Three days, three kinds of participants (volunteers of organizers together with roletakers, who made the conference happen, contestants along with speakers, who came to share their ideas and the audience, who joined to get inspired) plus three workshops dedicated to leadership.
Acknowledging all the fantastic keynote speeches and workshops at the Future starts today Toastmasters conference I emphasise only those (3+1) workshops which gave me fresh ideas about leadership.
We were lucky to learn how to build successful teams from Lippner Tamás as he talked about the three golden rules of leadership on Friday evening.
Did you know that 77% of organization experience a leadership gap? This means that most managers use their position, which in the lowest level of leading, instead of influencing people. Yes, you’ve guessed it right, if using your position is the lowest level of leadership, Influence is the lighest level of it. At least according to John C.Maxwell who wrote a book about The 5 levels of leadership.
Leading volunteers is the highest form of leadership, as you have to be inspiring to lead volunteers. Don’t even motivate, since that would lead to external motivation only, however if you inspire them, it will ignite their engines. As a leader it’s your responsibilty to build the confidence in people, so they can believe in themselves.
The first golden rule is build a great team. How to do that?
- recruit better people than yourself
- be a servant leader
- have choices
- don’t motivate
- have the right posture
Understand what real value you can offer to them.
The second golden rule is develop your people.
- help them out of their comfort zone
- keep people accountable
- give valuable feedback
A continuous feedback given immediately (within 24 or maximum 48 hours) about the action and not the person is valuable feedback. And the most important aspect of the feedback is the intention. If they feel that the intention is good, even a hard feedback is acceptable. Should people feel you don’t like them, it won’t work, let it be the most professional feedback.
The third pillar is leading by personality types, and in case you know Tamás, you could guess it’s the DISC model.
The magic three in the last pillar would be:
- build a team of different personality types
- understand motivations
- have a leadership culture for all
You most probably attract people who are similar to you, but you need all different types of personalities, whom you need to accept and understand.
Leadership is a skill in which you can be better at, we have learnt from Simon Bucknall’s Saturday workshop.
How to engage your listener’s attention? Use the P.I.T.C.H. process.
First and foremost get to the problem. What are the problems I am responsible to solve? If the listeners know the problem, they can relate to what I’m saying. Then inject emotions. Show them the pain and then the pleasure. Where you want to be in the future. Invite them to cross a bridge together. Tap into their world by using their language, let it be auditive, visual, kinestetic, etc., and here comes knowing your audience. Then follows credibility, which is all about being specific. Showing small number of credible examples of my value. It is the way I present myself. Am I the first, the only or the best at many? I need to sharpen the distinctive of my unique value. And finally help them take the next step. It’s our job to make it easy to do, therefore remember, baby steps are good too. The smallest possible step one can do.
This PICTH process can be applied at sales, at leadership or at any other communication situation where being effective is the goal.
Building communication and leadership skills are the main goals of Toastmasters. Could not be a better title of the Sunday workshop of Florian Bay, as Speak to lead! We have learnt the three pillars of leadership from him.
Who is an effective leader? What makes an effective leader? John F. Kennedy, Elon Musk, Váradi József. What’s the link that connects them?
An effective leader has the ability to come up with a vision, he knows the direction how to get there and is able to gather all the neccessary resources needed and finally he can also communicate that vision effectively. Vision, direction, communication.
Prior going into details, we need to stop for a second. Why? Because every pillar needs a base to be built on, and this should be self-awareness. It means that leadership begins with ourselves. As Sun Tzu told in The Art of War: „If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will always be defeated. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory you will also suffer defeat. If you know the enemy and know yourself, you will be invincible.”
Now we can turn to what vision is and how you can develop that.
Vision is „the ability to think about or plan the future with imagination or wisdom.” There are a number of ways you can develop it: you may choose a top-down or buttom-up direction, may answer to a problem, or respond to a preceived need, even you can use a snowballing idea.
Direction means we know what we can do to fulfil that vision. We need to have a strategy, which means being able to analyze the current vs. the desired situation, develop the required resources, finally pre-empt obstacles and challenges.
Remember, knowledge is power. The more you know, the more your team knows, the more you can leverage.
Should your vision be compelling, but when you cannot communicate it clearly, you will not reach your goals. Clear communication enables exchanging ideas, allows persuadig and rallying others. Tell clearly why are we doing what we are doing. Why is our vision unique, new or necessary at all.
Finally the conference ended with a compelling interactive workshop, where among others we have learnt that to be the best leader we can be, we need to know our emotions, manage our emotions moreover recognize and understand other people’s emotions. Should you be a visionary leader who articualtes a shared mission and gives long-term direction, a participative leader who gets consensus inputs to generate new ideas and build commitment, a coaching leader who fosters personal and career development or an affiliative leader sho creates trust and harmony, emotional intelligence helps you to achieve success.
