Key To Success For Leader – Jump Off The Management Water Slide Ride
As a professional speaker, I speak on leadership, organizational culture, and employee engagement at conferences for organizations across multiple sectors such as health care, transit, education, and more. One of my focuses is on finding, engaging, and retaining top talent by building a DREAM-to-DO culture.
When building a DREAM-to-DO culture, there are many leadership principles to keep in mind. Yet there is one key to leadership success that, if missing, zaps a leader's energy like nothing else. To use a Covey-ism, it's keeping first things first. In other words, it's making sure that leadership is primary and management is secondary.
Key to Success for Leadership
Keeping leadership primary and management secondary does not mean management is unimportant or unnecessary. Instead, it means that for management to accomplish what it is supposed to accomplish, leadership must come first. Put more bluntly, mission, vision, and direction must be committed to and followed before leaders can manage the specifics of implementation.
However, if an organization is careful, management can eventually crowd out leadership. When this happens, the focus begins to shift away from vision and direction towards administration and procedures. And before you know it, the efficiency of policies becomes primary, and the effectiveness of the mission becomes secondary. Even worse, leaders lose sight of the reasons they got involved in leadership in the first place: to make a positive difference in something significant.
Bottom line: a key to success for all leaders is learning how to jump off the management waterslide ride and recapture your passion and focus for leadership!
Jump Off the Waterslide Ride
Here's a video of me speaking at an education conference. The clip is 8:33 long, but I believe it's worth your time because it creatively demonstrates the importance of jumping off the management waterslide ride to recapture your passion and focus for leadership. Enjoy!
Want More?
Great leaders ask great questions — have you ever wondered why? Do great leaders intentionally develop the art of asking great questions because they know it’s an essential leadership skill, or do people who learn to ask great questions become great leaders? Honestly, the best leaders don’t get tangled up in this debate. They just know that asking great questions is a powerful leadership tool.
Additionally, great leaders ask surprising questions. They might start with shallow questions, but they don’t stay there. They wade into asking deep questions that often make team members uncomfortable, at least at first.
In this FREE RESOURCE, learn seven surprising questions great leaders ask, and the more they ask them, the better both the leader and the team become.