Most leaders want to boost their team’s productivity. However, for this to succeed, the first step is to strengthen your own leadership skills through learning agility, effective communication, and embracing empathy and compassion.
This is according to experts Doug Lennick and Chuck Wachendorfer, who are partners at think2perform and authors of the new book, Don’t wait for someone else to fix it. Doug Lennick is the founding CEO of think2perform, a high performance leadership development firm serving organizations in a variety of industries. Chuck Wachendorfer is President of Distribution at think2perform.The two have worked with clients including American Express, Wells Fargo, Comerica Bank, TD Wealth of Canada, Charles Schwab, and others.
Within the book a number of business skills are discussed and outlined. These can be distilled down to:
Learning Agility
A leader’s ability to analyse new business situations and solve problems is a top priority. Leaders need to be curious, choose growth over comfort, resist defensiveness, experiment — and share these skills with their teams to boost productivity.
Effective Communication
Effective communication is a function of both someone attempting to send a message and someone receiving that message. If the receiver is not understanding the intention of the communications, then the communication is ineffective and impedes productivity. A big problem often occurs when leaders do not communicate what activities need to be undertaken to achieve the organization’s goals.
Embracing Empathy and Compassion
This leadership skill is more relevant than ever. Empathy is about understanding. Compassion is empathy in action. Any leader who actively cares about the well-being of their people will be rewarded with best efforts, higher productivity, and retention of the best and the brightest.
The above is expanded into eight leadership essentials, described as the ones necessary “To Maximize Your Influence In Business And Life”.
“Leadership is not about having a certain title or performing a particular role. Leadership is about the power to influence others,” explain the authors, pointing out that even small acts of leadership can make a positive difference.
These include ‘aiming to be yourself’, by which they mean: “We can only be successful leaders when we embrace principles and values, define our purpose and goals, and act accordingly,” write the authors. They detail the importance of ensuring that your values, goals, and behaviors are aligned.”
To add to this is the importance of ‘knowing your real self’, which they describe as: “We need to cultivate self-awareness to benchmark our real selves against the people and leaders we ideally want to be”. The authors point out the common errors people make when assessing who they are, and how to develop a more accurate picture.
To these integrity and responsibility are discussed and seen as necessary to breed trust. It is also important to ‘decide wisely’, not least because everyone makes approximately 35,000 decisions each day.
Another lesson is around ‘letting go of what you know’, or ‘learning agility’ (the ability to learn from experience). Here the authors offer guidance for cultivating a learning mindset, including being curious, choosing growth over comfort, resisting defensiveness, and experimentation.
Throughout the book, the authors provide a wealth of practical exercises and tools for developing each of these eight leadership essentials.
