The Day to Day Language of Leadership

Roger Payne

Being educated does not mean you will be a good team leader; in fact formal education has little to do with it. Competent team leaders are not born, they learn by making mistakes just like the rest of us, but they only make a specific mistake once. Some people quickly adapt to it, some slowly adjust and become reasonably competent, while others will never be able to do it; that is a reality of life. Julius Caesar was good at it, so was Genghis Khan and Saladin, yet they never did a course on team leading. Each learned early on that it is about offering the right rewards (motivation). They also understood that people don’t work for you; they work for their own ends, so you have to offer them rewards that will cause them do what you want them to do while making them think it’s what they want to do. There it is in a nutshell, and providing you use the correct methods you can crack open the shell. This book is a collection of leadership skills learned from dozens of practical team leaders. In many ways it is the perfect leader, yet in reality there is no such thing as the perfect leader because as individuals we all have weakness however good we might seem. So the answer is to pick what works for you. This book allows you to do just that. It is designed to be an easy to read team building nut-cracker that will open the shell of team building and leadership.

Sample

SETTING STANDARDS
Standards are the specific guidelines that identify the level of quality control that you require in your work practices and product. It is also a ‘code of conduct’ for the team. The best way to make sure tasks are done correctly is to set clear and precise standards and continually enforce them.

CHECKLIST

STANDARDS CAN RELATE TO ANY OF THE FOLLOWING:

(1) Product (value, quality or output).

(2) Work practices.

(3) Work place conditions.

(4) Team and team leader proficiency.

THE MOST EFFECTIVE WORK RELATED STANDARDS ARE:

(1) Realistic.

(2) Challenging.

(3) Specific.

(4) Achievable.

(5) Within a set time and strict guidelines

(6) Always enforced.

IF YOU ARE PROMOTED INTO A LEADERSHIP ROLE YOU MUST ALWAYS IDENTIFY THE EXISTING STANDARDS.

CAREFULLY EVALUATE THEM AND:

(1) If they are acceptable then keep them.

(2) If they are unacceptable, vague or non-existent, change them.

HOLD A MEETING TO EXPLAIN THE (NEW) STANDARD(S) AND:

(1) Ensure that everyone understands them.

(2) If anyone is missing then personally make a point of informing him or her of the new standard(s).

(3) Inform everyone that you will accept nothing less than the new standards.

(4) You must always set the example.

DON’T SET UNREALISTIC, UNACHIEVABLE STANDARDS.

GIVE THEN TIME TO ACHIEVE THE STANDARD(S)

ONCE A TEAM ACHIEVES THE LEVELS REQUIRED YOU WILL OFTEN FIND THAT:

(1) They will accept it as normal practice.

(2) Almost everyone will then perform at a slightly higher level.

Quotable Quotes
Some people will do anything, to do nothing.
Anon

Team Leading Anecdote
Phillip had just received a well deserved promotion and was transferred to a new department. He now had around ten people working for him and they all eyed him carefully wondering what kind of a leader he was going to be. He seemed a nice person but then that on its own wasn’t everything. Phillip wasn’t there five minutes before he began changing things. This wasn’t how things were done; from now on they would be done another way, the way they’d had been where he worked before. He didn’t seem to care that this department had a totally different system and produced things unrelated to where he was before. By the end of the day output had dropped by nearly 15% because of the new policy decisions, and outside agencies that relied on the team was getting hot under the collar because they couldn’t get what they wanted on time. Nobody had been asked why things happened, they were simply changed and that was that. It wasn’t long before Phillips superiors noticed things weren’t going well; investigated why and change things.

Leadership Quote: There are many hypotheses in life which are wrong. That’s perfectly all right; they’re the aperture to finding out what’s right. Life is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny. Carl Sagan

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