Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Focus and Good Leadership



Day one of Communitelligence Conference! All of the sharepoint presentations and audio are available online for conference participants. In this post I'm going to give you the takeaways for me from this morning's speakers.

Kris Taylor from K.Taylor and Associates started us off by setting some focus. We took a look at what the intentions would be for the day.
  • How valuable do you plan for this day to be?
  • How participatory do you plan on being?
  • How much risk do you plan on taking today?
  • How vested are you in the well being of the group?

With those intentions, I decided I would really participate, make comments, take notes, tweet the event and see what I could contribute to the group.

Tom Lee Arceil Leadership Ltd. Robust Credibility and the Three Voices of Leadership highlights and notes :

Number one issue we face in corporate communication is not social media – the number one challenge is trust . the 2009 Edelman report on trust shows corporate America is trusted about 20% of the time. We, as corporate America, have not done what we said we were going to do.

His Rainbow model moves us through a process. Awareness, understanding, acceptance, commitment and finally engagement. Most companies are well managed by poorly led! Leadership is all about change and management is not comfortable with change.

Common to all great things over history is
:
  • single minded intense focus
  • object of deep curiosity
  • subject of consuming passion and
  • product of someones enduring courage .

There are three voices when you communicate with your employees.

Formal voice -- this is all the media things – words, numbers, pictures and images that convey official information and voices – less than 10%of all employee perception are attributed to this .

Semi formal voice – institutional management tools that implicitly, often inadvertently establishes priorities and signals an organization is ready for change. If this in incompatible with your formal voice, you lose.

Informal voice -- a leadership connection that culturally defines the organization and determines where and how people fit in – the relationship between the boss and you is in the informal voice.

Are your three voices aligned? Is your message consistent?

If we are not minding the store on trust and authenticy, we are squandering the future of our enterprise.

How does all of this translate into meaning for my business? After every good meeting, you need to ask yourself: what is my next step? Do I have a way to put these items into action?

1.I like setting the focus each day. To be intentional about what the day will be like. I can ask those questions of myself each morning – and then live into my answers.
2.I can manage anything, but am I being a good leader? Am I capable of making the change I need to further my business? If I take a good look at what I'm doing – I will ask myself these questions:
  • can I have a single minded focus on this topic?
  • Am I curious about what I'm doing here?
  • Am I passionate about it?
  • Can I have the courage to continue?
3.My conversations, both internally and externally need to be in sync. What can I do to make that happen today?
4.Am I trustworthy? Have I built that into my business plan?

Bullseye picture courtesy the marque

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