3 Payoffs of "No-Excuses" Leadership

Too many leaders are quick to make excuses for why their companies aren’t performing to expectations by blaming others or circumstances outside themselves when things don’t go as planned.  However, if you are a true leader, you make no excuses and accept the responsibility for the results you get. By honing your own ability to lead, you will experience three payoffs that lead to success:

Payoff #1: You Know Yourself. As a leader, you have a life-sized laboratory or playground for exploring who you are, what you really want in life, and what you do to get what you want. As you become a more intentional leader, you shift to more deliberate, conscious choices and see more alignment between your intentions and impact. With this level of intentionality, you get the results you intended and don’t make excuses for the results you get.

Feedback is a primary way to get you to a place where you know yourself better, whether this feedback comes from assessments, other people, or the results you get from your actions. The trick is to be able to reflect on this feedback and to integrate it with your experiences. This allows you to know yourself better, which puts you well on your way to becoming a no-excuses leader.

Payoff #2: Align Your Business. Once you are more deliberate in the personal impact you intend, it follows that you would create that same alignment in your business. This alignment is about using your company’s intention (its mission, vision, goals, and values) to craft plans, procedures, processes, and systems that guide your employees to “walk the talk” regularly.

Creating and using a living, breathing strategic plan and current company goals, you and your leadership team ensure that daily work aligns with the company’s most important priorities. Every action taken, every promise made and acted upon reflects what you intended and wrote in the mission statement, your vision statement, and the strategic plan. You cultivate this same alignment with individual employees and teams throughout the company. With the business aligned, you decrease the need to make excuses for the outcomes you get.

Payoff #3: Express Yourself Clearly and Powerfully. The final payoff as a no-excuses leader is clear and powerful communication.  To achieve this, you see communication as a powerful, unifying process throughout your company. You check your own actions and words as well as your company’s systems to ensure the important communications employees need to hear are sent without mixed messages.

As a no-excuses leader you use a mix of stories, facts, and images to engage employees’ hearts and minds. You also learn to use influence more often than coercion to get stakeholders to join with you to accomplish you most important goals.

Socrates is attributed with saying, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Are you ready to examine your leadership to become a no-excuses leader?

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Beth Strathman works with leaders who are willing and courageous enough to shake up business as usual by understanding themselves, aligning their businesses, and expressing ideas clearly. Learn more about her company Firebrand Consulting LLC at: firebrandconsultingllc.com.

6 Behaviors That Move You from "Pretender" to "Leader"

It’s very easy to go along, get along, with the fear that if you really showed others who you are and what you really believed about your company’s current strategy and tactics, others would question your loyalty or competence. To be grounded and sure of yourself, however, you need to be authentic about who you are. Here are six behaviors that will move you from being an inauthentic “pretender” to a true leader:

Know Your Motives for Leading. There are many reasons for taking on a leadership position. What are yours? Reflect on the underlying fears and/or aspirations that drove you to accept a leadership role. Look at how these underlying (and even hidden) motivations have shaped the difference you strive to make as a leader. Being aware of your personal leadership “why” will serve as a compass to guide you when the going gets tough.

Give Constructive Feedback. Without being a jerk, a true leader is expected to give feedback that serves the good of the company by providing opportunities to improve. At times, however, you might find yourself withholding constructive feedback from a colleague or direct report simply to avoid an uncomfortable situation. Remember: there is no movement without friction. Go back to your leadership “why” and see whether remaining silent serves the company and everyone else involved.

Engage in Disagreement. As with giving feedback, you may be able to help resolve an issue but are avoiding it. If you find yourself avoiding a situation, examine your reasons for steering clear of the potential conflict. If you determine the avoidance isn’t serving you or the company in the long run, determine the most appropriate and respectful way to address it. Also help co-workers and team members who don’t work well together move through past issues or conflicts.

Share an Alternate Opinion. A true leader speaks up when concerned about the direction the company is going. When you think it’s heading in the wrong direction, you must express your point of view as effectively as possible. Whether or not, the company alters its path based on your opinion is not the point. It’s the fact that you didn’t act like a sheep and spoke up when you believed it was warranted.

Bolster Professional Relationships with Authenticity. The higher up the corporate ladder you are, the more important building and maintaining relationships becomes. Often relationships are weak because you have not been open and honest about the way the relationship is working (more conflict avoidance). Find ways to strengthen those relationships by revealing your real assumptions and beliefs about important issues that come up.

Amplify Misaligned Mission and Company Action. When your company doesn’t walk its collective talk about its mission and values, weigh the cost of going along, rather than highlighting the disconnects. Determine what you can do to encourage your company to bring its “walk” and “talk” into alignment.

You’re a “leader” not an “avoider”. Stop pretending to agree and step forward into the uncomfortable space where motives, thoughts, and opinions differ. Lead out to acknowledge and resolve issues for the good of your company.

WANT TO USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR NEWSLETTER, BLOG OR WEBSITE?

You can, as long as you include this information with it:

Beth Strathman works with leaders who are willing and courageous enough to shake up business as usual by understanding themselves, aligning their businesses, and expressing ideas clearly. Learn more about her company Firebrand Consulting LLC at: firebrandconsultingllc.com.

What to Do When Someone Speaks Their Truth to Your Power

Speaking truth to power is something Americans believe in whole-heartedly. We love historical examples of the Founding Fathers sending a message to King George and of reformers like Martin Luther King, Jr., standing up to leaders in cities, counties, states, and in Washington, D.C. Americans revel in the stories of investigative journalists and whistleblowers who uncover the hidden misdeeds of corporations and governments.

However, what do you do when you are the person in power on the receiving end of someone else’s truth? It’s not easy to hear a customer, employee or board member’s negative opinion of a decision you made or an action you took. However, you are not an absolute ruler. With leadership comes the responsibility to account for your decisions and actions and to deepen relationships by being trustworthy.

With that, here are some things to keep in mind for times when someone speaks their truth to your power:

1.    Put your ego aside. Most of your actions and decisions aren’t about you personally anyway; they are or should be done for the good of your organization.  For this reason avoid getting defensive because you took criticism personally. Sometimes, another’s critique is more about himself than it is about the action you took. One way to avoid getting defensive is to . . .

2.    Listen for commitment. Be respectful, humble and vulnerable enough to hold the space for the other person to say what they have to say.  And as they speak, give them the benefit of the doubt by listening for what positive principles or values they are committed to in the end. By focusing intently for the core idea the other is communicating to you, it’s very possible you will be able to identify common ground.

3.    As an on-going process, consider creating the position of “fool” or “devil’s advocate”. Those who report to you know where their bread is buttered. This can create a situation where they don’t speak up when they smell a rat for fear of losing your favor or their jobs. It is interesting that many native cultures have the role of the sacred clown, and in medieval times, the royal courts had court jesters or fools. It was their job to entertain and to enforce the rules of the group by highlighting what was proper and what was not, even by sometimes poking fun at others, including a King or Queen. 

Alternatively, you can invite an outside observer, like a coach or consultant, to get a bead on the inconsistencies others notice but don’t voice aloud.

4.    Create a process that allows observations to move from the front line to leadership levels. Front line employees are often the first to see the disconnect between the company’s “walk” and its “talk”. A process that allows issues and opinions to bubble up and to be addressed could be as general as a survey, or it could include periodic forums where employees interface with leadership to discuss the impact leadership decisions make in practical terms.

Hearing the “truth” that someone else is living need not feel like an attack. Instead, it can be a great opportunity to find out how your intentions are translating into others’ reality.


WANT TO USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR NEWSLETTER, BLOG OR WEBSITE?
You can, as long as you include this information with it:

Beth Strathman works with executives who are willing and courageous enough to shake up business as usual. Learn more about her company Firebrand Consulting LLC at: bethstrathman.com.