The Authentic Leader Blog
The ability to communicate is arguably the most important trait of leaders. Communicate to provide direction, to inspire action, to persuade, to develop your team, to gain buy-in, and to drive organizational change. The ability to communicate separates mediocre leaders from great ones. Below is an overview of the communication mindsets that will support you on the path to becoming a great communicator.
Authenticity. It’s a word we hear all the time. But what does it really mean to be an authentic leader? The term is thrown around loosely in leadership and professional development circles and often becomes a nebulous concept in peoples’ minds. Rather than provide a purely academic definition of authenticity, I have included examples of authenticity in action below based on my own experience.
Being the leader of a company is not for the faint of heart. While CEOs are lauded for building world-beating companies like Apple and Google, they also face incredible scrutiny when many of those same companies face challenges (See Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook) or due to crushing marketplace conditions resulting from the Coronavirus pandemic, the 2008 housing crisis, and many others. While some leaders duck and cover while waiting for the storm to pass, the best leaders proactively focus on strategic, operational, and people related issues to not just weather the storm, but to come out stronger on the other side. Below are some of the things that CEOs are doing during the Coronavirus pandemic and other economic downturns.
The ability to lead a virtual team is more important than ever before. Even without the Coronavirus, more and more employees are working remotely and we as leaders need to develop skills to lead high-performing virtual teams. Leading a virtual team requires a different set of skills than managing an in-person team and many leaders and managers are now tasked with leading a virtual team for the very first time. Watch the video replay by clicking on the link below.
Have you been tasked with leading a virtual team in the wake of the Coronavirus and a work from home mandate from your company? Or has your organization adopted a new remote working policy? Regardless of the cause, it’s critical to quickly galvanize your remote team so that you can maintain high levels of productivity, engage and retain your team members, and ultimately achieve team and organization-wide goals. Below are 10 tips to leading a virtual team.
Great leaders use communications as a tool to motivate and inspire, gain alignment behind a vision or strategy, persuade others to join them in a new cause, convey critical thoughts and ideas, and to maximize their own impact. Great leaders also tailor their communications style and message based on who they are speaking with and the format and medium of the conversations. Learning to adapt your communications style to the audience offers a number of benefits. Keep reading to learn more.
Leadership is a nebulous and often hard topic to define. Many people conflate leading and managing, which is ultimately about marshaling and directing human, physical, and intellectual property resources toward the achievement of a set of business objectives. Leadership on the other hand includes aspects of management, but also has an elevated set of responsibilities including creating vision, instilling purpose, and aligning a team behind a North Star as well as a focus on empowering, motivating, and inspiring individuals, teams, and groups to achieve a common goal. Leadership entails the many facets detailed above and more, but underneath it all are 3 foundational elements needed for success.
As an executive coach focused on developing leaders, I have observed a number of parallels between my professional work and coaching kids on the sports field. In particular, the values I introduce to our rec sports teams overlap with those adopted by some of the most successful leaders. While they look a bit different on a wide-eyed 6 year old versus a seasoned and sometimes cynical executive, they do hold up quite well. Below I have depicted how the values come to life within our youth sports teams as well as how I apply them in developing leaders.
After being exposed to the impact and benefits of taking a Strengths-based approach to leadership, leaders and executives will typically ask us, “What are some quick tips to help carry this forward?” Read on for some quick hitters to take the next step in using Strengths and integrate them into your day-to-day role.
We all face doubt, from the most elite athletes and performers to successful executives, entrepreneurs, community leaders, and even military special forces. It’s part of human nature that doubt will creep in from time to time (and more!) for even the most confident among us. Below are some useful tips that I have learned along the way that can be helpful in tackling doubt.
Darren Reinke, Managing Director of Group Sixty, is distilling leadership strategies and tactics from Group Sixty's leadership development practice into a book to be released in the first half of 2018. The book is titled The Savage Leader: How to Unlock Your Potential for Personal and Professional Success and will be available to friends of Group Sixty before it is released to the general public. Click the link to learn more and join the waiting list so that you will be notified when it's available.
During the holiday season, and Thanksgiving in particular, many of us take time to appreciate all of the wonderful gifts that we have. While it’s important to focus internally and be grateful for all that we have, during this holiday season I would encourage you to take it one step further, shift the focus externally, and acknowledge those members of your team and organization who are not just achieving, but who are making CHANGES to their mindsets and trying on new behaviors in support of greater career and life success.
Many CEOs and executives struggle with the challenge of creating a high-performing leadership team. Leaders wonder if the focus should be on assembling a team of “A Players” or a team that has a wide array of experiences and skillsets. According to the research from Google’s Project Aristotle, the number one trait of the highest performing teams is the presence of psychological safety. Below is a set of practices that have been proven to be successful with our clients.
