CEO Leadership Best Practices Journal™

Turn Up the Leadership Volume

Recent projections suggest a bottoming and, perhaps more optimistically, some upturn in the economy. However, many US-based CEOs are less convinced and suggest that any significant recovery will not occur until 2010.

Let us remember that as leaders, we too have been navigating through a very turbulent and stressful period. Many leaders have been distracted from more strategic initiatives because of the pressures of managing day-to-day challenges, including fundamental business survival. It is now time to reignite our passion about the business, convey optimism about the future, and turn up the volume on our best leadership skills. Turning up the volume is a metaphor for reallocating even more time to leadership best practice fundamentals; i.e., those behaviors that enable you to perform at your best and inspire the best from your people. It is the time to recommit to ourselves, our leadership teams, our employees, and our organizations.

HPS often refers to employees as the audience. In this context, we suggest that the audience is constantly listening. They are also observing, speculating, rumoring, interpreting and translating, often based not on what they are hearing from their leaders, but on what they are not hearing (information, clarification, etc.). In the absence of real information from leaders and managers, employees try to surmise what is going on in the organization and often create their own reality. This reality may be very different from — and counterproductive to — the culture that the leader is trying to build in the organization.

What this means for leaders is that we are definitely "on" from the moment we enter the work environment. Listening requires the ability to hear, and hearing is influenced by, among other things, volume. Listening is also essential to understanding. Thus, turning up the leadership volume can enable more effective communication and reinforce the "right" culture of the organization.

Rationale for Turning Up the Leadership Volume

• Reignite Passion: Reignite passion within your organization, a spirit of competition and winning, and work with your leadership team to develop the conditions that support a positive Pygmalion Effect. The Pygmalion Effect suggests that our positive expectations of others' potential have a dramatic effect on others abilities to achieve and perform at their highest potential.
• Leverage Leadership Best Practices: Exemplary leaders build and sustain trust, model compassion, create stability and offer hope. The Gallup organization recently published a research-based explanation of why people follow leaders. The research suggests that people follow leaders who help them fulfill four basic needs: trust, compassion, stability and hope. Learn more about this in a previous HPS newsletter about "What's Right" Leadership®.
• Shift Gears: Shift — or at least be prepared to shift — to a higher gear in order to ensure that your employees, teams and organization are poised and ready to respond to improved business conditions, customer needs and related expectations. It could also be an ideal time to grow market share by enticing new customers away from the competition.
• Retain Key Talent: Reinforce your organization's commitment to being an employer of choice to support key talent retention and to attract new talent. Don't think for a moment that your best employees are not vulnerable to competitive opportunities. Do think about enticing your competitors' key talent to join your team.

Suggestions for Turning Up the Leadership Volume

• Be Seen and Heard: Increase your visibility at all levels of the organization. Begin talking about key economic indicators, the signs of recovery, and how they will positively impact the business. Instill renewed hope and confidence as part of the organizational culture and serve the needs of your employees.
• Employ Deliberate Communications: Inquire about what is important to employees and find ways to address those issues. Solicit candid feedback in preparation for your verbal and written communications. Remember, you only have one opportunity to get it right the first time.
• Enlist Advocates: Select trusted individuals within your organization to serve as advocates/champions and to reinforce key communications. They can also provide a direct pipeline to you and your leadership team about what employees want and need to hear and understand.
• Dust Off the Goals: Remove the dust that may have collected on the goals these past few months. Adjust to realistic levels — perhaps even raise the bar a bit — and establish doable yet challenging goals in the months ahead.
• Reestablish and Sustain Momentum: Search for and immediately recognize early successes as a catalyst to reestablish and sustain momentum. Recall the Flywheel Concept in Jim Collins' book, Good to Great, or better yet, reread the book or contact us for an Executive Summary.

Good leadership and business results are simply no longer good enough. CEOs, other senior executives and young professionals aspiring to be tomorrow's top leaders must learn how to distinguish and elevate themselves to greatness by performing at their best and inspiring the best from their people.

To learn more about how we can help you perform at your best and inspire the best in your people, visit www.hp-strategies.com.

Kindest regards,
Larry & Melinda

HUMAN PERFORMANCE STRATEGIES, LLC
Executive Offices, Austin, Texas USA
www.hp-strategies.com

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