’s purpose. Purposes will differ slightly between team members and these differences should direct the distribution of roles within the team. It is the team leader’s role to discover team members’ purpose and align roles with purposes. The team leader also needs to align everyone’s purpose to the purpose of the team. Only then can he achieve great team performance! The best team leaders will always find a way to get to this alignment between team’s purpose and team members’ purposes. It is vital to team performance.

As a team leader, make sure that you hire people who have purposes aligned to your team’s purpose. If you don’t pay attention to this criterion as you hire people, then you will constantly have to fight an uphill battle. The “misaligned” employees will never feel motivated to work, will hardly endure setbacks, and will rarely come up with innovative ideas. The performance of the team will suffer greatly.

On the other end, if all your employees are well aligned with the team’s purpose, you will find them highly motivated, resilient, and innovative. They will help you lead the team in collaboration. You will feel comfortable delegating important tasks to your team members because you know they also have an interest in succeeding.

I believe that defining the purpose of a team and ensuring that everyone on the team aligns with that purpose is one of the most crucial tasks of every team leader. It is a fantastic motivator and insurance to success!

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

The Manager’s Routine

Dear Managers and Leaders!

A long time ago, someone told me that he really enjoyed switching places every time he was coming to a classroom. Doing that put him out of balance and he actually enjoyed that feeling of uneasiness and the sensation of starting anew even thought he was coming to a known classroom. He added that doing this kept him on his toes. I was actually quite different so I replied that I preferred keeping as many parameters constant so that I could focus better on the “real new items”. Twenty-some years later, I still feel the same. I think routine is power!

I believe routine is power in two aspects. First, by doing things routinely, you can really perfect the way you do it to the point where you could not do it better or faster. Second, by defining a clear routine, you can really focus on the non-routine items and give them lots of time and attention. Defining a clear routine and acting upon it can really improve your efficiency!

So, what I would suggest to all leaders and managers would be to define their routine and keep working at it and improving it until it becomes a reflex to perform these tasks. How to define a routine is not that difficult. Take a piece of paper and start writing down what you need to do every day, every week, every month, every quarter, every year. You can limit that to your job activities or you can go wild and include all of your personal activities as well. It depends if you want to focus on the time you spend at work or on your entire life. This is up to you.

So, let’s give some examples of items that could fall into a manager’s routine. Hopefully this will give you a good idea on how to start defining this routine.

Every day

• Review to-do list
• Talk informally to my team members

Every week

• Creation of my week’s to-do list (setting goals for the week and placing actions every day to meet those goals)
• Weekly meeting with my team
• Weekly project meetings
• Weekly report to my boss
• Weekly meeting with my boss
• One-on-one’s with some of my team members, some of my peers, my boss

Every quarter

• Unofficial performance and objectives review meetings with team members
• Quarterly budget update

Every year

• Official performance appraisals of my team members
• Official performance review meetings with team members

Once you have a list like the one above, the next step is to put all these items in your agenda. That way, you will know exactly what and when you have to do things. It will also have the effect of reserving time for performing these items. Don’t forget to reserve time to prepare for meetings or write reports. All this should go in the agenda.

The next step is to find ways to improve the way you perform all the actions found in your routine. Since you have to repeatedly perform those actions, improving the way you do them will give you a lot of return. This should free up your schedule for the other actions you have to do but cannot plan so easily.

So, unless you really like to always be destabilized and feel unorganized, define a routine and perfect it. You will never be caught off-guard and you will free up a lot of time for the rest of your activities.

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Out of Fear, Into Action

Dear Managers and Leaders!

I know. It has been a very long time since our last conversation. As you know, I was taking a course last Fall and then I got terribly sick with the H1N1 flu. All this to apologize for missing several of our online meetings! I hope you will forgive me.

Today feels terribly awkward. I have not written on this blog for a long time and I feel I will not be able to start again. I’ve been telling myself for several days now that I have to start blogging again and I always find a good reason not to. I’m frozen in fear! I fear I will not be able to give you the same quality as before. I fear I will not be able to come up with good ideas that will entertain you and allow you to improve your leadership skills. “Who am I to try to teach people how to lead?”

I’m sure you’ve all felt that way at one time in your life. Starting something new, or going back to what you were doing can be frightening. The fear of failure is a strong fear. But it should not stop you from trying. If you allow fear of failure to stop you from doing anything, then it is at this exact moment that you fail! Hubbard was saying: “There is no failure except in no longer trying." I completely agree with this statement. To succeed, you have to keep trying again and again until you find a way to succeed!

So how do you get out of your fear-induced frozen state? Well, you have to get up and start doing something. That something might not be great, but it will move you into action and out of your frozen state. The fear of failure is in your head. You thus have to get out of your head and get into action to get out of your fear.

So, this is exactly what I’ve done here! Write this first post after a long time as a cure to my fear of failure! I hope you’ve enjoyed this cure as much as I did!

NOW WE CAN START 2010!!

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

More Than Virtual Action!

Dear Managers and Leaders!

Have you noticed how the Internet can be a good place for discussion? With all the social sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or other virtual communities, it is really easy to spend days and nights just staring at a computer reading or discussing with virtual friends. This is all good, but I find that what is missing from all these sites is action. It is so easy to live inside our brain, sharing ideas, photos, and telling people what is going on in our life in 140 characters or less that we often forget to do something!

Social sites bring together people with enormous possibilities! But the sad thing is that this potential rarely translates into actions that are beneficial to the real world. It is not true of all the sites and what I want to do today is to highlight an exceptional event that happened on 09/09/09. I announced this leadership webathon on this blog last Tuesday. Can you imagine 21 consecutive webinars about leadership delivered in 21 hours? Isn’t it INCREDIBLE? It was incredible! The special thing about this webathon is that its organizer, Kwai Yu, and all presenters are part of 2 related virtual communities.

The first of these communities is the Leaders Cafe Foundation that has a virtual presence as a very active group on LinkedIn. You can find it here. The second one is the Differencemakers virtual community led by Ian Berry. It can be found here.

So, if you want to join virtual communities that are doing more than just chatting on the net, you should definitely consider joining these two special communities. I am certainly glad and proud I am part of them. They are dynamic communities, dedicated to DOING something to make this world a better place.

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Invitation to Attend a Leadership Webathon!

Dear Managers and Leaders,

today, I will not give you new contents to read, but I will invite you to a very big international event that is hapening on 09/09/09. Starting at 7am GMT, leadership specialists members of the Leaders Cafe Foundation (LCF) will give 21 free webinars! 21 FREE WEBINARS from leadership specialists coming from 6 different countries. You have never seen so much contents delivered in a single event, I'm sure!

Note that I will give two hours of presentation, the first at 23h GMT (7pm EDT) and the second one right after at midnight GMT (8pm EDT). I hope you will all join me for these two presentations. The first one is explaining 3 complementary models of a team and the other one will talk about some symptoms a leader cannot overlook. The latter is inspired from the series of posts I did on this blog.

The link to attend all webinars is

http://webmeeting.dimdim.com/portal/JoinForm.action?meetingRoomName=leaderscafe

The official communication with a lot more information now follows. I really hope you can join me and attend these presentations!

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WEBATHON - CELEBRATING THE WORLD DAY OF INTERCONNECTEDNESS ON 090909 THROUGH LEADERSHIP

On 9th September 2009 Leaders Cafe Foundation group and differencemakers community will celebrate World Day of Interconnectedness with a 24 hour webathon (all free). There will be a leadership webinar starting every hour with a great line up of presenters from 6 countries.

The probable program is listed below. Final program will be updated at

http://leaderscafefoundation.webs.com/wdi090909.htm

Fellow LCF member, Ian Berry has the honour of kicking off the webathon at 8 am London time 090909 (07:00 GMT)

All times listed are GMT (EDT.

07:00 Ian Berry from Australia What Real Leaders Do and fake ones don't

08:00 Heather Davis from Australia "Taking it personally: Small ‘l' leadership"

09:00 Krishna Kumar from Australia You've planned your holiday but have you planned your life?

10:00 Sangeeth Varghese from India Defining moments that can change your life

11:00 Krishna Kumar Growing Roses and Chrysanthemums

12:00 Don Dunoon from Australia Leadership mode: Leadership as grounded in learning and relational work

13:00 Gino Federici Harmonious Oneness

14:00 Rhea D'Souza from India Leadership through storytelling

15:00 Rhea D'Souza At the edge of innovation

16:00 Kwai Yu from United Kingdom Why Should Anyone Be Led By You

17:00 Kwai Yu Finding Purpose

18:00 Kellie Frazier from USA Speak and Write With Intention

19:00 Joel Graham-Blake United Kingdom To Be Announced

20:00 Richard Norris from Scotland 7 Steps To Success

21:00 Ian Berry Standing out from the crowd - how to do today what others will be thinking about tomorrow

22:00 Ian Berry Differencemakers - how doing good is great for your life and work

23:00 Remi Cote from Canada 3 complimentary models of a team

00:00 Remi Cote Symptoms a leader cannot overlook

01:00 Jane Chin from Los Angeles Leaders Cafe Foundation launch in LA

02:00 Jane Chin Personal Branding including the launch of the ebook Who am I? the power of a personal brand by Ian Berry, Jane Chin, Remi Cote, Shelley Dunstone, Joel Graham-Blake, Pat Nautin, Leo Sonneveld, and Kwai Yu.

All participants in these webinars receive a copy of this ebook.

03:00 Jane Chin Personal Branding

You can participate in any of these free webinars by clicking on the following URL at the appropriate time

http://webmeeting.dimdim.com/portal/JoinForm.action?meetingRoomName=leaderscafe

For more on the World Day of Interconnectedness visit http://www.interconnectedness090909.org/

Your Vision in 7 Quotes

Dear Managers and Leaders!

We already discussed a few times the importance for a team leader to have a clear vision and to share that vision with his entire team. Today, I want to share a few quotes about vision with you. Some of these quotes are taken from the book "The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork" written by John C. Maxwell.

I hope these quotes will inspire you to define a clear and articulated vision, to broadcast it around you, and to live it fully.

"To have a vision gives motivation and assurance to team members."

- John Maxwell

"Every soldier must know, before he goes into battle, how the little battle he is to fight fits into the larger picture, and how the success of his fighting will influence the battle as a whole."

- Bernard Montgomery

"Leaders do not need to be visionaries themselves. The vision can come from anyone."

- Ezra Earl Jones

"I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."

- Henry David Thoreau

"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it."

- Michelangelo

"The vision must be followed by the venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps - we must step up the stairs."

- Vance Havner

"You must have long-range goals to keep you from being frustrated by short-range failures."

- Charles C. Noble

I hope you enjoyed reading these quotes and found some wisdom in them.

I also want to invite you to a free webinar I'll give on 09/09/09 from 7pm until 9pm EDT. This is part of a larger event hosted by the Leaders Cafe Foundation for the World Day of Interconnectedness. I will present two different topics:

• 3 Complementary Models of a Team
• Symptoms Leaders Cannot Overlook

But the event is a 21-hour leadership presentation marathon If you want to join me or learn more about the other sessions, send me an email at remi@innovachron.com and I'll send you all the details.

Remi Cote

4 Ways to Improve Your Team

Dear Managers and Leaders!

I am reading a very good book from John C. Maxwell titled “The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork”. In this book, John Maxwell emphasizes the fact that as a team leader, you must ensure that your team meets the highest performance standards possible. Your team must perform or it is bound to fail. You do not want your team to be caught underperforming because at that point, you will lose control over your team. Someone above you is likely to overtake your team and do what is necessary to correct the situation. At that point, it usually requires some serious actions that could even mean lay-offs of team members or even the elimination of the entire team. You really want to notice that situation before someone else detects it so that you keep control and do what you decide to do to correct the performance problem yourself.

To help you with improving your team, Maxwell suggests 4 ways to improve your team’s performance. I’ll share them with you here.

• Improve the performance of your team members – If you see that your team does not perform as well as it should, the first thing that you need to check is whether the team members can be trained to perform better. You must always look for ways to train and improve the people forming your teams. Note that you also must not forget to improve yourself in the process!
• Add competent people to your team – Sometimes, your team members are performing well, but you discover that you will not succeed with the current team as it stands. Maybe you lack some specific competences. Maybe it is just the sheer number of people that is insufficient to do everything that needs to be done. In those cases, you will find that you need to adjoin more competent people to help you achieve what you need to achieve. You need to grow your team!
• Change the leader – When a team is composed of the right people but still does not progress, maybe it is time to look for a new leader! Or maybe some people on your team would be better suited to lead certain aspects of the project. This is tougher to do when you are the team leader yourself. You have to look at your delegation skills and see how you can use some better suited people to help you with leadership. You can keep the control of the overall project, but delegate the leadership responsibilities of certain parts to someone else if you feel it will be better for the project.
• Remove inefficient members – Finally, sometimes you need to remove inefficient members from a non-performing team. A single member can change a winning team into a losing team! In that case, you have to put the interests of the team first and remove that person from your team. For you as the leader, the team is what counts. You need to compose the best possible team and this should be your focus.

Those are the four elements that Maxwell suggests in his book. I would add things around processes and relationship myself. We might look at those in some future posts!

What about you dear leaders? Do you always focus on your team’s interests first? Do you have your own suggestions as to how team performance can be improved? Please add your comments below. I’m always happy to see them coming!

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.