Top 7 Leadership Articles: Winter Edition

You can’t know too much about leadership. This quality is a mix of talent, knowledge, and skills that requires huge responsibility. If you want your people to follow, trust, and respect you, you should always be up-to-date and discover new opportunities that would help you do your best to become a reliable and trustworthy leader for your team. Let’s take a look at leadership tips that world experts prepared for you this winter.

Four Storytelling Techniques to Bring Your Data to Life

The paper published by Nancy Duarte reveals the necessity for leaders of dealing with people closer as data is produced by people working for your company. The author provides readers with the following techniques based on the art of storytelling to address data challenges:

When working with any statistics, for instance, sales indices, dwell upon the story characters: imagine and think of the people who’re behind decisions and figures. If the sales rate decreases, think over all the parties participating in this process. This step will help you improve the situation in the future.
The next move is to get in contact with the people engaged in data generation. To understand the figures, there’s nothing better than talking to the heroes involved in the process of data production. After listening to their concerns and insights it’ll be much easier to analyze all aspects and change the trajectory of further actions.
Immerse into the core of conflicts to resolve them. Every hero faces a conflict anytime in the story. It can be a conflict with a system, an interpersonal one, or a self-conflict. In order to help employees free themselves from any burdens, try to identify the conflict, analyze its roots, and design ways to resolve it.
Zoom out to motivate your teams. Don’t judge anyone’s job based on current figures. Always remember that any aspect of business just like the entire life is a mix of ups and downs. That’s why before criticizing, analyze previous dynamics, let your employees consider them, too, and make corresponding conclusions to improve the state of things in the nearest future.

4 Basic Truths That Will Improve Your Leadership Skills Overnight

In this paper, Marcel Schwantes lists and grounds four rules that a good leader should follow to keep their leadership skills at the level. They’re as follows:

Don’t abandon your company’s values and let them rule your actions.
Remember that your employees are human beings with their private lives. To be a great leader, you should concern yourself with their interests and goings, not just their work.
Establish good relationships within your organization. Don’t be too focused on making contacts with everyone in isolation, but with the whole team. And the most important thing is to make them a unity, then there’ll be a sense of community and things will be much easier.
Distinguish between your business goals and your purpose. Your purpose is the driving force of your leadership efforts, and it doesn’t disappear even when all your business objectives are met.

Are You Giving All of Your Employees an Equal Chance to Succeed?

Nicole Stephens reveals the fundamentals of unbiased decisions and attitudes to company employees, providing examples of gender- and race-based stereotypes that prevent people from promotions. The author suggests several tips for leaders to be fair-minded when managing their employees:

Analyze the disparities that happen in your company. This process should also involve taking into account all related facts and data related to the disparities and their further investigation. Testing and analyzing company rules, traditions, and policies are also a must if you want to get rid of bias.
Design and implement solutions to eliminate biased decisions. They should align with company regulations and provide more transparency to be sure your company rules are based on equality.
Test the designed strategy. After you invented some solutions, implement them and analyze the consequences. Take step-by-step actions and test one solution at a time to adequately assess its impact on the organization.

How New Managers Can Get Better at Making Decisions

Written by Art Petty, this article proposes 8 tips for managers to become better decision-makers. The author suggests that a leader should:

Give more space and opportunities for initiatives to their team members, as any action is the result of a decision.
Don’t block your employees’ desire to act and make independent decisions but always assess their intentions in terms of your risk management obligations as a company manager.
Teach your team members how to make programmed decisions according to the company policies. You shouldn’t spend too much time consulting everyone regarding every decision they’re going to make.
Include your company’s values into your decision-making process, and always be guided by them when going to make one.
Try to assess a situation from different perspectives. Resolving an issue depends on how we frame it – either positively or negatively.
Analyze additional information before making a decision. Considering only case-related data is not enough, you should also review circumstantial facts to make the optimal one.
Assist in making group decisions. You as a leader should take care of your team to be capable of making rational decisions without complicating issues where it’s out of doors, and think rationally to make the best ones.
Document all your decisions to be able to analyze their consequences and learn your lesson, no matter if it’s positive or negative.

How to Help Your Managers Engage Their Teams

In his article for Gallup, Adam Hickman reflects upon the right ways to promote employees to the position of a manager on a fair basis. That means that nobody can be promoted occasionally or just based on tenure. He offers considering the following points for leaders to dwell on before elevating an employee through their career ladder:

Assess employees’ engagement levels. Any person can’t succeed as a worker without being engaged. The best way to estimate it is to have a face-to-face conversation. It will help you not only learn about their engagement but also find out about their pain points and concerns. It’s extremely important for a good leader as people must be sure they’re heard and valued.
Any manager should be able to engage their teams, so the number one goal is to teach them how to become engagement experts. Leaders can do this by setting clear expectations for managers and specific engagement standards to make a manager know what they should do and what their plan is, suggest rewards for a good engagement job – managers should know their efforts are appreciated.

How Leaders Can Break out of the Conflict Loop

In his article dealing with the conflict issue, Roger Trapp analyzes a book by Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler entitled “Optimal Outcomes”. In this book, the author claims that when people try to resolve conflicts, they just worsen the situation. The reason is quite simple: everyone has their own ‘conflict habits’ that confront one another when people are trying to interact to avoid or resolve a conflict.

Goldman-Wetzler suggests her own way to help leaders avoid or heal conflict situations, which is called the Optimal Outcomes Method. It includes eight practices to help leaders free themselves from these habits.

The first practice aims to make a person realize their unconscious habits that worsen conflicts: ignoring the conflict until it breaks out and like that.
Practices 2, 3, and 4 involve analyzing the situation that caused the conflict and trying to remake the usual set of actions.
The further 4 practices are intended to make a person dwell upon the best outcome of a conflict situation by designing and planning ways and steps that could resolve it.

To Be a Great Leader, You Need the Right Mindset

Ryan Gottfredson and Chris Reina suggest that there are 4 basic mindsets that can help you become a brilliant leader. A mindset is an array of attitudes that dictate your behavior in various situations. They distinguish between growth and fixed mindsets, learning and performance mindsets, deliberative and implemental mindsets, promotion and prevention mindsets.

A growth mindset implies that everyone is capable of self-development, while a fixed one presupposes that people can’t change their talents and inborn properties.
A learning mindset suggests that a person is motivated to improve their competence and develop skills. A performance one is about the overwhelming desire to get positive estimates and to avoid criticism.
Leaders with a deliverable mindset are those who tend to collect and analyze information to make sure they’re as productive as possible. People having an implemental mindset are prone to making and implementing decisions without being focused on analyzing additional information.
Promotion-mindset leaders are guided by the desire to win and get a reward, while their colleagues with a prevention mindset are concentrated on the goal to avoid any troubles and failures.

As you can see, the first types of mindsets in these duets are better for leaders providing them with all the necessary qualities to become successful. While the second types of mindsets (fixed, performance, implemental, and prevention) are a barrier on the way to the professional and personal development of a true leader.

What tips are to the point for you? Which of them would you like to implement in your business activities? Share your insights in the comment field.