Leadership Reckoning - Tough Love!

Our Management Training Workshops

By introducing our Management Training workshops to your staff we help ease the negative effect of change on both managerial and supervisory personnel. The change in job responsibilities, the change in personnel, job duties, and the rising challenge of developing subordinates are specific goals of our learning systems workshops. We are highly successful at helping Managers and Supervisors learn and adapt to the necessary skills and proper behaviors to be successful at work as well as in their personal lives.

For more information on our management training workshops please contact us.

As a part of our management training workshops, Managers and Supervisors will learn how to:

• Minimize the chance of miscommunication by understanding what people are really saying, and why
• Deal with difficult people, manage tense situations, and resolve conflict
• Make use of proven active listening skills to improve your ability to gain helpful information
• Be able to facilitate, guide, and close discussions in one-on-one or group settings
• Improve understanding and communication by giving and receiving good feedback
• Use ideas submitted by a member of the team without causing other members to be defensive
• Develop a comprehensive team building strategy that improves productivity of the whole team
• Emphasize the value of working toward common goals without devaluing individual accomplishment
• Define and set up a method to track staff activities
• Be able to manage time and work assignments effectively
• Conduct team meetings that capture and hold the audience’s attention
• Interview and hire the right person for the right job
• Save time and work more effectively through the use of a clear time management plan
• Understand and comply with proper hiring and managing requirements
• Communicate effectively with both superiors, peers and subordinates
• Become effective coaches for their work team
• Conduct accurate and difficult performance appraisals

 

Over the last two years we have experienced many disappointments and betrayals by those in whom we placed our trust. To solve any major problem, we must always seek root issues. Rather than a crisis in ethics, the seeming collapse of our leadership may have been a symptom of a succession system that was broken on many levels.

What Went Wrong?

Perhaps you too have noticed a growing sense of entitlement, as well as an increasing impatience with career and salary progression among our workforce. In fact, the issue seems to be a cultural issue. As with so many things, the problem may start and end with Leadership.

Just as a parent must make decisions for the long term good of the child, our leaders must do the same. When a parent slips into trying to keep things peaceful, he or she soon pays a price in the escalating demands of the child. We may all be paying the price for trying to avoid any discomfort or pain as we rearrange our priorities.

Many of today's leaders were bright, competent individuals who expected to continue their advance at the same rate they had experienced as younger employees. Unfortunately, the math does not work. There are fewer jobs at the higher levels. So what happened?

If these young and talented people did not move forward in a time frame they deemed acceptable, they often used their disappointment as a reason to move on, peddling and often inflating their credentials for the rank they desired.

When they got what they wanted, as they often did, they were frequently unready for their assignment. Rarely did they see their performance issues as related to their own lack of preparation for their responsibility. Instead, as the pressure increased, they would seek the next assignment. The economy seemed to support them in their quest for more title, more power, and greater incentives.

Why would unseasoned and untested young people continue moving up the food chain when they were not really ready? It was too easy to do. HR departments were faced with losing their talent or keeping up with this demanding group of individuals and their expectations. Our organizations were confronted with either creating the roles, titles, and compensation packages as a means to keep their employees engaged, or losing them to companies who were willing to do so.

Instead of learning how to make difficult decisions that might make them look bad in the short term, many of our leaders became masters of creating the illusion of success. They created more and more complicated business models which allowed them to continue impressing their audiences. Unfortunately, they had to run faster and faster in order to outrun the inevitable recognition that they were building a house of cards.

It is too simple to blame our leaders. Too many of us have participated in the evolution of "illusion" as a business practice, if not a way of life. If someone dared to tell the truth, they were punished by a system that did not know how to handle tough or unsavory outcomes.

What We Are Facing!

There are many would-be leaders who continue to think of themselves as the elite. Even as they refuse to accept the responsibility that comes with all of the perks, many have become frozen in indecisiveness and control freak tendencies that reflect their lack of maturity. Others persist in perpetuating the illusions of success with even more complicated and unstable business practices.

Who will "take on" these people who make our overall situation more and more fragile?

We all must do so. To develop seasoned, modest, and courageous leaders from a group of entitled, spoiled bureaucrats who have learned to shut out negative feedback takes serious intent, sophisticated skills, and audacity. It can not be overstated how difficult the intervention will be and how necessary it is.

Leadership is not an intellectual exercise. It is a kind of wisdom and courage under adversity. If we are to create better leaders for the future, we must take on the current leaders and find the right processes and choices to cultivate the "up and comers". We must find a way to stop rewarding infantile narcissism in those to whom we are giving huge rewards. Our new leaders must be tough, patient, humble and wise. Anyone who is not should be confronted, and removed if they are incapable of growth.

Given a fragile infrastructure, we must prepare our leaders with the same diligence that our Special Forces prepare for combat. Learning to be "tough" is not easy. Learning to bear up under hardship, to confront those who demand stupid choices in order to preserve their personal illusion, to be patient when the rewards are uncertain are all qualities that must be taught and nurtured. Standing up to spoiled, entitled leaders will be our worst nightmare. But, it must be done.

We have no choice. If we do not learn how to do "tough love" on ourselves and each other, the economy will continue to do so.