Leading through Result - Impacting others

Having discussed making an impact at self-level on leading, let us examine, how you can make an impact on others in a day to day life.

The others could be your friends, colleagues, boss, and subordinates in a professional setup. The first impact you can make others is that making yourself approachable when others are reaching out. Approachable means, how you are friendly enough and how you care them through listening. It should not be perceived that you need to be available for others all the time and do serve for other’s need. Even if you are not available to others, how politely you are refusing is also a way to make an impact on others positively.

Similarly, when others are approaching you for a solution to problems, how you are guiding with your thoughts or perspective or directing to right sources makes an impact on others.

The point is how you are conducting yourself through eventually make an impact on them about you. Once you make an impact on others through your positive gesture and thought process, any higher level challenges in the organizations can be resolved with your leadership capability.

To sum up, when you are going up the career ladder, you need to make an impact on others through your ease of approach and friendly. This is something experts refer to as soft skills. Once you impact on soft aspects, you can lead in any hard, technical, business challenges!
 

Leading through Result -Impacting Self

The first logical step in delivering a result or making an impact as one of the leadership development processes is to create an impact at self-level through our actions.

Making an impact at self-level:

To gain more influence on others or any decisions you take on a professional ground. First, you need to make an impact at your level.

For example, if you are suffering from some unwanted habits, you need to work on yourself to give up the practice. When you achieve through your willpower, you are making an impact at your level, and this impact will reinforce your leadership capability.

Similarly, if you are the person of coming late for any event, first correct yourself and make an impact on yourself. This impact at your level will bring you more confidence to you when you insist discipline on others.

If you afraid of taking a decision even with given data points, make yourself to break the inner fear and experiment to take a decision and face the consequence. By breaking your limitations, you are making an impact at self. 

Likewise, each one of us has many inhibitions, reservations, doubts, inferiority complex, procrastination and when you work on it and overcome those pulling factors, you are making an impact at yourself. Any positive impact being created by you at self-level will give you tremendous power to lead others.

Identify the limitations which are pulling you down, take action and see the result or make self impact!
 
Let us discuss the ways by which you can make an impact on others in a day to day life in next week!

Leading Through Result

Having discussed some insights on personal leadership and leading others, the next step in the leadership development process is “ delivering results.”

Not only in a professional environment, in any transactions, like in customer-seller, employer-employee, sports, politics, what is being watched out for is Impact or result being delivered consistently.

You could be a person with good value systems, self-organized and good at building an interpersonal relationship with others, yet if you lack delivering impact or result, your growth and leadership development stalled.

You might have observed some people with excellent qualification and attitude, but struggles to go up through career ladder due to lack of delivering expected results or impact in their given role.

When we say result or impact, it could be tangible or intangible. However, people are looking for consistent result or impact from you as a leader in a given role or context.

Some of the areas need to be discussed on making an impact as a leaders

1.Making an impact at self-level and others
2.Thought leadership 
3.Managing expectation on Impact or Result
 
Let us discuss those areas in next week.

Have a great week till then!

Leading others-Earning Respect

The fifth factor in strengthening the quality of relationship with others in a professional environment is “earning respect”.

As we come across many personalities in a professional life like customers, colleagues, friends, subordinates, and bosses and do the transaction with them, only with a few people, we have respect and admire them. The respect comes from any one or all of the factors

• The way they treat or respect others
• They way they approach the problems
• They way they teach or guide others
• Their technical/ functional / leadership capabilities and so on.

 
Because of the above factors, we have high respect for them, in turn, a good relationship is getting formed. When the quality relationship exists, we are easily influenced by them, and they easily get the things done through us. The foundation for all is they earned our respect through their consistent, positive behavior and actions.

Similarly, when you want to influence others and get the things done, you need to earn respect through your decisive, consistent action which positively impacts them.

Earning respect is a long term process and calls for consistent effort from your end. Once you gain respect from others, your capability to get the things done or leading others also enhances!

Leading Others -Improving Communications 2

In continuation of last week discussion about improving communication in the workplace, there is always challenge in dealing with others on two scenarios

1. When you express yourself  to others
2. When you are getting instruction from others

 
When you express yourself to others – you need to apply purposeful communication practices as we discussed last week.

When you receive information from others also, there is a chance for misinterpretation that leads to a problem. Communication experts are suggesting that when the person is giving instruction, he supposed to ask the recipient to repeat what he said and get confirmed. However, in my opinion, it is the choice of the giver, and we cannot expect or influence others. What is possible at your level is that you can rephrase the statement to the giver and get confirmed about your interpretation quality.

For example, when your colleague is asking for some details about the something, say sales data, you can check with him by rephrasing his statement like sales details of the x year and prompt when he wants, the format he wants and so on. Checking back by rephrasing and prompting may likely prevent communication problem at a later stage. Also, this practice will enhance your alertness and proactiveness in the workplace.

Even though ensuring effective communication is two-way responsibility, your extra effort to explain to others in detail and your proactiveness in confirming with others is always under your control, and it will likely improve your communications skill and in turn, your capability to lead others!

Leading others (Improving Communication)

The Fourth factor in strengthening the quality of relationship in a workplace is improving your communication skill.

Improving communication is not about language proficiency, it is all about the clarity of thought and quality of your expression to others to get things done.

Most of the problems in the workplace are due to lack of proper communication between you and others on a two-way basis.
 
Dealing with communication challenges between you and others:

     In the workplace, most of us are struggling to meet the expectation of others or others are not up to our expectation. One of the reasons could be due to our inability to express our requirement very clearly to others. Expressing our requirements is the art of communication and developing this skill is a lifelong effort as we need to deal with different people, with a different situation, and also we are at a different level of maturity.

      One technique that you can use in a professional environment to get the things done is practicing purposeful communication. It is all about communicating with others by explaining your purpose of the requirement rather than merely saying what do you want.

For example, when you ask for any details from your team, you can go one step further by explaining why you need the details, when exactly you need, how this details would be useful. When you use this technique, there is a high probability that you are getting things done, and your relationship with others also improves.

By nature, the human mind looks for reasoning, when you satisfy it, listening improves and in turn commitment also improves. Also when you take a stretch to explain the requirement with details, you are conveying your respect to others, and you will get it in reciprocation.

Just experiment when you are communicating with others to get things done!

Let us discuss some more communication improvement techniques next week!

Leading others(Enhancing your tolerance)

The third factor in strengthening the quality of relationship in a workplace is enhancing your tolerance.
Tolerance is an attitude towards others whose behavior, opinion, expressions are entirely different from you.

Regarding people, first, you need to admit the fact that people are emerging from different experiences, qualification, aspirations and sometimes that may not be matching with your expectation. When you do not accept the diverse values, opinions, expression of others, internally you lose your cool and externally you behave rudely. Hence the first step in enhancing tolerance is to accept diversity and reality. 

When you accept the reality, then try to understand others by their background and from their perspective. Accordingly, you can modify your response.

For example, you expect your team member to take decisions independently to finish the work at a faster rate. However, in reality, your team member awaits your approval for every small decision, and you may get irritated. When you try to understand your team member's background, you might have realized that he/ she had grown in a conditioned environment and low self-esteem made them get permission from you for every decision. When you understand the background or their perspective, you would be in a position to empower them to take decisions on their own or allow them to experiment to boost confidence level.

Here the key is your acceptance of other's diversity, behavior, understanding background and helping to improve makes a difference in your leadership skill on others.

The point is the world is a mix of diverse population and what you can do through your response will enhance your leadership than reacting to all diverse situation only spoil you and your relationship with others.

However, it does not mean that we are advocating mediocre performance in the workplace. The context needs to be understood in a right perspective!