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Master Your Game: Leveraging "Who" and "How"

Guest post by: Jacque Small

Article Overview: As a leader, you will turbo charge your organization when you shift from a narrow focus on processes and results (what you are doing and the results you need to achieve) to transforming the players in your team (who you need to execute these processes). Leaders with great communication skills have the power to shift people's self-perception and improve their potential. When you understand who your people are and are able to assist them to be brilliant in how they undertake the business processes, success will follow.

Master Your Game: Leveraging "Who" and "How"

As a leader, you will turbo charge your organization when you shift from a narrow focus on processes and results (what you are doing and the results you need to achieve) to transforming the players in your team (who you need to execute these processes). Leaders with great communication skills have the power to shift people's self-perception and improve their potential. When you understand who your people are and are able to assist them to be brilliant in how they undertake the business processes, success will follow.


Current Practices

Current wisdom and management practices have us almost exclusively focusing on strategy, tactics and business goals - the "what." Many hours are spent in management meetings discussing the what with very little time spent on the who - the people needed to ensure success. In today's ever changing, competitive world of escalating goals, we need to spend more time focusing on the latter.
Jim Collins in Good to Great states that the foremost focus of leadership in great companies is on who not what. By focusing on who, you can determine if you have the right people and if they are in the right positions. Collins also notes that the effectiveness of our people at implementing processes is impacted by not only what they know, but by how they approach new challenges.


The Shift Required

To exceed our goals, we have to be better at how we execute the processes that will allow us to achieve these goals. That means either the processes have to change, or our thinking needs to shift in order to improve our process performance, or both.
If a standard goal for you is to sell 1,000 units and all of a sudden you are challenged to sell 10,000 units, how will you and your team respond? If someone believes that reaching the goal is impossible, then that someone will be right and it will be impossible. However, with good leadership and communications skills you will have an opportunity to coach people and shift their thinking to overcome their personal barriers.

To succeed, you need people who can approach the challenge with big thinking mentality. You need creative thinkers who will tap into all the resources at their disposal in order to come up with new approaches. You need people willing to embrace new ideas, use others as sounding boards and do what has previously not been thought of - people who can envision many options, and to whom the idea of selling 10,000 units is within their realm of possibilities.


Your Role as Leader

Great leaders and managers understand that they need to support and challenge their people. It is necessary to manage and connect with each person as an individual and to understand what inspires and/or holds them back.
To understand who our people are, we need to know:

• what success looks like for them
• what they are passionate about
• what they love to do
• what they fear doing
• whether they have a fear of success
• whether they have a fear of making mistakes
• whether they fear failure
• whether they are uncomfortable when others know more than them
• whether they avoid certain interactions because they don't have all the answers

Because how we approach something is dependent upon several things, including the way we think, our frame of reference, our fears and beliefs; one or more of the above may be hindering you or your people from being brilliant and reaching your goals. By understanding who you are, you can enhance your communications with your people and build a better understanding of what inspires them as individuals. Coaching will assist you to enhance your communication skills and shift your leadership style.

Next month, I will discuss how to support a shift in behaviour in your people by using a simple performance development system.

Success in Leveraging "Who",

Jacque Small

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Article Tags: business processes, clarity, communication skills, focus, vision



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