I want to share a leadership story with you. This was a moment in time where I think
something got through my thick skull.
How do people really change?
I had become a sales manager and realized that the skill set
required to be a successful Sales Manager was different than the skill set required
for a sales person. You still had to be
results driven but you had to do this through other people. I’m sure many other people have gone through
this experience as anyone would, moving into a management and leadership type
role. The owner of the company said that
my management skills and knowing how to move the business forward were solid; I
just needed to add those leadership skills that would help us move everyone
forward. Our jobs as doers change
drastically when we are expected to serve others.
I decided to take a Dale Carnegie program called Leadership
Training for Managers. I quickly learned
about myself and what skills I was going to need to improve on to be a
successful leader. I can’t say that I’ve
mastered any of these skills, but we continue to learn and become better at
what we do. I realized that my style was
not about relationships but more about doing and getting things done. To become a better leader I needed to understand
that my job was to find out what was important to those I lead, what motivated
them, how I could inspire them to do more, be more and ultimately help them get
what they wanted. In business we exist
to serve our customers and as a leader we exist to serve our customers, our
internal customers and the people we lead.
In my opinion this is what today’s leadership lacks, the serve others mentality, this is why our
job as a leader exists. Leadership is
not about power or authority; it’s about influence and what we can do to help
the people we lead get what they want.
As Zig Ziglar once said, “The more time we spend helping others get what
they want our success will follow.” Not
the exact quote but I think you get the message. This is what leadership is about, it’s not
about you, it’s all about the people we lead.
So as leaders, how do we get engagement, how do we inspire
others, how do we get our teams working at a higher level? Simple, as leaders we need to know our people
at a deeper level, we need to know what is important to them and we need to get
them involved in bringing their ideas forward.
We had a person in a Dale Carnegie course that called me
half way through the program that said, even though I did a good job of selling
him into the program he didn’t think that it was the right fit for him. He wanted a program about leadership. I suggested to him that the bulk of the
leadership components of the program were later on and that if he continued to
work hard in the program and he felt the same way once the program was
completed we would have another conversation.
We never had that conversation, in fact, this person was so happy with
the results he decided to come back and join us in the program as an assistant
coach!
His realization was that he wasn’t listening to the people
he was leading. He was giving orders and
telling people what to do. Once he
stopped giving orders, started asking questions he quickly realized how the
culture with his team changed. People
started coming to him with ideas, they were more engaged, they put more effort
into what they were doing. The results
were amazing; their warehouse efficiency rating improved tremendously saving
the company thousands of dollars.
Leadership involves a mentality that how we do things are
usually more important than what we do.
This was my aha moment and it has lead me down this path with Dale
Carnegie. I’m a better person for it and
I thank those that have helped me along the way.
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