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Posts Tagged ‘great leaders’

They Do Not Hear You, Make Them – By @Lymoon

26 Mar

via Jeroen van Oostrom/freedigitalphotos.net

Hello all, a new post by a new guest is coming your way. Today we have @Lymoon (lemon in English). You may know him from his always smart and funny Twitter account. @Lymoon is a dear friend of mine and a man with quite an experience in the fields of engineering and management.

In this remarkable post he is talking about a skill we all need, on professional and personal levels alike, he is talking about how to ‘listen’ … truly listen!

I am sure you will enjoy this post, and hey, if life gives you @Lymoon, you better read his post carefully :)

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Does the guy in front of you keep talking! Repeating himself/herself over and over again! You think he/she is stupid! Well, it’s a possibility, but most probably they didn’t feel that they have been listened to. That is why I wanted to talk to you about empathic listening. Empathic listening will help you with the employees you supervise, your boss, your talkative friends, and even with your wife.

Empathic listening is conveying the message to whomever talking to you that you actually heard them, you already paid attention to what they were saying. It is simple, just practice it, this is what you have to do:

  1. First let them speak about the situation.
  2. Identify their feelings.
  3. When they are done (yeah I mean don’t interrupt), reframe what they said stating their feelings.

Ok ok here are some examples:

  • Sentence: I am fed up with my work - Empathic: So, you are upset because things have changed at work.
  • Sentence: I am so not going out in this streets of Jeddah - Empathic: You feel angry when people do not drive in an organized manner.
  • Sentence: I felt so alive after the seminar I gave - Empathic: you felt valued and satisfied because the seminar added value to many people.

Yep it is that simple. To make it easier for engineers (my beloved geek universe savers) here it is in a formula:

Sentence = “You feel” + F + “because” + S + A

F: feeling; angry, upset, energetic, happy, …

S: subject; work, traffic, spouse, boss, sister, …

A: action done by subject; environment changed, not organized, ignores you, satisfies you, respect you, …

However, I have to warn you about the don’ts: do not be JUDGMENTAL and do not ask questions, just repeat. It might go like this: oh you lose your temper in the traffic! Then, of course you start unsolicited advice; control yourself man!

One more thing, empathic listening is really hard when you are under attack. The fight-and-flight mode kicks in and you start defending yourself, if not attacking back. At this situation my advice is to remember that it is about the speaker not about you and focus on the process (listen, repeat with feelings). Basically, shift your focus from defending yourself to thinking of how to reframe what you’ve heard. For example, attacking wife: you don’t know how to plan your drive! Empathic husband: it upset you that I got you lost on the way, which will make you late for your friend’s party. How sweet is that :”)

Steven Covey pointed that out in his book of the seven habits; seek first to understand then to be understood. Empathize with others first then they will listen to you.

Finally, this is just an appetizer, more ways can be found on the web, knock yourself out with these references:

http://www.franklincovey.com/blog/empathic-listening-tips.html

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/5-tips-for-empathetic-listening.html

http://www.empathymagic.com/images/downloads/Empathic%20Listening%200061.pdf

*Image source

 
5 Comments

Posted in Leadership

 

Buying Time – By Hanan Al Ghamdi

03 Mar

Via: freedigitalphotos.net/jscreationzs

Hello everyone; I am brining you a guest today. I am delighted to share with you this post written by Hanan Al Ghamdi (@HananAlGamdi) about ‘Buying Time.’ Have you ever seen managers complaining about how their schedules are full and how they cannot find time; Hanan seems to have a solution!

Coming from an economical background, Hanan is adding value to the national economy by working in the private sector (as she likes to say). Her dream is to be the ‘Minister of Planning’ … one day …

Enjoy the post …

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Coaching in business is a quite recent topic. While we might read theories telling us that ‘coaching’ is a very effective leader skill, yet when it comes to implementation, a lot of managers would feel hesitant coaching their staff.

It can be clearly seen in such a “rising professionals labor market” like the one we have in Saudi. The pioneering corporations that are willing to develop their staff are still few compared to small businesses that are usually doing their best to recruit individuals with high-quality experience, and usually, from those pioneer companies.

This managers’ behavior could be explained by their fear of loosing their qualified employees and/or of being replaceable by their own staff. If they were smart enough, they must have read somewhere in one of those business publications that great leaders are best described as ‘replaceable’; those are the ones who their teams wouldn’t fall apart and go astray once the time comes and they leave work.

Only smart companies realize that coaching people will benefit them on the long run because it would give them the chance to truly explore their staff abilities.

As per http://www.businessballs.com

Coaching  is “not concerned with delivery and specilaised training – it focuses on enablement and reflection, so that the individual decides and discovers their required progression themselves.” For me, I’ve always believed that the turning point to maturity comes when individuals start to better understand themselves . And as long as business concerned, maturity is a necessary factor.If you come to think of it, work on a managerial level is more about monitoring and planning rather than doing the work itself.

if time was being sold in units, then coaching manager can buy more and more units from others’ free time. At end of the day, this exchange will benefit both parties; the coach would have more units to invest in planning and monitoring while the staff would be motivated by taking more responsibilities and authorization in return.

So are you interested in buying more time units in your hectic schedule?!

*Image Source

 
5 Comments

Posted in Human Resources, Leadership

 

That is what Great Leaders Do

01 Oct

Image: Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I am taking some kind of a managerial training these days and the instructor just reminded me of a lesson I learned during my master studies. What is the one feature that almost all great leaders throughout history have in common?

You will be surprised that although it is a well known ‘feature,’ it is rarely found in most of work environments; Maybe that’s why extraordinary leaders are scarce!

Simply put; Great leaders are redundant! Yes … you read right; great leaders are replaceable!

They are redundant because they usually invest a lot of time and efforts in developing the second line of leaders, they know how to delegate and inspire, they have created a culture that is deeply rooted in their organizations, a culture that is reflected in the performance of their subordinates. If these leaders are not present for any reason or even if they decide to step down and give the chance to a new talent, the work they are attending to never stops, they have everything in place, everything covered.

Now compare that to the other kind of managers, the common kind, the ones who their lives revolve around power and authority, the ones who build blocks and blocks of secrecy between themselves and their subordinates in the name of ‘for the eyes of senior managers only’ and ‘sensitive strategical information’! Such kind of managers fear delegation; it means losing part of their importance to their own subordinates and that’s just hurt their ego. They like the feel of being needed and that their signature is on each and every paper getting out from under the hands of their teams!

Do you think it is easy to be a great leader?

* Image Source

 
2 Comments

Posted in Leadership

 

From Professors to Leaders

07 Mar

The newly appointed Prime Minister of Egypt, Dr. Essam Sharaf, if a man of academia, he spent most of his career between University halls and corridors educating students about civil engineering. Also, the mayor of Jeddah, Dr. Hani Abu Ras, does not have much of a career out of the Industrial engineering department of King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah.

Now, the questions is, does the academic degree or being a professor at a university necessarily make a good manager or a leader or a politician for that matter?

I am afraid my answer to this question is a big-fat-NO!!

I am not trying to imply that the above examples make no good leaders or anything; actually, the first is still a brand new PM, and the second … mmm … let’s give him a chance (just for the records, I am not optimistic about this one although I wish I will be proven wrong).

My argument is that both fields require different set of skills. Between the University halls you should be spending most of your time updating your information, throwing yourself into researches, assisting students to become major players in their fields of study. While on the other hand, leaders spend most of their time thinking, communicating, and inspiring others. Definitely, there are some lines crossing the two fields, but still, the mechanics are totally different. This does not mean that a good professor cannot make a good leader, a poor preforming professor could be a good leader!! got my point, they are not related to each other!!

However, in the Arab world, such argument is mostly not considered. There is a strange belief that the best leaders are those coming from Universities; dig up the history of most ministers in the Arab world and those in important public positions to get a sense of what I am talking about. It seems that because we do not have R&D centers, where highly educated people should be exhausting their talents in, our PhD holders are competing for public posts!!

We just care about educating people, but I am not sure about creating leaders out of them!!

What do you think?

 
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Posted in Leadership

 

True Leaders and Clowns

01 Sep

Days are passing by and the end of the year is around the corner. For a lot of companies and a lot of managers, these three last months of the year are so critical. It is time to revise plans, goals, budgets, and not to forget, performance appraisals are just around the corner.

In such heated situations, there are two types of leaders that you may encounter, or might be yourself:

  • True Leaders: Those who already have well crafted planes and smart objectives earlier that year. A lot of their goals have been accomplished or about to be completed. However, they might face some missed targets and deadlines here or there. In such situations, they calmly and logically sit to restudy the situation, and ask themselves and their team members a lot of why’s and how’s. They turn obstacles into opportunities and failures into lessons learned.
  • Clowns: Those who built their plans on vague inputs, poor data, and sometimes pure dreams!! Most of their goals are missed, if not all. But nothing will stop them from raising their voices and pointing their fingers on everybody around them, even their own team members. Whenever around one of those, you will start witnessing a lot of fightings during meetings, a lot of heated emails, and a lot of passing the ball theory practices!

Look around you and check; which type of managers are you pumping into more often?

 
6 Comments

Posted in General Management, Leadership

 

The Golden Question

01 Aug

For any business owner or leader out there; the moment of truth kinda of question could be the following one asked by Jim Collins (according to this HBR blog post):

If your company went out of business tomorrow, would anybody really miss it and why?

Although it’s a simple question, its answer contains the essence of the organization, its soul, and its whole purpose of being alive and competing in the market. If a leader or a number of executives failed to answer such question, then there must be something wrong!

There are some interesting points the blog post is referring to in case a leader wants to know why his/her company should be missed. But let’s look at it from the other way around. Let’s see it through the eyes of you; the customer. Think for a moment of a company that you will be really missing if you heard now that it will be a history starting from tomorrow, and why would you miss it?

If you honestly answer this question, your answers will be almost the same as those mentioned in the HBR post, the answers that every business leaders should be aspiring to and working on having in his/her company.

Allow me to be the first to start … These are my choices:

  • Starbucks: This is by far my most favorite brand in the world. You could even say that I am emotionally connected to it. Noting that I am neither a heavy coffee drinker nor someone who spend a lot of times in coffee shops. But I admire it because I feel that they care. They care about the quality of their products and the quality of the services they are providing.
  • Sony: The Japanese electronic manufacturer will be my second choice. I trust whatever products they’re producing. Whenever I see Sony, I see high quality.
  • P&G: Proctor & Gamble, the known FMCG manufacturer. There are no choices whenever that one of the products to be choosing from carries this company name. They have a vast range of brands under P&G, and they are all my first choices especially in Health & Well being and Household care categories.

Now, what are your favorite brands and why?

 
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Posted in Branding, General Management, Leadership

 

There is No One Answer

13 Mar

What is really interesting about management, and social sciences in general, is that they do not believe in one and unique answer. For each and every topic, there is a number of theories and point of views that sometimes come to be as contradicting to each other as it can be. There is no equations that should be balanced, but there are interests that should be maintained and situations that should be studied. And if you come to think of it, unless you are talking about mathematics or physics, this is life in general, there is rarely a one answer.

For that, if you are a manager and you, somehow, think that you possesses the answer to every problem. And if you, for some reason, think you can force everybody to follow your brilliant ideas, then you better leave your managerial chair because you do not deserve it.

And if you, by any chance, hold one of those master or PhD degrees (MBA included!!), and you do not know how to engage in a scientific debate and you do not believe in others’s right to have their own opinions about a certain subject, no matter how strongly you believe in your own point of view, you better burn that piece of paper you hang on the wall because it does not mean a thing.

Now, the above concept of being open to different ideas and point of views is a vital corner of answering this important question; why we do not have a number of great leaders? In a matter of fact, it is one of the major problems we have as a whole society.

 
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Posted in General Management, Saudi business