January | 2010 | Leadership Lessons

Browsing All Posts published on »January, 2010«

Strengths Based Leadership by Tom Rath and Barry Cochie

January 27, 2010

After extensive research involving over 40,000 interviews with leaders, 20,000 interviews with followers and over a million surveys of work teams, Tom Rath and Barry Cochie uncovers the secrets which make effective leaders effective. Key revelations of this extensive research show that: 1. The most effective leaders are always investing in strengths. Contrary to common […]

Delegation Gone Wrong

January 25, 2010

Many leaders and managers often fall into the trap of shrieking responsibility in their attempt to delegate their tasks to the team. Magnus, an operations manager in an IT firm, was tasked to draft out the car parking and traffic plan for the company’s upcoming 30th anniversary celebration. He was given three weeks to prepare […]

Making the Right Decisions

January 22, 2010

Some of us find it easy to make decisions while others tend to procrastinate a lot when it comes to making decisions – particularly if they are important ones that could alter the pathway of our life. When making decisions in life changing situations it can be hard for everyone, after all the choice you […]

Delegating Effectively

January 20, 2010

The art of delegation does not always come naturally to all leaders or managers. While some leaders may effectively assign and allocate sub tasks to his team members, others experience difficulty in grappling with the subtleties of the skill, such as maintaining control over the process, or avoiding the crossing of the line between delegating […]

Winston Churchill's Valuable Life Lessons

January 18, 2010

Winston Churchill is probably no stranger to anyone. He was an inspirational British leader during the Second World War, a noted statesman, officer, historian, writer and artist and the only British Prime Minister to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Throughout history and even today, Winston Churchill is often quoted for his words of wisdom […]

Proactivity and Leadership

January 15, 2010

In my many years of leadership experience, what I have discovered is that a key factor that instantly differentiates an effective leader and a mediocre one is proactivity. In his book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, Steven Covey describes proactivity to be having the initiative to actively take massive action, and emphasises its […]

Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lecioni

January 13, 2010

Ever been in a team or headed a team which seemed to epitomise the very meaning of corporate politics? Chances are that you probably have. Corporate politics represents a culture of a team which just fails to achieve synergy, where behaviours commonly known as ‘backstabbing’ and ‘badmouthing’ are prevalent. The team could possibly contain many […]

7 Great Ways To Supercharge Your New Year’s Resolutions

January 9, 2010

Let’s face it folks. We’ve all made dozens of New Year’s Resolutions that we haven’t followed through with. But this is the year of redemption for all those forgotten promises. It’s that time of year again, time to turn over a new leaf and live life to it’s fullest. It’s time to resolve to lose […]

Standards Part 4- Enforcing Standards

January 7, 2010

So far, we have discussed how we can set standards, gain agreement in them, and achieve clarity in them. The final step towards having effective standards would naturally be to enforce them. In this final issue, we shall discover how we can enforce the standards we set so as to create an effective framework and […]

Standards Part 3- Clarifying Standards

January 5, 2010

It may sound absurd if I tell you that despite our certainty that our teams know the standards we expect of them, some of the members would still be unclear or confused. Many of us may have found ourselves to have experienced falling into a pitfall where we assumed that the team knew what we […]