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.