Most leaders seek to boost their team’s productivity. However, the first step is for the leader to strengthen their own leadership skills. Some ways to attempt this is through learning agility, effective communication, and embracing empathy and compassion.
This is the basis of a new book by Doug Lennick and Chuck Wachendorfer, partners at the company think2perform. The boo is titled Don’t Wait For Someone Else To Fix It. The two writers have worked with clients including American Express, Wells Fargo, Comerica Bank, TD Wealth of Canada, Charles Schwab, and others.
The treatise draws on the following essential skill sets:
Learning Agility
A leader’s ability to analyze 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 book goes on to provides eight leadership essentials and each of these is related to real-life stories.
The eight essentials are:
Aim to Be Your Ideal Self
“We can only be successful leaders when we embrace principles and values, define our purpose and goals, and act accordingly,” the book states.
Know Your Real Self
“We need to cultivate self-awareness to benchmark our real selves against the people and leaders we ideally want to be.”
Ignite Integrity and Responsibility
In the book it states that integrity and responsibility breed trust.
Embrace Empathy and Compassion
The authors explain that empathy is the ability to understand and appreciate what others are feeling, while compassion involves using what you understand to show that you care.
Decide Wisely
In the text it is explained that your influence as a leader depends greatly on others’ responses to the decisions you make.
Let Go Of What You Know
This connects with learning agility – the ability to learn from experience – and the authors argue that this has become a critical skill for leaders at all levels.
Achieve Purposeful Goals
Lennick and Wachendorfer encourage people to adopt the WDYWFY goal achievement model, which stands for “What Do You Want For Yourself.” This approach requires achieving self-awareness about what a leader actually wants.
Empower Others
“Empowerment is a powerful leadership tool because it taps into the internal motivators of the people you want to influence,” the book explains.
What is of practical value in the book is the array of practical exercises and tools for developing each of these eight leadership essentials.
