Category: management

6 Simple Habits that Change Managers into Effective Leaders

Sharing this great article by John Eades

  • Published on August 23, 2017 @ LinkedIn

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The debate about the difference between a manager and leader has been settled. Without question, there is a difference in both definition and behavior.

Just to ensure we are on the same page, here are my favorite definitions of both in action form:

Management: The manipulation of others for your own success

Leadership: Serving and empowering the lives that have been entrusted to you

Unless you grew up in a place of worship or had really strong figures in your life that taught you about serving and empowering, you most likely default to management. Why? Because it’s what’s taught in high school, college and organizational leadership development programs. In many ways, our environment is teaching us to be managers, not leaders, but unfortunately, that’s not an excuse. Here are six habits that can help change managers into leaders.

  1. Find a Purpose Beyond Money

While there is no question that money is important in life, one of the best ways to make a leap towards being a leader is to find a true purpose in your work beyond money. If the only reason you go to work is for money, your people will know and you will never make the leap to serve.

If this is an area you struggle in, pick up Simon Sinek’s new book Find Your Why when it comes out in September.

  1. Decentralize Decision Making

Most people move into a position of management because they were good at their job. Typically their first actions are to solve all the worlds problems and be a major part in every decision facing the team. The problem is the people they are now leading are being treated as followers and have a sense of being in a subordinate position, thus creating more followers, not more leaders. As leadership expert David Marquet says, “followers have limited decision making authority and little incentive to give the utmost of their intellect, energy, and passion. Those who take orders usually run at half speed, underutilizing their imagination and initiative.”

The key here is to not only be ok with your people making decisions make it a core part of their job.

  1. Give and Serve Outside of Work

I don’t mean to give financially, I mean give your time. Winston Churchill famously said “We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.”

Look for ways to volunteer in your community or start a support group. The point here is if you learn to give up your free time to serve those that you don’t know, you most certainly will begin to serve and empower those that you do at work.

  1. Focus on Your Example

The old adage ‘do as I say, not as I do’ is an awful way to lead and a sure-fire way to erode trust with your team. Leading by example encompasses all your actions, from what time you show up at the office, how much vacation you take, what you wear, to the moral and ethical decisions you make both at work and home.

The choices you make every single day are watched and judged by others. Do your actions exemplify the way you want to be portrayed? One of the most important things you can remember is not allowing your title to effect a positive example you set for your team.

  1. Thinking You Have to Be the Hero

Like most professionals, I met my biggest weakness early on. I thought I was the only person who could do things right, and I had to have my hand in every decision. Then someone told me,

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

It was exactly what I needed to hear. From then on, I knew I didn’t have to be the hero. Now, I surround myself with talented people, ask for help, give more responsibility, and try to listen more than I talk.

  1. Stop Making Excuses

If you habitually struggle with saying or thinking on a regular basis “There is never enough hours in the day” or “this quarter is so important,” stop and reflect on what you are saying. Every quarter is important and every day is important but it shouldn’t for a minute stop you from thinking critically about how you are leading other people.

I don’t care what the circumstance eliminate your excuses, take responsibility and put in the work.

The Windshield Mentality

No matter if you are a manager or a leader, I want you to begin embracing the windshield mentality. All the windshield mentality is, is thinking about what’s ahead of you instead of behind you. Start thinking and planning how you are going to implement these habits moving forward and never look back!

 

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Mutual Respect

And this is true for whoever you are and at what level you are.

We are all human.

If you can bow to a person who is in a higher position than you ; as well as to a servant, a door man, a waiter or a office boy ….then you will live a happier life.

Do not be selfish with your respect for others.

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Independence Day – Indonesia

 ….. and may our actions be based on hope and integrity ; rather than that of fear and selfish gains.

Conform to the right cause.
Conform to the right group.

In your heart ….. you should know what is “right”.

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Freedom

Are you ready to take the plunge, the risk, the unknown, the uncertainty for a better tomorrow ?

A life of hope beats a life of fear ….

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Kindness

Every day,  some where out there, someone needs a helping hand

You just need to open your heart to see it

Express your gratitude for what you have

By being KIND to others 

Make someone smile today …..

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What can you do ?

Have a BIG HEART …
Kindness is never wrong, no matter who it is showered upon.

Treat others the way you would like to be treated  ….

Who can you show kindness to today ?
Make an effort.
Look around ….
There is ALWAYS someone who needs it.

the.gentleman.wolf-1501106896327

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Write …. don’t just talk.

Capture

Many many many years ago, to be a great sales professional, perhaps the greatest asset to have would be the ability to talk and present well. This was the needed “communication skill”.
Then, as one progressed to be a Manager or even higher, besides being able to talk well, one must also then be able to write well. Both talking and writing becomes equally important. However, “writing skills” was often neglected or overlooked.
TODAY, in our digital age ; and the creativity one can do on social media, the ability to WRITE and EXPRESS oneself are perhaps equally important if not more so than our ability to talk (or present).
Short/ concise/ captivating messages (artwork) can reach millions of people worldwide by a click of a button. Customers do not even have to see your face nor hear your voice to buy from you.
So, are you good/creative in sharing your ideas/thoughts in written-form or WORDS to seduce your customers ?
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Familiarity

The burning fire in one’s eyes needs to be re-ignited ….

” Familliarity ” will not be good for one’s soul nor to the people surrounding you ;  be it internal or external customers. The competitive winning instict and speed will be missing. An overdose of flexibility & tolerance will prevail. 

Discipline will be compromised.

#passionsofwillie 

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Why Your Company Culture Should Match Your Brand

Read a great article by Denise Lee Yohn. Sharing the article below.

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Ask people how to develop a good corporate culture, and most of them will immediately suggest offering generous employee benefits, like they do at Starbucks, or letting people dress casually, as Southwest Airlines does. Rarely do people point to encouraging employees to disagree with their managers, as Amazon does, or firing top performers, as Jack Welch did at GE.

But in fact, it’s having a distinct corporate culture — not a copycat of another firm’s culture — that allows these great organizations to produce phenomenal results. Each of these companies has aligned and integrated its culture and brand to create a powerful engine of competitive advantage and growth. Their leaders understand that a strong, differentiated company culture contributes to a strong, differentiated brand — and that an extraordinary brand can support and advance an extraordinary culture.

It doesn’t matter if your company culture is friendly or competitive, nurturing or analytical. If your culture and your brand are driven by the same purpose and values and if you weave them together into a single guiding force for your company, you will win the competitive battle for customers and employees, future-proof your business from failures and downturns, and produce an organization that operates with integrity and authenticity.

When you think and operate in unique ways internally, you can produce the unique identity and image you desire externally. You need to have employees who understand and embrace the distinct ways you create value for customers, the points that differentiate your brand from the competition, and the unique personality that your company uses to express itself — and your employees must be empowered to interpret and reinforce these themselves. You achieve this by cultivating a clear, strong, and distinctive brand-led culture.

If your culture and brand are mismatched, you can end up with happy, productive employees who produce the wrong results. For example, at a grocery store chain I worked with, employees were steeped in an operations culture that valued efficiency and productivity. As the industry moved toward an emphasis on customer service and merchandising, the company fell behind, because its employees were focused more on increasing inventory turns and sales per square foot. It had to confront the fact that its culture, though vibrant and vital, was holding it back from serving customers well and improving the brand image.

Without using your brand purpose and values to orient your culture efforts, you’re also likely to waste a lot of money. You may think you need to take extraordinary measures to attract and retain in-demand talent, like providing free lunches to employees, putting foosball tables and beer kegs in break rooms, and offering free gym memberships. As you try to one-up your competition in the war for talent, you’ll probably draw from a pool of perks and benefits that sound great but produce little more than a generic, fun work environment. And you may end up like social media software startup Buffer, which struggled to achieve profitability because its generous cultural practices, including offering vacation bonuses and wellness grants, ate away at cash flow instead of producing employees who were passionate about the brand offering and committed to developing on-brand innovations.

With a single, unifying drive behind both your culture and your brand, however, you reap the benefits of a focused and aligned workforce. No one needs to expend extra energy figuring out what to do or how to act in order to achieve what you want your company to stand for in the world. Your human resources aren’t trying to decipher what skills and behaviors will be needed in the future, or maintaining performance evaluation systems that are out of sync with your values. And your sales and marketing departments aren’t working at cross-purposes, each with its own view of what success looks like. Organizational silos are bridged and disjointed initiatives are minimized because everyone is singularly focused on the same priorities.

How can you tell if your culture and your brand aren’t interdependent and mutually reinforcing? A disconnect between your employee experiences and your customer experiences is a telltale sign. If you engage your employees differently from how you expect them to engage your customers, your organization is operating with two set of values.

I’m not just talking about the obvious problem of managers who treat their employees poorly. I recommend using the same principles to design and manage experiences for both employees and customers. If you want to consistently introduce new products and technologies to your customers, then cultivate a test-and-learn mentality among your employees and encourage them to experiment with the latest gadgets. If your brand is differentiated by the way your products and services look and feel, then infuse your employee experience with design and creativity. You can’t expect your employees to deliver benefits to customers that they don’t experience or embrace themselves.

Another indicator of a mismatch between your culture and your brand is the lack of understanding of and engagement with your brand among your people. Your employees should understand what makes your brand different and special from a customer perspective. They should clearly understand who the company’s target customers are, as well as their primary wants and needs. They should use your brand purpose and values as decision-making filters and they should understand how they contribute to a great customer experience — even if they don’t have direct customer contact. If your people think they don’t play a role in interpreting and reinforcing your brand and that brand building is your marketing department’s responsibility, then your culture lacks brand integrity.

To address these gaps and align and to integrate your brand and culture, start by clearly identifying and articulating your brand aspirations. Do you want your brand to be known for delivering superior performance and dependability? Or is your intent to challenge the existing way of doing things and position your brand as a disruptor? Or is your brand about making a positive social or environmental impact?

Once you know what type of brand you’re aiming for, you can identify the values that your organization should embrace. In the case of a performance brand, you should work on cultivating a culture of achievement, excellence, and consistency inside your organization, while a strong sense of purpose, commitment, and shared values is needed for a socially or environmentally responsible brand. When you have clarity on the values necessary to support your desired brand type, you can use it to inform and ignite other culture efforts, including organizational design, leadership development, policies and procedures, employee experience, etc.

How you operate on the inside should be inextricably linked with how you want to be perceived on the outside. Just as brands differ, there is no single right culture. Identify the distinct cultural elements that enable you to achieve your desired brand identity, and then deliberately cultivate them. When your brand and culture are aligned and integrated, you increase operational efficiency, accuracy, and quality; you improve your ability to compete for talent and customer loyalty with intangibles that can’t be copied; and you move your organization closer to its vision.

Denise Lee Yohn is a leading authority on building and positioning exceptional brands, and has 25 years of experience working with world-class brands including Sony and Frito-Lay.

 

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Europe 18 June to 1 July 2017

lts been a while since I visited Europe. Even then, it was mostly for work and there was always a local host looking after us.

This time round, I took my family for a 12 day holiday to Amsterdam, Paris and Zurich. It was indeed a pleasant experience and we enjoyed it thoroughly. Of course there were moments of joy as well as moments of exasperation. Luckily, there was more joy overall.

As Alexis is only 10, it was great for her to see and also learn a few things on culture, behavior and mannerisms of people outside of Asia.

Firstly, on language. In France today, we are pleasantly pleased that the French we encountered in places we went spoke English. They understood us and were very helpful in giving us guidance. Though it will be nicer if they did it with a smile. Somehow they seemed moody and sullen.

The myth that the French spoke little English or ignored people who spoke English to them – does not seem to be true anymore. However, they do seem impatient and stern with an air of arrogance when giving answers (avoiding eye contact as well) : which I felt was rude.

We could see Pullman Hotel employs people from other countries to be at their front desk and breakfast area. Everyone was helpful and could cater to tourists from China, Korea and Latin countries, hence speaking in languages other than French whilst serving foreigners.

However, it was indeed contrasting when a low level receptionist was  helpful and polite but instead the captain of the hotel simply refused to answer us a simple question ; but insisted that we spoke to the concierge instead. And he (the captain) was not even busy.

I was making a joke to my wife  that perhaps this captain’s English was not so great and hence there is a defense machanism to divert me to someone else, instead of loosing face in case he did not understand me or could not answer me accurately. Or is he “looking down” on people who are not in “suit and tie” ?

The key point here is language. On our end, when we are in another country, it would be great if we spoke a little bit of their language. And on the French people’s end, it would be great too if they recognize the importance of English and other foreign languages today  ( I HOPE THEY DO), especially if they want to host the Olympics in the near future.

Now, on the other side of the coin, we happenned to be sitting beside a middle age American couple who thought that their American language was most superior in the world. They ordered coffee and made a scene comparing milk vs. cream and complained that their coffee was “burnt” and tasted awful, when infact I guessed they were just not being accustomed to the strong taste of black European coffee. Thats fine – if not for the fact that they complained that the waiter was bad and did not understand English. Hello,  you are in France, Mr. COWBOY who drinks only “light watery coffee” and light Budweiser !!

It would be like me (a Chinese) expecting the waiter to understand Mandarin and wanted tea to taste like Chinese Oolong tea and compalined that Mint Camomile did not taste good and was too diluted ???!!

Note – I am only too aware that not all Americans are like the ones I met here.

Again, the point would be on “language” ; and we should never assume that our language is the BEST in the world and that everyone else should understand it. Shame on us if we do.

Second observation  – cost cutting !! I was surprised that today KLM and AirFrance have adopted the Air Asia way (or was it vice versa).

Checking in and printing of boarding passes can only be done via an automated touch screen machine. Any checked in baggage will cost 35 € and the machine accepts credit cards too. In CDG Paris and Zurich, the luggage tag is even printed out from the machine and we have to tag our luggage ourselves. Then when we went to the check in counter, there was no person there. We had to scan our ticket ourselves as well as our baggage tag too and then push our luggage into the conveyor system. Wow !! Zero personnel needed for the whole check in process. Tickets are printed on cheap paper. No more ticket cards.

In Asia, Air Asia is regarded as a budget airline. Now KLM and AirFrance too ? Seems like everyone is cutting headcount and cost. It is indeed inevitable. 

Observation point – if one is not familliar with touch screen features, computer illiterate or uneducated,  one will have challenges with these machines. We saw many passengers fiddling with the machines – obviously confused and lost. Sadly, there were also very few AF personnel available to provide assistance. Language was again another barrier here ; as foreigners had challanges communicating with the AF personnel. 

Some autommated machines do not even accept foreign credit cards. (Not very ready on globslization, are you ?).

And with 35 € for 1 piece of check in luggage, everyone should travel light. Oh dear, we had 3 luggages to check in. Really … really ….nothing is for free anymore.

And it may be VERY WISE  to check in early to avoid “timing stress”. With the queue and the confusion, it took us 1 hour 15 minutes to finally reach our boarding gate. The normal discipline of checking in 2 hours earlier may not be enough (unless of course you already know all the steps and procedures).

I am happy though to note that we no longer need to pay a 1 € coin to get a trolley cart. Years ago, I felt this was so ridiculous. Not so much of the amount of the money –  but more of “how many foreigners would have a 1 € coins in their pocket ready on standby to get a trolley to bring our huge luggages ???”

Transportation in the city – we noted that it is so easy, comfortable, clean, inexpensive and efficient to travel by train. Every major cities are connected by rail and going from place to place was a breeze. Hence, it is important that one stays in hotel that is near the city central station. These stations are huge and had many lines, built years ago. Hello Indonesia, why oh why did we not learn this years ago ?

However, taxis are pretty expensive. In Paris and Amsterdam, some taxis have a fix rate of 50 to 55 € from the airport to any hotel in the city centre and vice versa. Of course, there’s always “thugs” who would prey on ignorant tourist and have their mileage meter switched on resulting to passengers having to pay 10 to 15 € extra. One thug even offered us a “traffic free route” for 85 € flat. Luckily, we refused.

On our last day, we were so lucky. Our taxi driver was polite, kind and honest. Told us directly when we boarded that the rate is fixed at 50 €,  googled for us for that the Garuda check-in gate was at row 31 and when we arrived at the airport, he automatically helped us to get 2 trolley-carts for our bagages. All done with a friendly smile. Wow. How can I not give him a good tip !! Europe is wishing us a pleasant flight home.

Well all in all, we learnt so many things in our days here.

Personally, I would have preferred to be served with more smiles, humility and patience. It would be nice if they were more open and receptive instead of being defensive. They should listen better and not assume the questions we had and thus giving us wrong answers. It would be wonderful if they showed more care and sincerity for our well being.

We are tourist. Of course we would like to feel warm, welcome, perhaps even pampered.

Well what do I know ? Maybe Asians are spoilt when it comes to demanding for good SERVICE. Errrr … customer is king ? No ? Oooops who taught me that ?

Communication is always a  2 way street and perhaps some Frenchmen is also blogging away now on how we Asians cannot communicate well, being too demanding or having too many questions (asking questions does not mean one is stupid, mind you).

But hey Europe is Europe. One country differs from the other and obviously, different nationalities differ in their own respective manners and behaviors. Some do welcome foreigners with a smile whilst perhaps others may feel impatient on having to put up with aliens “invading” their country and perhaps their ego challenged for having to serve Asians ? Well,  how delussional, arrogant and ignorant can one be ?

For today, I simply believe everyone is equal and Mutual Respect should be a culture for all human beings regardless of race, nationality, color or religion. The world would be a more beautiful place to live in then.

Good bye Europe. We enjoyed the scenery, the good food, the wine, the history, lakes, beautiful architecture, paintings, the clean drinking water from the tap, the friendly Swiss-German ; and we ceratinly would come back here again. The challeges we went thru were pale in comparison to all the other great things we encountered and saw.

To top it all, we met SUPERMAN in Zurich. Hello Clark Kent ….

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