Tag Archive for 'leadership'

Steve Farber on Leadership that is Greater Than Yourself

Published on April 18, 2011 in Business. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Greater Than Onephoto © 2009 Brent Linden | more info (via: Wylio)To Steve Farber, author of Greater Than Yourself, the best leaders set themselves apart by nurturing the leadership potential in  their employees because work place success is not a zero sum game.  Empowering and building up your team does not necessarily short you. Last Tuesday, Farber shared insights from his research into great workplace culture and leadership on a G5 Leadership webinar.

Striving to maximize the potential of your peers and reports also helps you put the golden rule — do unto others as you’ have done unto you — in play. People are programmed to help those around them when culture permits.  Per a survey on sharing, the primary reason to do so is “to help that person because he or she would benefit from it”.

With those sentiments in mind, Farber offered 3 basic steps to cultivate your own and staff leadership potential.

1) Expand yourself.

Complete annual or semi-annual personal inventories to ensure you are developing and strengthening the value and skills you bring to a company, client or reports.   That self-review should include everything from innate and learned skills to the belief and value systems that shape you, as well as life altering experiences that have altered your perspective.

From conferences to books to mentoring, there are countless ways to build up your talents, even if you’re a seasoned pro.   That inventory should lengthen over time.

2) Give of yourself fully with no strings attached.

Share the resources at your disposal with no expectation of tit for tat.  It increases the odds people will take the opportunity to apply what’s available or build on it to do something amazing.  You can be the leader that made it possible or a valuable team player in this scenario.

Incidentally, a friend often reminds me to avoid any expectation of reciprocity because you never know how the energy you put out into the world will return to you.  Helping a  co-worker today could shift energy that allows you to connect with the person who will sponsor your job jump to better and bigger things tomorrow.

3) Replicate yourself.

The only way this process can continue is if all participants choose to pay it forward.  While you can seed growth and optimal performance in a handful of people on your own, the ripple effect as the people you impact repeat the process on others around you can transform a workplace culture or change the world.

I’m of the opinion that this type of mentoring isn’t limited to the upper echelons of management.  At every tier of the corporate ladder you can spark the magic in someone.

For information on upcoming G5 webinars, check out their event calendar.  They offer several 90-minute, online classes each month taught by best-selling business authors who’ve set their sights on enhancing your soft skills.  For $129 per year, you can have access to their complete roster of trainings plus workbooks, slide decks and recordings for review at a later date.

 

Social networking makes professional women more competitive

Published on January 1, 2009 in Business. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

network

graphic by jared

I’ve been thinking about the background research on that McKinsey study of Model Centered Leadership.  Particularly the brief mention about how

men tend to build broader, shallower networks than women do and that the networks of men give them a wider range of resources for gaining knowledge and professional opportunities.

Given the very long arm of social networks, it seems as though the internet is helping to level the networking playing field for professional women.  Women are definitely engaging online; for instance, 55% of FaceBook users are female.

How do the two relate?  I read status updates on a regular basis indicating my friends and acquaintances are connecting with elementary school friends, long last college hall mates, former professors, etc.

Ten years ago, you had no way of keeping track of hundreds of tangential connections that you hold face or name recognition with, but little more.  Now you can connect online with just about every person you meet in real time. . . not that you’d want to.

When you’re looking for a new job or a new house or a new boyfriend, your circle of connections has grown that much larger when you connect with people you liked from past chapters of your life, people you’d otherwise have lost touched with, if not for social networking.

Isn’t social networking allowing us all to build broad, shallow networks of acquaintances we can reach out to as needed?  This natural evolution of the internet seems to be giving women the tools to be as competitive as men when it comes to networking.

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Video of Day: Arianna Huffington on Life

Published on July 11, 2008 in Useful Stuff. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

I wish I could post the video here, but WordPress makes it really difficult to post non-YouTube stuff.

Click through to listen to Arianna Huffington’s 23-minute talk on work-life balance, self-doubt, relationships and giving back, given at the 2008 WEB Women in Business? conference. It’s worth a listen.

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Gen Y is taking the lead, one niche at a time

Published on May 25, 2008 in Gen Y and Society. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

A few weeks ago Ryan Paugh at Brazen Careerist asked if Gen Y really wants to change the world because we seem to have an aversion to long term commitments and more public forms of activism that previous generations embraced.   I would counter that there are plenty of Millennials doing their part, but main stream media is so addicted to bad news, it gives sparse time to those individuals.  Additionally, since we’re such an individual-focused generation, we’ll have a harder time finding a single person who can represent us all.  We’re more likely to find heroes in our our niches.

Here are some recent news items about Millennials that had a very short tail in the media world.

Sure, the above Gen Yers are likely to be relatively ambitious to be doing the unthinkable and seemingly impossible.  
But imagine what our generation could do collectively if called to action. In 1961, JFK called on the American brain trust to get man to the moon within a decade and we did.  
Imagine if the next President called on us to develop clean energy, whether ocean water-powered cars or solar-powered heating and air conditioning units.  What could Gen X experience, combined with Gen Y optimism accomplish?

 

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Egging on the starfish

Published on October 21, 2007 in Books, Business, Entertainment, Gen Y and Useful Stuff. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

starfish

Business books tend to fall towards the bottom of the “to read list because they’re typically dry and common sensical to the point I ask why, oh why, did I buy this book? However, I just finished reading The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom this afternoon, and want to recommend it to everyone I know in the entertainment, telecommunications, and Internet arenas. It’s compulsively readable, and at 208 pages of text, easy to knock out in one afternoon.

Brafman and Beckstrom provide a great overview of the history of digital piracy and how it works into this model. Studios and networks function like spiders, while pirates and hackers come together and collectively act like starfish. Corporate entities tend to have a relatively rigid structure with layers of approval and multi-step processes to usher new products through R&D before the public gets to see them. Leadership is top down featuring upper management who keeps the worker bees in line. The piracy community, on the otherhand, doesn’t have an outspoken leader to target. Members of the web community (frequently anonymously) work together to launch better and better programs to keep P2P networks going despite the full on war against piracy by the studios and networks. Every time one site gets shut down two more spring up like mushrooms after the rain…or like a starfish that was cut in half. (If you’re not a big piracy nut, the authors also cover Al-Qaeda, Ebay, and manufacturing examples that are equally demonstrative of the principles and rules that they discuss.)

Their generalizations about starfish clearly apply to the very collaborative web community:

  • When attacked, a decentralized organization tends to become even more open and decentralized (p. 21)
  • An open system doesn’t have central intelligence, their intelligence is spread throughout the system (p.39-40)
  • Open systems can easily mutate (p. 40)
  • The decentralized organization sneaks up on you (p.41)
  • As industries become decentralized, overall profits decrease (p. 45)

Doesn’t piracy make for a delicious example of decentralized organizations? The music industry was the first in entertainment to face off against the amorphous starfish colony that commandeered digital distribution via sites like Napster and Kazaa. CD sales plumetted and even iTunes won’t save the record system from crumbling because artists are increasingly turning self-promotion and alternative partnerships to maximize their own cut of profits (For example, Radiohead is letting fans price their new release for themselves, and are finding fans are voluntarily paying typical retail prices. And Madonna signed a $120 Million, 10 year deal with LiveNation that covers album releases, merchandising, her tours, kicking longterm label Warner Music to the curb). Unsigned bands are able to make it into top 10 singles lists by generating a huge online following and taking advantage of services like DiscRevolt that don’t require much money up front from the artist. The recording companies just can’t compete with the way the Internet has opened distribution to all for low costs.

waves

Despite the writing on the wall, film and TV leadership didn’t take a proactive role in shaping internet distribution early on. They now fight the tidal wave of churning internet offerings that make it easy to produce and distribute, or pirate instead of pay for content. Sites like Metacafe and revver are paying content producers for videos that go viral to encourage the quality filmmaker to return again and again. Great videos like When Shift Happens 2.0 are going viral because they resonate with viewers who forward and forward the link on.

Web users upload copyrighted content to all sorts of websites that host video, so that all users can easily access what is believed to be a public good whether it’s a conventionally available TV program or movie or a hard to find classic that has yet to make it to DVD or has never been released in this country. The amorphous web community is tearing apart the standard model in order to bring products and services (that consumers are tired of waiting for in a format they want) to the people. And the networks and studios are freaking out because the writing is on the wall, they are set to experience the same innard wrenching the music industry is struggling with. Shutting down a site like Tv-Links.co.uk just sends users to more far flung sites to find the content they want. The film and television industries are destined for the same misery because like the music industry, they want to fight the change and solidly tether, rather than harness the energy reshaping distribution to build a better business model.

My suggestion: Rather than try to prosecute all the leaders of this tumultuous change, labels; studios and networks should be hiring them to take the charge and bring consumers the content how and when they want it (because they get consumers better than the people enmeshed in a dying entertainment business model who can’t see the trees for the forest). Hire strong digital leadership and trust them to develop and turn out a platform or partnerships without lots of meddling by senior brass.

Stepping off my soapbox now.

Women in Power

Published on October 2, 2007 in Business, Education and Money. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

42-16939352photo © 2008 gcoldironjr2003 | more info (via: Wylio)
Research firm Catalyst follows the trail of executive level female business leaders and the effects they have in the workplace. Recent studies have found women to be to be a vital component to executive management, so much so that there appears to be a link to a company’s fiscal success.

On average, companies with the highest percentages of women board directors outperformed those with the lowest; by 66% return on invested capital (ROI), 53% in return on equity (ROE) and 42% return on sales (ROS).

Companies with boards including at least three women evidently dominate in all three business measures of seven different sectors with the exception of “financial” and “materials.” (October 1, 2007, Forbes)

These findings should come of no surprise to anyone. In college the required reading for a health care management class I took included Why Are Some People Healthy and Others Not?: The Determinants of Health of Populations (Social Institutions and Social Change) (Social Institutions and Social Change).
Covering a number of studies, the authors concluded that the health of a society is directly correlated with the relative freedoms granted to women of that society.

It does beg the question, why did Catalyst find that only 14.7% of Fortune 500 boards make room for women as of 2006 (albeit, a decent increase over the 9.6% in 2005)? Perhaps the shortage of female senior management will see improvement as well in the near  and distant future.  Hopefully, we’ll see women reach parity at the executive and Board levels in the next few decades.

Women are now earning 58% of bachelor’s degrees and a matching share of graduate degrees

Today, women earn 67 percent of education doctorates, 26 percent of physical science degrees and 18 percent of engineering degrees, according to a federal survey. Women are also the majority of doctoral candidates in the social sciences, humanities, and, for the first time ever, in life sciences. (Grad Schools.com)

The pursuit of higher by women is outpacing that of men, which will increasingly bring women to the market who can track in the towards executive level careers.