Leaders: Balance Your Life!

Dear Managers and Leaders!

Do you think it is possible to be a leader and still have a balanced life? Aren’t we seeing a lot of leaders who are totally dedicated to their work, so much that they do not have time for their family? Their only friends are found at work, and are they real friends? Is it possible for these people to be great leaders?

To be entirely clear here, I think I need to first define what I mean by having a balanced life. I feel that it means devoting enough time to four domains of life to make you fulfilled and happy. These four domains are: work, family/home, community, and self. I believe these four areas are generic enough to cover most of what can happen in someone’s life.

You will notice that in my definition of a balanced life, I did not mention the perfect blend of the four domains to be balanced. I did that intentionally because I think it will vary depending on many factors. For instance, I consider it is normal that if you manage a project en route to failure, you will devote more time to work than on self-development for a while. Also, if you have a sick kid, you will for sure spend a lot more time with your family than time at work while the sickness lasts. There is no perfect blend. You have to judge what is important at a given moment and deal with it.

The key here is the “for a while”.  If you spend all your time working and never have time for friends or family, this is not balanced. If you spend all your time with your lover and forget about your friends, this is not balanced. I know it is the toughest thing to do, but you absolutely need to go back to a normal state and invest in all four areas once the extraordinary situation goes back to normal (once the project is back on track or the kid is healed).  

Here is a quick recipe to get to a balanced life:

           (1)    Recognize that having a balanced life is essential to your well-being

You must first convince yourself that it is important to invest time in all dimensions of your life to be happy and feel totally fulfilled.

          (2)    Decide to invest in all four areas of your life mentioned earlier (self, work, family, community)

Once you recognized that having a balanced life is important to you, you need to jump into action and start investing in your balanced life.

          (3)    Create a single TODO list for all aspects of your life

Ensure that everything you need to do is on that TODO list, not just your work items, but also the activities that you need to do with your wife and friends, and what needs to be done on the house. At the beginning of each week, make sure that you plan to do something in all four areas of your life. Balance the elements according to the priorities of the moment, but do something in all aspects of life.

If you have problems getting out of work schemas, you can see the four dimensions of your life as four business units that you are running at the same time. To be truly successful, you have to succeed in all four business units, right? Then make sure that you don’t leave one of them behind.

And what about you, dear leader? Have you mastered the way of balancing your life? What are the strategies you use to succeed in balancing your life? Please share your thoughts with us all!

Until next time,

Remi

Leadership is a Choice!

Dear Managers and Leaders!

I’m reading an excellent book these days called “The First 90 Days” by Michael Watkins. The book describes strategies to succeed in your leadership transitions. If not prepared properly, a transition to a new leadership role can become a nightmare, a big failure that will hurt your career for a long time if not forever. This book explains how to avoid the major leadership transition pitfalls. You will probably hear me talking more about this book in the coming weeksJ.

The first strategy explained in the book is that you have to promote yourself. You have to accept that you are now in a new position and that you have to change the way you do things and the way you think to be adapted to your new situation. As they say, what brought you here will not carry you forward. You are in a new position with different responsibilities. You can’t act as if you were still in your previous job. If you do, you will fail miserably!

This made me think that leadership is really a choice. You do not become a leader because you are promoted into a position of authority. The position will confer you a certain authority, but it will not give you any leadership if you do not know how to take advantage of your new position. You really need to make the leap and choose to act and think as a leader. This is natural for some people, it is not so natural for others.

So, what does it mean to act and think as a leader, you will ask? It means a number of important basic things:

        (1)    You have to stop doing and start facilitating, directing, inspiring, and empowering. You could see yourself as the one who needs to remove all the roadblocks so that your followers can do more. It is not you doing, but your followers.

        (2)    You are now responsible for creating a vision for an entire team, not just for yourself. You can’t act as if you are in isolation. You have to take into account that other people depend on you and you have to ask for their input as you make decisions (The 6 Steps To Leadership describes that well).

        (3)    You are now accountable for what your followers are doing. You need to follow what they are doing, be interested in what they are doing, and make sure that they are doing the right thing.

        (4)    Do not tell people how to do things, but rather tell them what needs to be done and why it is so important that it be done.

I’m sure this list can grow some more. You can help me by adding commenting on this post.

The important thing as you are promoted to a leadership position is that you need to let go of the past and learn how to succeed in your new role. You have to make that choice to leave the comfortable position you were in before your promotion and jump into a less comfortable leadership position. Leadership is all about choice, and the first one you have to make is to actually be a leader!

Until next time,

Remi Cote

6 Steps To Leadership!

Dear Managers and Leaders!

How can someone succeed in having other people follow him? How can a leader create all the conditions to ensure that people will trust him and suddenly go in the shown direction? Leadership is a complex phenomenon. Several books have been written on the topic, many serious people have tried to de-cipher the code but it remains a complex topic to understand.

Recently, on a different forum, I asked the “simple” question: “What is the most fundamental aspect of leadership?” I got a lot of answers to that simple question. Analyzing all the answers, I understood that there are 2 different areas of leadership and that one is not more important or fundamental than the other. The first area is the attitude of the leader. In that area, some people said that trust was the most fundamental aspect. Others said integrity. If you remember, back in February I had two posts related to the attitudes that a leader must adopt to be successful. This area of the art of leadership is tough to grasp and can only be developed through self-development.

The other area of the art of leadership that I discovered is the process of leadership. As you lead people, even if you have the greatest attitude in the world, it is likely you will fail if you do not follow certain guidelines and take some specific actions. This area of leadership is a lot easier to learn and describe.

I actually summarized the process of leadership in 6 easy steps.  I now offer a free mini-course titled “6 Steps to Leadership” that describes it all! You can get access to this free mini-course by filling your name and email address in the form on the right of this post. There is no obligation and you will learn a lot about the process of leadership in the 3 emails that you will receive. Hope you will enjoy!

Until next time,

Remi Cote

Everybody’s Working For The Week-End... - Loverboy

Dear Managers and Leaders!

It is Friday today and it makes me think about work-life balanceJ! You know, the week-end is coming! Do I have to remind you? Of course, weeks are too short. Of course you were supposed to do a lot more than what you actually accomplished this week. Weren’t you supposed to close all your action items this week? Weren’t you supposed to return all your calls, read ALL your emails? I know too well this little voice inside telling you to do more and more, and to work over the week-end. I can hear it say: “At least, over the week-end you don’t get constantly interrupted!”

But isn’t this a bit crazy and dangerous? We all know the importance of resting, no? We all want to spend quality time with our loved ones.  Why are we always pushed to work more and more? I can see a number of reasons that could explain why leaders are often hard workers. 

      (1) Drive

To go through the promotion cycle in large companies or to manage your own company requires a lot of drive. Someone in a leadership position normally wants to succeed and attain always larger goals. S/he will deploy a lot of energy and work very hard to succeed in achieving these large goals.

(2)    Purpose, passion

Good leaders have a deep sense of purpose and will be really passionate about the work they do. They are so motivated to achieve their goals that they can forget that there are other things around them in the world! This is extreme, but I have seen that!

(3)    Crave for recognition

Some people simply work hard because they want the recognition that comes from success. This crave for recognition is the only thing that drives them. They are ready to do whatever it takes to get that small bit of recognition that a successful project can provide them.

I’m sure we can extend the list even further and I hope you will post comments if you have other ideas on this topic! But the fact is that there are always great reasons to work harder and harder.

The funny thing is that people really seem to be lacking non-working time! When I look at the Internet these days, I see so many people selling packages to make millions on the Internet while sitting on a beach or traveling the world! If so many marketers are selling that dream of constant party, then it must be that A LOT of people are actually dreaming about it (and buying their silly packages)!

So why aren’t we living our dreams? Especially as leaders, we should be able to create a vision of where we want to go and achieve it, no! Isn’t that what leadership is all about? So, let’s all picture our lives with less hard work and more smart work. Let’s take a great, work-free week-end to create and experience that vision! 

Have a GREAT week-end!

Until next time,

Remi Cote

Leadership: The Need to Succeed!

"It is no use saying, 'We are doing our best.' You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary." (Winston Churchill)

Dear Managers and Leaders!

I like this saying of Winston Churchill so much! I see two important elements in it. First, how should one react in front of a failure situation? Should someone ask for forgiveness by trying to prove that s/he is doing his/her best? Does that make it a lesser failure? Maybe it makes you feel better to think that you did your best, but it remains failure anyways. As a leader, I think it is better to recognize that things are not going in the right direction and then correct the path.

What I discovered in my few years as a manager and project manager is that it is OK to go through tough times during a project. No one expects that your project will go entirely smoothly, that there will be no hick-ups, no painful moments, or no issues encountered. People will not measure your success by how much or how little pain was felt during a project. You should not use that measure either! People will measure success by looking at the results, your results in what is necessary!

And this brings me to the second point Winston Churchill brings in the quote above. “You have to succeed in what is necessary”. In fact, defining what is necessary is exactly what is so tough! Finding the quintessential elements of an enterprise is not easy. This is why we see so many projects wandering from left to right with a real lack of focus. Focus is really important for success, and it needs to be applied on the right things!

As leaders, we must absolutely have a clear vision of what is essential in the projects or enterprises we are leading. This actually defines success for the enterprise. It is a very powerful leadership practice to define the minimal success criteria at the start of a project. It will then guide the entire project in the right direction and ensure effort and resources are spent at the right place.

And please communicate the minimal success criteria to your team at the beginning of the project. Make it visible! Create a banner with the essential points written on it and post it in a central place in the office. Add it to your email signature!

Make it clear to your team that failure is not an option for the essential elements of a project and that you will always be there to help if a problem occurs in those areas. It will greatly improve commitment of the team and increase focus where it counts.

And what about you? Are you defining a project’s success criteria at the beginning of every project you lead? Do you have stories of un-focused projects that you would like to share? How do you feel about success and failure as a leader?

Until next time,
Remi

Meeting or Not Meeting... That is the Question!

Dear Managers and Leaders!

Meetings... If there is one element in the work life of a manager or leader that can really take a lot of time without producing real results, it must be those long hours spent sitting in meeting rooms with your colleagues. I remember one meeting I was in a long time ago. Back then, I was a software developer. I was asked to present an idea that I had about improving some processes to a number of senior executives. With a lot of luck, I was asked to present late on a Friday afternoon. Well, while I was presenting, I noticed that three out of four people in the room had their eyes closed, sleeping. One of them even snored at some point. I was furious! Maybe I was not a great presenter, but nonetheless I felt that these executives should have told me “no” up-front instead of wasting my time like they did. Needless to say, my idea was never approved.

Anyways, there are some ground rules that should be followed to ensure that you have meetings only when necessary and to guarantee their success or at least their productivity.

(1) Have clear objectives for each and every meeting you hold. If you cannot state clearly what the objectives of the meeting are, then cancel the meeting. It will be a waste of time.

(2) Send a meeting agenda ahead of time to the invitees to make sure that everyone will be ready for the meeting.

(3) Ask that people provide you with all the data they need to bring into the meeting prior to the meeting. At the beginning of the meeting, take a very brief amount of time to summarize what people sent you. You do not want the meeting to turn into a round table where everyone falls asleep.

(4) Meetings are usually about one of the three following things (see Seth Godin’s recent blog at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/03/three-kinds-of-meetings.html):

a. Provide information to the people present. This is a one-way meeting and even though questions are allowed, the decisions have been made prior to the meeting
b. Discuss something. This is an open forum where the leader wants feedback from the invitees.
c. Get permission. Here the leader needs approval to do something. The audience is expected to say yes, but can still say no.

Don’t confuse these three types of meetings. It should be clear from the agenda what type of meeting it will be.

(5) Always define the end time of the meeting. Most meetings should last 30 minutes or less. In Agile methods, they even mandate that the daily “scrum” meeting be held with people standing up to make sure the meeting will remain short!

(6) During the meeting, leave no space to chit-chats or discussions going off a tangent. People who want to socialize can do so after the meeting.

(7) If a point requires more discussion between a subset of the attendees, make someone responsible for that topic and postpone the discussion to a later time.

What about you, dear reader. Do you often find yourself wasting your precious time in un-productive meetings? Are there any other meeting ground rules that you use to ensure productivity? Please share your thoughts with this group!

Until next time,
Remi Cote

Brainstorming State Forever...NOT

The situation I’m in at the moment is quite incredible. As you know, I’m starting a business at the moment. Most of my time is spent developing my coaching product for managers and leaders. This is great, but boy is it hard to keep the focus! I’m overwhelmed by ideas:

“Oh, yes, I could do this. But look, there is this other thing that can be done! And oh! I need to do this as well but then this idea is soooo interesting!”

Well, you now see the picture! It is so easy to get excited about lots of things and in the end accomplish nothing! One can generate thousands of great ideas and do nothing about them. What will that person gain in the end? That person will gain nothing, of course.

The fact is that it is OK to be in a brainstorming state for a while, but at some point, you need to get out of that state. If you remain in the brainstorming state forever, then you know you will get a lot of brainstorming data that will sit still, not helping you accomplish your goals. But how do you get out of that state? How do you make sure that your brainstorming ideas turn into a real acomplishment at the end?

There are several ways you can go about getting out of the brainstorming state. But I think it all comes down to the following recipe. First, after all your thinking and mental wandering, you need to re-state your goals and objectives to make sure that you will be going in the right direction. It is possible that your brainstorming allowed you to see your goals more clearly or even change them altogether. So re-state your objectives to create that focus that you need and to add perspective to the set of ideas that you have in front of you.

Second, you need to clean up the vast amount of ideas that you generated while brainstorming. Some of these ideas that you had in the middle of the night either do not make sense anymore (even though you thought they were sparks of supreme intelligence that night J) or are simply not aligned with your goals. You need to toss them away and keep only those ideas that bring you closer to your objectives. And for the good ideas, you will need to put them in order. Maybe some are useful now; maybe some will be useful later. Maybe some ideas are good but need to be refined.

Third, the goal now is to come up with a vision of where you want to go and how you will get there. You have to look at all your good ideas, the ones that you kept, and come up with a mental picture of how they will play together to achieve your goals. This is the crucial step. You are creating the framework for your plan.

Once you have that clear mental picture about where you are going and how you will get there, capture it somewhere. This is your new vision of the future. It defines your focus for the future. You are now out of the brainstorm state if you stick to your plan. Of course, you will likely have to refine your vision, adapt it to the reality of the day, and create a realistic plan to achive your vision. You might even find yourself going back to a brainstorming state for a while as you refine your plan or adapt it. But you should do it in the context of this original vision to make sure that you move forward instead of constantly spinning your wheels standing still.

A good trick to make sure that your plan will stick is to come up with a list of short term goals. This will give you an early sense of accomplishment! But... this is a topic for a later post as this has the potential to become a very long discussion!

So, do you also feel that getting out of the brainstorming state is important? Do you usually find it tough to get out of that state and keep focusing on the task at hand? Do you think that this plan for getting out of the brainstorming state would work? Please let me know what you think!

Time management for leaders: The Outlook game!

Dear Managers and Leaders!

Have you ever experienced the panic of having a line-up at your office’s door? Have you ever forgotten to act on an action item that your boss gave to you? Have you ever forgotten about that “important” task that you delegated to someone on your team (ouch!)?

You know, as you grow higher in an organization, when you start to take on more leadership roles, more responsibilities, you also start to be connected with more people and to be involved in more activities. You almost invariably end up with a busier schedule! This can be tough to manage when you are not used to it.

There is also a weird shift that is happening when you get to a leadership position. Before, when you were an individual contributor, you almost had complete control over your schedule. Maybe your manager had a weekly meeting with you but, aside from that, you were the master of your calendar! Once you are in a leadership position, the situation often changes dramatically. People around you start to take control over your calendar. People schedule meetings with you, you have to participate in all sorts of activities, you have to represent your team to upper management, etc. All sorts of things to reduce the time you have to focus on what you have to do!

On top of all those activities, you have to monitor what your team is doing. You have to interact with your team several times a week, if not several times a day to make sure that your team members are staying on course. If they are blocked on something, you need to help them find solutions. If people complain about your team, you have to calm them down and make sure that your team delivers. All this is tough to manage, no?

As you can see, it is tough for a leader to find time to perform his work! There is always something else to do, and there will always be more people asking for your attention! However, there is work that a leader needs to do on his own. A leader must find time to think about solutions to issues, he must close action items, and he must find time to delegate tasks properly. This is essential to the success of the leader and to the success of his team.

The secret is to make room in your agenda. You must reserve space in your agenda that no one will ever be able to steal. When you plan for your week, you first have to estimate the amount of time that will be required to complete all the things that you need to complete by yourself during that week. Then, you have to block enough space in your agenda to do all the activities that you have planned for the week. That way, people will see that you are busy during those hours and no one will be able to steal that precious time from you. This will allow you to perform your work and succeed! I call this secret "Playing the Outlook Game"!

As you plan for your week, please be realistic! If you pile up so much work for yourself that you no longer have time to spend with your team, then this will not be good at all! You have to consider the entire picture and balance the time you spend alone in your office working on your personal activities and the time you spend with your team and other people in your surroundings. Also, it is always possible to realize at the beginning of the week that you have too much to do. This is when you start asking yourself what can be delegated to your team members! Isn’t it good to have people on your team?

And you, dear leader, what are your tricks to reserve time in your agenda? Is there anything special that you would like to share with this group?