Leadership Skills | Thierry Dentice Leadership

Category: Leadership Skills (page 2 of 5)

February 14, 2020

Master Your EQ to Enhance Your Leadership Capabilities

EQ, or emotional intelligence, has become a popular topic among leaders and managers in recent years for good reason. While this skill was largely overlooked throughout the past several decades, it’s getting a much-needed resurgence while propelling effective leaders to new heights and creating unstoppable teams.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to manage yourself and your relationships effectively and is closely linked with performance and success. Use the following tips to enhance your skills to more effectively lead your team to success.

Be Self-Aware

Self-awareness is a crucial skill to have as a leader. You must be aware of your actions, how you come across to your team, and how you express yourself in certain situations. In addition to knowing how you will react to situations, you must be aware of what triggers your emotional responses. These aspects together can give you a clear picture of how to best control these actions to lead your team towards a healthier future instead of regressing. Be open to criticisms and use them as a basis to improve and develop your skills.

Be Socially Aware

Social awareness involves a sensitivity to another person’s feelings and emotions as well as your own willingness to be respectful. With more knowledge about how other people may react, you can compose a professional response without batting an eye. If your company implements a new policy that may trigger a negative reaction within your team, you can prepare them in a way that is respectful, ensures their concerns are heard, and you can make the proper adjustments to maintain efficiency.

Facilitate Collaboration

With a higher emotional intelligence, it’s possible to improve day-to-day interactions amongst those on your team. A higher EQ means you can manage larger teams more effectively by helping others work together and to motivate them to work harder in a way that inspires instead of threatens. The happier your team is the more it will show in their work. Once you prove the worth of your EQ to the team as a whole you can teach others to do the same to create a positive and productive workforce that truly values its employees.

October 9, 2019

How Leaders Make the Best Out of Mondays

For the longest time, Mondays have gotten a bad rep. They have often been seen as the mark the end of the weekend and the dreaded start of the workweek. However, Mondays can actually be the best day of the week. When it comes to being a successful leader, they make the best out of Mondays and use it as their most productive day.

Hyping Up the Team

Without a doubt, energies are very low on Mondays. Instead of letting your team sulk and dread the beginning of the week, make it a day they look forward to. A good leader will use Mondays to start the week off right and get their team members pumped. A fun and easy way to do this is to start the day off with a meeting that has complimentary donuts or simply grabbing everyone’s coffee orders. This way, your team members are happy and more likely to have a productive day.

Tackle Challenging Tasks First

It’s easy to let Mondays slip out of the way when you’re looking to just get it over with. Instead of waiting for it to just be over and waiting to be more productive on Tuesday, use Monday to get all of your toughest tasks over with. This way, by using the beginning of the week to handle your biggest challenges, the rest of the week is a breeze. You are able to put more focus on your team and their challenges. This will help your week go by much more efficiently.

Revisit Overall Vision and Purpose

Mondays are the perfect day to revisit your overall goals, vision, and purpose. Instead of just going through the motions and losing sight of the bigger picture, think about your overall objection. It only takes a few minutes to go over strategic planning and goals that align with your vision or purpose. It’s even better to go over with your team of why you all are doing what you do and what the team is working towards. This will not only motivate and inspire your team, but it will also keep the right on track and become much more efficient.

Look at Mondays as your most efficient day and the best opportunity to make your week as productive and efficient as possible.

September 17, 2019

Ways to Foster Belonging at Work

The human sense of connection is incredibly important: it impacts our health and productivity. While it may seem that belonging only matters in our personal lives, research conducted by the leadership development startup BetterUp indicates that workplace belonging is key to employee well-being and organizational functioning. Exclusion can beget both pain and psychological ailments.

BetterUp found, among other statistics, that employees see a 56% increase in job performance when they feel like they belong. Furthermore, belonging benefits workers’ careers, since those who felt highly connected received twice as many raises and were 18 times more likely to be promoted in a six month period. Cofounder and CEO of BetterUp Alexi Robichaux states that the most important assets to your company are your people. “Belonging should be at the heart of every human capital strategy.”

If you’re not sure how to do that, here are some strategies that came out of their research.

Create Allies at Work

A powerful solution to prevent feelings of exclusion is to add an ally to the team. Having an ally can counteract the 25% productivity loss seen in those who didn’t have one. This can be as simple as having someone who acknowledges and includes you. Peers make for very effective allies, and fortunately, there is no hierarchy to allyship: anyone can be an ally.

Encourage Healthy Interactions

Psychologists Jane Dutton and Emily Heaphy coined the term high-quality connections (HQCs) to describe interactions that have a positive impact on our lives and work. In a high-quality connection, each person reciprocates positive regard and care, and as a result, both feel valued. HQCs play an important role in close relationships but also have the power to unlock meaning in less intimate interactions. These interactions can be brief and emotionally neutral, but the key is that they happen regularly and are not negative.

July 30, 2019

Tips on Recovering from Failure

When we think of leaders and successful people, we usually just picture them in their successes. Seldom do we think of their failures. Failure can cause emotional pain and embarrass us, but the silver lining of failure is that it is an opportunity to grow and enrich our lives both personally and professionally.

The first gift of failure is humility. Acknowledging a mistake and/or failure takes us to a place of vulnerability. Admitting to it is powerful and helps us to affirm that we want to do the correct thing, in the case of wrongdoing, or to do better if we fell short. Humility is also a reminder that as humans, we are social and need to rely on one another.

Another gift of failure is compassion. Admitting to mistakes can be unbearably embarrassing, painful, even, but that embarrassment can increase our compassion for others. Research has shown that we tend to focus more on ourselves when we are successful and have achieved a higher status. The vulnerability of failure opens us up to connecting with others. Sally Blount, a contributor to Forbes, puts it best: “It turns out that engaging in the small joys and comaraderies of everyday life is one of the best ways to soothe a chastened ego.”

One of the best ways to recover from failure is to keep an openness to learning. Many people find they learn best through experience, and that includes experiencing failure. Of course, this isn’t easy, as we tend towards safety and comfort. The combination of humility and compassion helps us learn and better connects us with others. While success may increase confidence, it is failure that builds wisdom.

July 10, 2019

Five Things Sucessful Leaders Do Every Day

To be a leader successfully there are a number of qualities one must possess. It can be a balance that once attained is the key to a business running smoothly and prospering. For example, leaders need to be able to make critical decisions that not everyone agrees with while still empowering their employees and making them feel confident in their own positions. While maintaining this balance there are five habits that become natural to leaders in any industry.

Making Big Decisions (Quickly)

Leaders are counted on to make things happen. This means that most decisions fall to them, or at the very least they are always informed of the why’s and how’s someone else reached a critical decision. Often times there are choices to be made quickly and it’s a leaders job to keep the momentum going and make the big decision confidently. This comes with experience and skills acquired over time because while some would struggle to weigh all options, leaders are thinking a few steps ahead and able to produce an answer or solution quickly.

Challenging People

To get the best work leaders know how to challenge people while instilling confidence in them. This means knowing the capabilities of the employees and putting their minds to the task at hand. It’s important that everyone is always learning and by continually delegating and keeping people thinking, leaders allow the work environment to stay positive and fresh.

Providing Feedback

Everyone wants to feel appreciated. A successful leader is going to let their employees know that they are paying attention. By providing feedback, the relationship between the two naturally gains more trust and the chance for miscommunication narrows.

Allude Positive Attitude

Successful leaders are very aware of the benefits of a positive work space and they seek ways to improve morale. When people see their leader alluding a positive attitude it causes stability and inspiration. Everyone should feel like they contribute to the goals of the company, and leaders make sure to keep the energy motivating.

Keep Learning

Finally, to stay successful one must always be evolving. To stop learning is to stop growing and that’s the last thing a successful leader will let happen. While inspiring and teaching others, leaders must continue to educate themselves. By staying knowledgeable about trends, news, and any other statistics that can affect business the leader can be sure to also continue being a teacher to others that look to them for help and support.

April 18, 2019

What Successful Leaders do Differently

In today’s business world, becoming an effective and successful leader requires skill building in areas such as integrity, empathy, and the setting of healthy personal boundaries. Fortunately, learning to strengthen skills in these areas is something that anyone can do with enough effort; it may require time and hard work to master leadership skills, it is true, but the results can be truly life-changing. Here are just a few of the qualities that set successful leaders apart from the pack, and why they matter more than ever.

Great leaders admit when they’re wrong

Anyone who has had a manager who refuses to own up to their mistakes knows that an irresponsible leader quickly sinks company morale. Being an effective leader doesn’t just mean keeping one’s word when times are tough, and deadlines are looming, it also means admitting when one has chosen the wrong course of action. Without taking personal responsibility for mistakes, there is little guarantee that the same problems will not arise again and again in the future, and that is an outcome that can spell disaster for a business. Indeed, to be a truly successful leader in the long term, a sense of personal responsibility is a must-have skill.

Great leaders don’t confuse being nice with being a pushover

Unable to cope with the idea of being disliked, some leaders want to accommodate the demands of everyone they meet, despite the fact that their need to please others may be undermining their ability to lead effectively. Focused on being the office “nice guy,” these leaders too often burn themselves out by taking personal responsibility for making everyone around them happy. While kindness is an essential quality of effective leadership, it’s important to recognize the difference between caring about others and becoming their personal doormat.

Great leaders empathize with employees

As anyone who has seen the negative effect of a high employee turnover rate on a company’s reputation, employee satisfaction isn’t just about making a good salary or negotiating a competitive benefits package. Without empathetic leaders, simply put, a workplace becomes a toxic place for everyone involved. Just as being a pushover is a detrimental quality in a leader, a manager who does not empathize with their employees will often push talented workers towards better opportunities at other companies. For these reasons, knowing the difference between setting healthy boundaries and setting impossibly rigid boundaries is an essential skill for a truly successful leader.

While it can feel intimidating to begin the path towards mastery of interpersonal and leadership skills, the truth is that top-notch communication abilities in business can be developed with time and dedication. Becoming a great leader doesn’t happen overnight, but fortunately, the personal rewards of a journey towards becoming a great leader are more than worth the effort. For those willing to take the high road towards business success, that is life at its best!

January 11, 2019

Why Entitlement Is The Ultimate Leadership Derailer

Entitlement has become something of a buzzword that gets tossed around and even mistakenly applied in a number of erroneous ways. Many times, we think of someone as being “entitled” when they simply have something we do not have, but want. In truth, entitlement is the belief that you have earned (or are entitled to) something that you have not earned. Therefore, in many cases, the person who labels someone else as “entitled” is often actually the entitled one. Because they believe they deserve something someone else has, but have not actually done what it takes to earn the thing the other person has. Entitlement is a particularly destructive quality in leaders. Here are three reasons why.

Entitlement literally keeps you from leading

By its very nature, leadership is embodied by movement. You can’t follow a parked car. Entitled leaders generally see their role as one of giving orders or making demands, rather than of setting an example for others to follow. They believe their job is to tell others what to do. To speak something means to dictate. The person that does something that enables others to follow them is a leader. The person that tells others what to do is – quite literally – a dictator.

Entitlement undermines your own authority

One thing that entitled leaders fail to understand is the difference between position, title and leadership. A business or company can give you a title and a certain amount of authority to make certain decisions. The authority to lead, however, can only be given by those that choose to follow. Like the old saying goes, if you think you’re leading, but no one is following, you’re just out standing in a field.

Entitled leaders create entitled cultures

“Do as I say, not as I do” leadership rarely (if ever) succeeds. About the only time entitled leaders don’t create an entitled culture is if they are not actually the leader and the real leader is setting a better example. If you feel like your workplace is riddled with entitled behavior and you are the boss, the first place to start addressing it is with the “man (or woman) in the mirror.”

October 15, 2018

How to Deal With Conflict in the Workplace

Conflict in the workplace is always tricky. At its worst, it can practically ruin careers, and even minor strife can make going to work every day feel like a serious chore. If you find yourself at odds with a coworker or even a supervisor, here are a few things that might help you work through it.

Communicate

Many workplace conflicts arise from poor communication. A co-worker might misunderstand something you did or said, or they might lack a key piece of information that either one of you might need to do your jobs. Situations like this are always easy to clear up, but you need to communicate to make that happen. Speak to the other person to find out if there is any misunderstanding, and go from there. As long as you both act like professionals and agree to work together to clear up any misconceptions, things will be just fine.

Don’t Get Emotional

Of course, it’s going to be harder to clear the air with someone if either of you gets too emotional. People tend to say and do rash things when they’re upset, but you cannot let this happen at your workplace. That’s the kind of thing that can cost people their jobs and ruin careers. If you or the other person are too upset to talk, take some time to cool off or talk to someone else who can act as a mediator. Once both of you can remain calm, you can address your conflict rationally.

Prevent Conflict Whenever You Can

Conflict can’t always be avoided, but you can address any potential issues before they turn anyone against each other. If you feel that there is a potential conflict between you and another person or between two other coworkers, address it and come up with some solutions before things get ugly.

Pick Your Battles

Even though issues will come up whenever people spend any amount of time with each other, you cannot start fights over every minor disagreement. Some things are worth arguing about, but you would be surprised at how much you can just ignore. If you’re going to spend about 40 hours a week with people, you cannot make enemies out of them simply because of your personalities. As long as neither of you isn’t doing anything that creates a hostile work environment, you can learn to accept and get along with just about anybody.

July 31, 2018

Four Ways to Apply Emotional Intelligence in Leadership

Emotional intelligence allows us to be more aware of our feelings and behaviors and those of others. Because of this, it’s an essential trait of strong leaders. Here are four ways emotional intelligence is an asset in the workplace.

Know Yourself

While the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of the term “emotional intelligence” may have to do with the ability to understand and empathize with others, it is critical first and foremost that you know yourself. A lack of self-awareness translates to a lack of capacity for growth; you must be conscious of your own strengths and worth as well as your own mistakes, flaws, and shortcomings. This will not only help you to understand which areas require your focus regarding growth but will affect how you navigate communicating and negotiating with others by being cognizant of your strengths and weaknesses.

Every Word Counts

People with emotional intelligence can use their intuition and what they know of their relationships with others to determine how they should approach different subjects with different individuals. Emotional intelligence allows for a gauge of different responses and how to calmly and effectively handle these responses. Besides knowing how to respond, people with emotional intelligence also know how to listen.

Control Your Emotions or They Will Control You

There’s much truth to be found in the timeless proverb, “Control your emotions, or they will control you.” This is especially true when conducting oneself as a leader. Once you can properly identify your emotions and standard responses to certain stimuli, you need to practice regulating them to prevent an accidental explosion. Being able to remain stoic and calm in a tense situation is important, but just as important is being able to process and release any negative emotions in a healthy way to avoid buildup.

Walk in Another Man’s Shoes

Emotionally intelligent people can pick up on cues, both verbal and nonverbal, that help them to understand how to interact with different people in different environments effectively. They can consider multiple perspectives and are thus skilled in authentically sympathizing. They have also learned to focus more on understanding than on hasty judgment. Because they understand viewpoints aside from their own, they can give more objective feedback. While ‘walking in another man’s shoes’ may not be possible in the literal sense, leaders who possess this tenet of emotional intelligence are valued for their abilities to listen and respond genuinely.

July 17, 2018

Five Types of Leaders in the Workplace

No two leaders are the same. With so many different kinds of employees, there needs to be different kinds of leaders suited to their needs. Certain styles of leadership will work for one person, but not another. It’s up to a good leader to determine the style that works best for their team and stick with that. Here are five of the most common types of leaders you’ll see in the workplace.

Transactional

A transactional leader is one who rewards their employees when they reach a certain goal. This type of leader will set goals with their team and use a carrot-and-stick approach to get those goals accomplished. With rewards for good behavior, there are often punishments for bad practices. This style can be effective in the short-term, but most employees won’t feel they can reach their full potential under this rule.

Laissez-faire

Originally an economics term, laissez-faire literally translates to “let them do.” This style of leader is known for their hands-off approach, allowing their employees to take control over their work. This style of leadership is especially effective in creative settings, or when managing very experienced employees. However, this style hinders those that rely on feedback from their supervisor. With no leadership or supervision from a leader, there can be a lack of control and lead to poor production. Research has shown that this style is the least effective and least favorite of employees.

Autocratic

Autocratic leadership is similar to transactional leadership, just to a more extreme level. This type of leader has complete power over their employees and rarely listen to employees or share any power. This type of leadership is common in military environments but does not lead to great results in a corporate workplace. Because these types of work environments have little or no flexibility, it can lead to a high turnover rate and frequently absent employees.

Transformational

Transformational leaders are considered the most desirable among employees. These types of leaders use effective communication to create an intellectually stimulating environment. This style focuses on initiating change in a work environment. This leader sets high expectations and motivates their employees to do more than they originally intended.

Democratic

Democratic leaders put a high value on team input. This style boosts morale because employees get to feel that they have a say in the decision-making process, though ultimately the final decision rests in the hand of the leader. Workers report high levels of job satisfaction in these environments. One downside to this style is that decision-making takes longer, making it an ineffective option for an environment where quick-decision making is crucial.

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