For many years, I ran around telling the people that worked for me what to do. I was very good at it. Considered great at my job. Promoted early and often. Then I discovered it was absolutely the wrong thing to do. It was a big mistake. And after I stopped, performance jumped!
Managing people would seem to be just another discipline, just another area in which a body of knowledge, including theory, has been accumulated. This knowledge should form the basis for a set of discrete, definable procedures which if followed should yield the desired results. But “should” never occurs on any day of the week. If it had, there would be no need to write this book.
Most people are actually somewhere between being a good leader and a bad leader, with the majority uncertain of the connection between their leadership and performance. A deeper knowledge of what good (or great) leadership is will then enable you to break-through and affect change in the performance of your team, organization or company like never before.
Most attempts to define leadership refer to one or more characteristics of a leader or to an action that a leader takes, such as providing a vision, getting things done through people, or challenging the status quo. Problematically, these are mere descriptions, not definitions. The individualistic actions a leader chooses to take and the idiosyncratic traits a leader exhibits do not reflect the essence of leadership. To determine what leadership is, we have to take a deeper dive. Because experts…
As leaders in the workplace, we set goals and objectives regularly. It makes business sense to decide where you want to go before deciding what to do and how to do it. And what most of us learn is that the more clearly we set those goals and objectives, the more success we have reaching them. So then, what is your goal for managing people?
Some managers have thought this through, and others have been given or have devised what they think are goals for managing their people, such as a culture to maintain and project. But let’s go further and define a universal goal that maximizes our ability to be successful, prosperous managers and leaders.
Ben managed diverse groups of people for 34+ years, including as an executive in charge of a 1,300 person unionized organization. He made all the mistakes one can make, then devised solutions for 99.9% of people management issues. Ben can take you beyond great.
