TGIF – Listen Up If You Want To Be A Better Leader

As the week winds down, we wind down with some tidbits for your information, education, health, and enjoyment.

Quote of the Week: “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

Humor Break:

Bev: Al, why can’t you ever give me a straight answer. Whenever I ask you a question you always answer with a question.

Al: When do I do that?

Stat of the Week: If you want to be a better leader (or with slight modification, a better parent) frequently ask your employees these 10 questions:

1. What’s going well in your role? Any wins (big or small) this week?
2. What challenges are you facing? Where are you stuck?
3. What is the business doing, or can be doing, to make you more successful?
4. How are you feeling? How’s the morale in your group?
5. On a scale of 1-10, how happy are you? Why?
6. What’s the best thing that happened to you this week, either at work or outside of it?
7. What can we do to improve the product or service provided by our company?
8. If you owned the company, what’s one thing you would do differently?
9. What were some great contributions made by other team members?
10. How I can be a better leader?

Action Tip: No time like the start of the year. How about making a New Year’s Resolution to frequently ask employees some or all of these questions. Listening does not imply agreement. But it is a fantastic source of knowledge and one of the best ways to be seen as a great boss. It is a “twofur”! You end up knowing more and looking smarter.

Self-Development Corner: There are no new courses scheduled by Coursera the rest of this month. But stay tuned. My favorite free online university will have more than 500 offerings in several different languages and from several different countries in 2014.

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.