Leadership

What makes an office building a ‘place of work’? It is the employees (human capital), not the office premises, or the luxurious facilities or the equipment. The more engaged and happy your employees are, the healthier your organization is. In today’s fiercely competitive marketplace, employee engagement plays a critical role in driving business success. High levels of employee engagement encourage talent retention, reduce employee turnover, improve employee performance and productivity and foster customer loyalty while maximizing ROI.

According to Gartner, to ensure success, employers must provide their employees with the information to help them aggressively engage with the corporate strategy and develop an understanding of how individual and team efforts can impact organizational outcomes. The research and consulting giant also strongly suggests employers to align company objectives to their people’s individual goals to drive employee performance.

Why Employee Engagement Matters?

• It makes employees self-motivated
• Helps employees have a clear understanding of their roles
• Helps them recognize the importance of their contribution
• Provides better job satisfaction to employees
• Lowers cost to value ratio for human personnel expenditure
• Reduces absenteeism
• Improves employee safety
• Enables more effective leadership
• Encourages employee advocacy

Best Practices for HRs to Develop and Sustain Employee Engagement 

HR practices have a major impact on employee engagement. Here are some of the best practices that can help HRs boost their employee engagement:

Enrich their Jobs: Integrate value, diversity, autonomy and co-worker respect with jobs so that employees can have a broader view of their roles and become more enthusiastic to take on responsibilities beyond their job description.

Respect their Opinions: Conduct opinion polls and surveys that permit your people to express their thoughts and concerns. The more you ask for their views, the more they feel honoured, entitled, and like they are an integral part of the organization.

Recruit Smartly: Target candidates who are likely to perform their roles challengingly and more enthusiastically. Encourage people to opt out of the process if they are not suited for a particular role.

Emphasis on Regular Training and Development: Provide orientation to employees to create understanding about how their work contributes to the organization’s growth. Offer regular skill development training to help upskill them and boost their job performance, satisfaction and self-confidence.

Consider Strategic Compensation: Encourage pay-for-performance programs to drive employees’ attention towards incentivized behaviors. Implement a competency-based payment system to encourage upskilling and knowledge enhancement which in turn can help in improving employee performance.

Have a Performance Management System in Place: Set challenging goals for them aligning with the company’s strategic objectives, regularly provide feedback, and recognize thier accomplishments and voluntary contributions.

Encourage Community Participation: Your organization is essentially a community. Engagement activities from organizing an annual event to taking a team out to lunch or dinner can significantly help in encouraging that community spirit among your employees.

Leaders get mentors because they want to grow faster and make a bigger difference in the role they have now, and prepare themselves for an even larger role in the future. Why?…because mentors will lift your goals, focus, action, and results to higher levels; and get you to use more of the potential that is already inside you.

With a MENTOR, you get…

1. Sounding Board (Clarity)
There is an old saying “How do I know what I think until I hear what say?” You are often spinning opportunities and challenges in your head, and important ones that you cannot really talk about with anyone else. This is when a mentor becomes very valuable to you, as you now have someone you can talk about those things with.

You think about these opportunities and challenges in fragments, and you never get to complete your thoughts until you either write it down or talk it through with someone else. You probably don’t have the time to write it down, but you would have time to talk with your mentor (who listens and could also give you some advice too).
Mentors force you to complete your thoughts on the important, helping you gain more clarity and take more action too. Better clarity on the important will always enable a leader to drive the key initiatives in the company faster and with better results.

2. Adviser (Ideas)
Mentors have been there before, and have collected many experiences along the way that you are now experiencing for the first time. They can give you ideas to help you think through your options on your own, or even give you some proven options that worked for both them and others in the past. However, the option you choose is always your own
responsibility.

With a mentor, you are growing faster using the experiences and ideas of others. You cannot live life fast enough to experience everything on your own, so leveraging the experiences of others is the best way to speed your own growth and to have better options when you need them the most.

3. Teacher (Habits)
Successful leaders realized a long time ago that the foundation for their success is their daily and weekly habits. It is what you consistently do both daily and weekly that drives your success. As you climb in your career, you will take on bigger opportunities and challenges and lead more complex organizations along the way. The habits that got you the larger role might not be the habits that can enable you to successfully lead in this expanded role.

There is another great saying for this: when your opportunities and challenges increase, it is time for new habits, not just adding more hours.

A mentor can help you identify and create the new habits you need, and hold you accountable until you fully implement them. The majority of leaders already know or learn what they need to do, but not have the dedication and discipline to stick with it until they have created the habit. Be the leader who sticks with the most important habits you need to create, and your habits will be the foundation for each step up you make.

4. Cheerleader (Energy)
The higher you rise, the more change and complex change you will have to lead in your organization. Nobody really likes change and it takes energy to manage yours and your people’s emotions through any it. With every change, you have the people who are against it (they will be fighting the change and you) and the people who are for it (but will continually need assurance that they can actually do it). Therefore, you will need to keep your energy high and your attitude positive to manage the change and everyone’s emotions in productive ways.

Your mentor can be a great cheerleader for you and keep you energized to successfully drive the changes forward. With every change, you will experience the ups and downs, and with the mentor along side you, they help you to never have the downs slow down your progress on the change.

5. Partner (Perspective)
They say leadership is a lonely role, and you can often feel you are alone with your opportunities and challenges. In these times, it is easy to lose your perspective and see problems where problems do not really exist. Also, you can often focus on the problems that have hit you emotionally and have grabbed your attention, but these problems may not be your most important problems to be addressed first.

A mentor understands the most important opportunities and challenges on your plate and can help you keep the right perspective on where your focus could be. With your mentor available to support you, you won’t feel as alone in dealing with the important opportunities and challenges. Your mentor can be your co-pilot on the important.

Do you have a MENTOR?… (or even a SET OF MENTORS)

Sometimes having a set of mentors can help you develop faster if you have more than one key development area that you would like to work on at the same time. In this way, you draw upon the right mentor for the right area, and you develop each area faster.

One last thing…

A mentor will just naturally help you raise the level of your communications skills…as working with the mentor will drive you to package your key thoughts and messages in more concise and straightforward ways. Your mentor is actually helping you to begin speaking and interacting at higher levels, and this makes you better prepared for the next step in your career.

With a MENTOR or a SET OF MENTORS, you will GAIN…

Better Clarity

More Ideas

New Habits

More Energy

Stronger Perspective

About Mark Fritz
Lack of ownership kills your team’s performance. Mark mentors ambitious executives globally to get their people to OWN IT! He has spoken on leadership and the power of ownership in over 50 countries throughout the world. He runs leadership development programs for international companies…helping their leaders get their people to OWN the
achievement! Mark has lived and worked in the USA, Singapore, Egypt, Netherlands, Italy, Japan and the UK, and now calls London home along with his Japanese wife.
+44 (0) 7930321458
mark@markfritzonline.com
www.markfritzonline.com

Success – The most coveted title that one wants to crown his head with. While success is that drug that everyone wants to get high with there are many who feel they are stuck in their life. The reasons might be aplenty – disorganization and disorder in life, attitude and perception towards life, failing to make most of the time that one has, inability to be as productive as one can be despite strenuous efforts, fear, insecurity, etc. There are a lot of things that keep us from making the leap. No matter how old you think you have grown up, no matter where you’re from, what you do – a student or an entrepreneur, or anyone else, or what you’re into, your desire to be successful is that flame that keeps you burning to achieve your goals. Here are a few ingredients that help one to succeed in his life making him able to share what he has learned to try to help others.

1) Determination: Be so determined that circumstances have no time to decide for you. Build your life by yourself, it might take a lot but in the end, it’s definitely worth it. You may have to work hard and long in order to achieve your goal, you may have to sacrifice something, you might face challenging failures and problems. It’s all in you – make efforts, do not worry about anything or anyone, believe in you, be confident and build it up.

2) Focus: Focus on commitment. It is very important to remind yourself about the goal you want to achieve every day in order to stay away from distractions. How committed are you to your goal? How important is it for you? What are you willing to sacrifice in order to achieve it? If you can answer these questions to yourself you’re halfway to succeeding. Also, focus on solving the problems big or small. Your focus on tackling issues and solving problems can have a major impact on your success.

3) Positive Thinking: Positive attitude is an important ingredient that can add a major portion in the process of becoming successful. Optimistic energy will attract new people and instill new energy levels. A positive attitude is an approach of daily willingness to self-improvement. Having a positive, joyful attitude the results are always positive and joyful. Being positive or optimistic helps you get rid of stagnating thoughts and further gives you the will power to face criticism, negative vibes, and negative people.

4) Never Give Up: One will truly accomplish what others thought he wouldn’t when he never quits. Thoughts on quitting on something that you’re really passionate about can land you in the discouragement abyss. Constantly work on improving yourself, your skills. Consider each goal and think of what you can do to improve the means of achieving. Success is a constant learning process and one can claim it only if he is willing to journey throughout the process.

5) Planning: A perfect plan yields to perfect results further laying a perfect route map to success. Fill out your weekly calendar. Plan ahead what and how to do. Know your three steps forward and not more. Planning your schedule and prioritizing it is a great way to make sure your daily activities will help you work towards your long term goals. Success is a long thorny path full of mistakes and obstacles, and one who plans his steps across the path will be amazed at what he can achieve.

We live in a digital world where the continuously advancing technology has been influencing the day-to-day lives of us humans. The digital technology has influenced various fields globally including education, economy, politics, and business. With digital technologies like mobility, social networks, automation, big data, and cloud computing now deeply implanted in every aspect of our professional and personal lives, today’s business leaders need to possess a completely new set of leadership traits to sustain the transition and succeed in this digital era.

Firstly, the leader should possess capabilities and sufficient knowledge in addition to the IQ. The leader should have the ability to identify the technological trends across the different sectors, knowledge to use these resources and vision to succeed in the digital world using these resources. Apart from the aforementioned traits, a leader should have the ability to lead, innovate, negotiate and manage.

Ability to Lead: He/She should have a focus on the trends of the digital age and how they shape the industry and organization. He then should focus on effectively leading individuals, teams, and organizations contributing to the individual’s growth and also the growth of the organization as a whole.

Ability to Innovate: The leader should teach the individuals on how to work within the digital age and getting accustomed to the new technologies. He should innovate and execute new methods to get the things done. He should lead change through experimentation and implementation. He should dedicate himself and his team to regular exercises and workshops that harness the creative skills and technology exploration amongst the team members.

Ability to Negotiate: The leader should have the ability to negotiate, collaborate and manage conflict. He should have a willingness to listen, interact, and communicate with internal and external stakeholders. Smart bargaining skills in leaders can help create and sustain relations, and good relations can have an excellent impact on your company’s reputation. He should have a strong sense of interest and curiosity in emerging trends.

Ability to Manage: A leader should be capable of leading and managing himself and others in the fast-changing digital age. In addition to building and maintaining critical relationships, a leader should be equipped with the skills needed to build, manage, lead and influence virtual teams. He should be able to manage up, down and across and influence his team to accept the change.

The above traits redefine the leadership in this digital era and a successful leader is the one who has the potential to guide his team and organization through the transformation.

Are leaders born or made? This has been a serious question for the past many decades with few arguing that leaders are born while others debating that they are made. However, the leadership myth that leaders are born implies to the fact that there is a genetic factor to a leadership. This myth also asserts that people have certain charismatic qualities or personality traits to be a leader. Which is not. If we observe some historical leaders like Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Steve Jobs, Martin Luther King Jr., Winston Churchill, etc., we find different personality traits in them all.

Generally speaking, a leader is a person who rises up from the multitude and comes forward to take the challenge. He is someone who has the best training, nurturing, developmental opportunities and someone who is not hidden in the crowd or unwilling to take new opportunities. Here, the best training does not necessarily include being exceptionally trained or mentored. Rather, it includes deliberate practice, struggle, sacrifice, hard work, and regular self-assessment of that individual. Best Leadership is a learning process where good leaders seek out developmental opportunities that will help them learn new skills, seek new experiences. Leadership learning is a lifetime activity where a leader is in a constant self-introspection mode and strives to learn, develop and improve.

The most heard phrase or the most used norm that “Everyone is born to lead”, often raises few questions that speak for the credibility of the leader. The questions like “Are you a leader?”, “What kind of leader are you?” and “What kind of leader do you want to be?” are something that an individual who wants to outstand the crowd listens to. The moment you give a thought to those questions and frame answers through your continuous efforts, opportunities, taking risks, working hard and commitment, is when you unlock the leadership potential in you. What determines a leader is his/her way of thinking which is further reflected in his behavior and later demonstrated.

There are few traits that every leader should possess.

1) Influence: A leader should be capable enough to influence his fellow mates, colleagues, workplace or wherever he is. His work and behavioral approach should influence the surroundings resulting in a progressive development.

2) Integrity: A leader should work at all times with integrity, honesty, and transparency. Frankly, great leaders demonstrate integrity and honesty even when it is excruciatingly difficult.

3) Inspire: Leaders should inspire great trust from those who follow them. He should inflict the confidence in them that they can rely on him to be strong and honest in the face of adversity.

And we’re confident that they will lead us to something better, from a place of clarity, integrity, and forthrightness, not for their own gain, but for the good of all.

4) Identify: A leader should be capable of identifying any problem or issue ahead be at the forefront to face it and handle it. His problem identification trait can take his team/ organization towards gain.

5) Interaction: Finally, a great leader should have a positive communication style with words that inspire the greatness and growth in his team. Words have the power to make or break, hence, the effective interaction of the leader is what builds his team towards optimism and success.

A perfect leader is one who combines the natural traits with training, knowledge acquired through learning, workshops, and experiences, creates a perfect blend of both and puts them into use.

Leadership and management are two commonly used terms in the business world with many mistaking them to be one. Very often, people in business organizations presume a good leader for a good manager. Little do they know that they both are not the same and can not be the same. A good leader can be a good manager but a good manager necessarily need not be a good leader. One needs a clear understanding of who a leader is and who a manager is and also make out the difference between leadership and management.

A leader is someone who leads or commands a group or organization. The activity of leading a group of people or an organization or the ability to do this is leadership. A manager is someone whose job is to organize and control the work of a business or organization or a part of it. The process of dealing with or controlling things or people is management. The main difference between leadership and management is that a leader can be anyone. He does not have to be the person who holds a position in an organization. The characteristics that a manager and a leader share are similar, yet they both are different.

Leadership involves establishing a clear vision and sharing that vision with others so that they will follow willingly. A leader strives for the vision to come to pass and also provides the information, knowledge, and methods to help others(team/organization that follow him/his vision) to realize that vision. Apart from being visionary, the other important attribute of a leader is handling a conflict. He always engages himself in an influential interaction with the team members and makes sure a strong and positive relationship is built in between the duo. He coordinates and balances the conflicting interests of all members and stakeholders in a constructive approach. A leader steps up in times of crisis to lead from the front and is able to think and act creatively in difficult situations.

Management involves building a strategic vision and the ability to execute it. He formulates and enforces the policies of a business and does what is needed to achieve the plan and the goals. Unlike leader who establishes principles, a manager establishes rules, procedures and processes to execute the plans. While leaders empower, motivate and mentor their team to achieve the goals, managers unlikely direct and monitor their team to achieve them. Managers are short-term focused and they pay a keen attention to the problems, details from the team as they are responsible to make decisions concerning those issues.

The major attribute that distinguishes management from leadership is that management can be taught, whereas leadership, may be learned and enhanced through coaching or mentoring. A leader always has the charm of inspiring, motivating and influencing his subordinates to perform and engage them in achieving a goal. Managers, on the other hand, control people or the group to accomplish a goal. Both managers and leaders are important for any organization. Having someone who is both a manager and a leader is an added advantage to the team and organization as a whole who can

Are leaders born or made? This has been a serious question for the past many decades with few arguing that leaders are born while others debating that they are made. However, the leadership myth that leaders are born implies to the fact that there is a genetic factor to a leadership. This myth also asserts that people have certain charismatic qualities or personality traits to be a leader. Which is not. If we observe some historical leaders like Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Steve Jobs, Martin Luther King Jr., Winston Churchill, etc., we find different personality traits in them all.

Generally speaking, a leader is a person who rises up from the multitude and comes forward to take the challenge. He is someone who has the best training, nurturing, developmental opportunities and someone who is not hidden in the crowd or unwilling to take new opportunities. Here, the best training does not necessarily include being exceptionally trained or mentored. Rathers, it includes deliberate practice, struggle, sacrifice, hard work, and regular self-assessment of that individual. Best Leadership is a learning process where good leaders seek out developmental opportunities that will help them learn new skills, seek new experiences. Leadership learning is lifetime activity where a leader is in a constant self-introspection mode and strives to learn, develop and improve.

The most heard phrase or the most used norm that “Everyone is born to lead”, often raises few questions that speak for the credibility of the leader. The questions like “Are you a leader?”, “What kind of leader are you?” and “What kind of leader do you want to be?” are something that an individual who wants to outstand the crowd listens to. The moment you give a thought to those questions and frame answers through your continuous efforts, opportunities, taking risks, working hard and commitment, is when you unlock the leadership potential in you. What determines a leader is his/her way of thinking which is further reflected in his behaviour and later demonstrated.

There are few traits that every leader should possess.

Not too often we get to hear stories about those people who influenced their employees and who turned out to be successful during the transition from manager to leader. Whenever an employee is promoted from being a manager who manages a team or a company to a leader who leads a team or a unit or a company, the role he plays as a leader could not possibly be as effective as the role he played when he was a manager. The reasons are aplenty with most of them credit for the accustomed practices that a manager fails to incorporate when being a leader. The most prominent of it contributing to the basic thing where leadership requires a mindset that is different from management.

Many of them struggle mightily when they shift from leading a function to leading an enterprise that requires taking leadership skills to a next level. In order to make the transition successful, employees/executives must tune in themselves to a set of changes that have to be inculcated during the process.

Knowledgeable to Insightful: Managers are known to possess great knowledge, yet there is something beyond it that a leader possesses, i.e., being insightful. Leaders are expected to think differently and a stretch in the thinking, enhancement in the practice can help you show the way forward. An insightful leader not only thinks differently but also suggests practical ways to turn the thoughts into action. Apart from being knowledgeable, a leader should challenge himself/herself to apply his/her cumulative knowledge in innovative ways. He should apply his insights in making wise decisions considering the past, present and also future that could benefit the team and the organization as a whole.

Action-oriented to Visionary: A manager is generally action-oriented and focuses more on executions. Contrary to a manager, a leader is determined to be a visionary. He focuses on the vision and then develops a plan, shares it with his team, works collectively and collaboratively with them to execute the plan that accomplishes the vision. Being a visionary requires the confidence to see through the future, and beyond something that an individual or manager does not see. It also requires to encouraging innovation, creativity, and resourcefulness to empower his team towards productivity.

Task-Focused to People-Focused: Managers are merely task-focused as all their concentration dwells on getting the tasks done by his teammates, whereas, a leader is people-oriented. While shifting from manager to leader, the leader should shift his focus more towards people, and be empathetic to them. Encourage them, give them the freedom to make decisions, and more importantly coach your team members to help them grow and develop at a faster pace. Engage with them, and ensure that they have the resources and support they need. Instead of simply assigning tasks, inspire them by cultivating conditions for success. Lastly, thank and reward people for their contribution.

Instructional to Inspirational: The most important trait of a leader is inspiring his team by setting a good example for them. Good managers instruct their team to work but a leader inspires and influences them to work. What a great leader usually does is he practices before preaching. Rather than preaching and instructing them to work on the tasks, a leader will himself works along with his team creating an atmosphere that encourages them to work effectively.

Tactical Manager to Strategic Leader: Leaders are responsible for taking the organization into the future. During the transition from manager to a leader, an individual need to adopt a strategic mindset and shift from being a tactician to a strategist. However, developing such a mindset does not come overnight. One needs to build the ability to shift through different levels of analysis, recognize the patterns and strategic analysis of opportunities and threats. The strategic mindset also includes a willingness to take risks to achieve rewards, rely on experienced staff who give him advice and trust his peers and direct reports.