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

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

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!