Do you find yourself groaning at the thought of the next meeting? When you are at a meeting, have you ever wished so much that it’ll be done quickly? As Patrick Lencioni, author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and Death by Meeting puts it, a meeting is much more relevant and important than a movie, yet nearly no one ever finds it as half exciting. On the contrary most people are instantly put off at the mention of the next meeting. Moreover, such an experience is universal and …

Mark is a sales manager of a housing company. As the company prepares to launch a large scale state of the art residential apartment, plans have been made to carry out an ambitious 72 hours sales initiative, where the sales agent of Mark’s team will take turns and take positions at various locations in the city which enjoys high traffic and aggressively promote the upcoming launch of the apartment, with the goal to achieve sales of eighty percent of the units available.
On the day of the launch, however, Mark was …

“Leadership by Example” is a phrase that can often be found on the creeds and pledges of many military organisations all around the world, and for a very good reason. Due to the unlimited liability of military leaders, the responsibilities for not just the careers and development of the soldiers under them but the very lives of their subordinate, they are placed in a position where their leadership skills and abilities are of utmost importance, and leading by example may well make a difference between a successful mission and a …

There are shelves full of books available that chronicle the lives and histories of the world’s bad leaders. For the most part though, these bad leaders are discussed as tyrants, dictators, and despots. Seldom is serious writing dedicated to them as leaders. To fill the gap, Barbara Kellerman gave us Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters. Her approach addresses what she calls the “elephant in the room; bad leadership.” Most discussions tend to cast leadership as good, either ignoring bad leadership or presenting it as …

Countless articles have been written on the topic of “Leadership by Example”. This just goes to show that leadership by example is not just the more desired form of leadership (though not necessarily the most practiced) but also a more productive style of leadership. However, while these articles address the sheer necessity of leading by example, only a handful of these actually show us how we can take action to lead by example. In this leadership lesson on leading by example, we shall examine five areas of our workplace where …

Among the numerous leadership qualities that are desirable in a leader is leadership by example.
I believe that some time in our life, we may come across two leaders who hold the same intent of, say, enforcing a particular standard. The first goes about doing this by an ‘imperial edict’ style, announcing publicly that everyone would henceforth have to comply with the mentioned standard. All well and good, but soon everyone was taken aback when they realize that the leader completely ignores his own words and undermine his own standards. This …

The free rein leadership style is one that favours autonomy and abhors control. This model caters for minimal control by the leader or manager and maximum flexibility for the team members. As such, the team leader often takes a back seat role and functions to coordinate and direct the actions of the team rather than dictate it. It is wise to remember that free rein leadership is at the extreme of freedom, away from the extreme of control, and that most teams operate within the continuum between.
The free rein leadership …

The art of delegation does not always come naturally to all leaders or managers. While some leaders may effectively assign and allocate sub tasks to his team members, others experience difficulty in grappling with the subtleties of the skill, such as maintaining control over the process, or avoiding the crossing of the line between delegating and “arrowing”. Regardless, we all know that effective delegation is a critical skill in becoming a successful leader, for this skill allows us to effectively manage the team to achieve outcome that we alone can …

Ever been in a team or headed a team which seemed to epitomise the very meaning of corporate politics? Chances are that you probably have. Corporate politics represents a culture of a team which just fails to achieve synergy, where behaviours commonly known as ‘backstabbing’ and ‘badmouthing’ are prevalent. The team could possibly contain many talented individuals, but the mutual resentment for each other and fear of being put down results in a lack of trust, which makes productive conflict impossible, leading to slipshod decision making where team members are …

It may sound absurd if I tell you that despite our certainty that our teams know the standards we expect of them, some of the members would still be unclear or confused. Many of us may have found ourselves to have experienced falling into a pitfall where we assumed that the team knew what we expected only to have them deviated from the standards. Frustrating, wasn’t it? We shall examine in a closer detail the art of clarifying standards in this article.
I believe the importance of clarifying standards is fairly …