personal leadership | Bigg Success

Tag Archive: personal leadership

The Question to Ask About Poor Performance

Written on August 27, 2009 by admin in Personal Branding

It’s Back-to-School time and we’re doing ten posts on lifelong learning. It’s hard to believe but we’re already at Post #9.

Today, we want to discuss leadership. It pertains to personal leadership, but we’re going to focus on leading others. We’ve been looking at learning opportunities; we’ll discuss this subject as a teaching opportunity.

___

Hear George & Mary-Lynn discuss today's topic on The Bigg Success Show! Click the purple player to listen while you read: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

___

When the performance of someone in your charge falls short of expectations, there’s a very important question to ask. You start with this because the answer determines your next move. The question is:

Have I done everything in my power to help this person perform up to expectations?

If the answer is no, determine what else you can do. Then do it.

If the answer is yes, then you may have to take more drastic measures.

Start with yourself for two reasons:

To give your employee every benefit of every doubt. After all, either you or your predecessor saw something worthwhile or this person wouldn’t be working for you.

You can control yourself; you can’t control anyone else. So if the answer comes back on you, it means the solution may be easier.

___

Get the tips and tools you need to be a BIGG success. Subscribe to the Bigg Success Weekly – it’s FREE!

___

2 categories of sub-par performance

You can summarize all the reasons why an employee may not be hitting his or her target into two categories:

It is either a knowing problem or a doing problem.

In general, knowing problems are easier to solve than doing problems. When you ask yourself if you’ve done everything you can, you hope you can honestly say “No”. Then when you ask yourself if it appears to be a knowing problem or a doing problem, you hope to honestly answer that it’s a knowing issue.

Then you feel like there’s a real shot at getting the employee on track. They may need encouragement. They may need more training. They may need context for the work they perform.

Teachable vs. learnable

With most jobs, there are elements that are teachable and there are elements that are learnable. You can teach someone how to get past a knowing problem. They have to learn how to get over a doing problem.

Think about it – you’ve probably read, watched or heard directions on how to do something. You thought you had it down … until you tried to do it.

Implementation can be difficult to say the least. But at some point, you get it.

The best decision may be the most difficult one

Your employee has to get it in a reasonably timely manner. If not, you face a difficult choice. You may need to part ways with this employee.

It’s important to keep something in mind. Let’s say you’ve given your best effort to help your employee get up to par. Your employee has given his or her best effort to get on track.

It still isn’t happening. You’re probably doing everyone a favor by making that difficult choice. That doesn’t make it easy, but it can give you some relief about your decision.

Great leaders take responsibility for the performance of every individual in their charge. When someone isn’t performing up to expectations, they quickly take action to get them back on track. That leads to bigg success!

Thanks so much for checking in with us today.

We love synergy here at Bigg Success. So next time we’ll discuss five activities that will make you healthy, wealthy and wise all at the same time. Please join us!

Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

Subscribe to The Bigg Success Show in iTunes.

Subscribe to the Bigg Success feed.

Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/biggsuccess/00469-082709.mp3

Lessons about Friendship from Man's Best Friend

Why Work Life Balance Doesn't Work

Does Barack Obama's Favorite Music Make Him More Interesting?

Tags: audioblog, back to school, bigg success, Business, career, employee performance, george krueger, great leaders, life, lifelong learning, Management, mary-lynn foster, personal leadership, podcast, problems, solutions, the bigg success show

0 Comments

The Need to Lead – Part 1

Written on February 17, 2009 by George Krueger & Mary-Lynn Foster in Leadership, Personal Growth

We are thrilled today to talk with Douglas E. Welch on The Bigg Success Show. Douglas is the host of Career Opportunities, a fantastic podcast where he helps people build the career they deserve. He is also a writer and computer consultant with articles published in Wired, MacWorld, and the Los Angeles Times. As if that’s not enough, he also conducts seminars on podcasting for schools and businesses.

___

Hear George & Mary-Lynn talk with Douglas on The Bigg Success Show! Click the purple player: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

___

marylynn One of the things we wanted to talk with you about today is that you have declared 2009 “The Year of Leadership.”

___

douglas This year was a definite conscious decision to choose a theme. It started about three years ago when I decided that, working alone in my home office, I had really become disengaged from my community – both the tech community that I work in and the community in general. So for my own personal decision, I decided to make that year the Year of Reconnecting and Getting Out. In 2008, I stumbled across the idea of the Year of Visibility, which I also think is very important. It’s about people making visible what they do and how they do it. So when 2009 rolled around, I realized that this was getting to be a great idea for each year. I was already working on a column and a podcast on leadership. If there’s ever been a year in my lifetime when I really needed to exercise leadership and get that out of other people as well, this is the year. We’ve simply been lacking leadership in a lot of ways across the entire world.

___

george I love that you said you need to do this. When you announced this on your show, you were really clear that it was about personal leadership leading to engaging a community and getting other followers.

___

douglas Everything starts at home. Sometimes I think we forget that. I could see in myself areas where I needed to lead more – whether that’s in my business, in my podcast, in my column or whatever. I think a lot of people have gotten the idea that leadership only exists “out there” somewhere. It’s something that takes place in the executive suite, in the boardroom, or in higher levels of government. The fact is that leadership is a fundamental aspect of our lives that we exercise – or should exercise – every single day.

___

marylynn In your Year of Leadership, what are some of the steps that you’ve been taking? What challenges have you faced?

___

douglas I remember when I worked in a corporate office and lunch time would roll around and the question came up about where we were going to go for lunch. And no one would decide! It’s kind of a joke, but kind of not. One of the simplest things you can do is start making decisions. Too many of us abdicate our decision making. We don’t decide and face problems with that down the road. So most fundamentally, it’s just stepping up and making decisions. Now I realize why we don’t make decisions. We’re scared – scared of failing, scared of making the wrong decisions. The fact is there is no wrong decision because each decision you make brings you closer to what you need. If something doesn’t work, you say, “You know what, that didn’t work. We’re going to try this now.” The point is to keep moving forward and to keep making those decisions so you don’t suffer what I’ve heard described as “analysis paralysis.” You spend all your time looking at all the different options out there and never end up doing anything.

___

marylynn I think one of the scariest things when you’re trying to step up your leadership role is that you might have to challenge the existing leadership. How do you tip toe around that?

___

douglas One of the ways is what we’ve already discussed. You start making decisions for yourself. It’s a relatively non-threatening way of pushing those decisions up the silo. One of the best things we can do as a human being is set a good example by our actions. As people see you making decisions, it helps them to take the reins as well and move forward.

___