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Showing posts with the label Career

Capabilities Of a True Leader

“When opportunity comes, it’s too late to prepare.” Leading today is what prepares a leader for more and greater responsibility tomorrow. Humanness . Nobody wants to work with a perfect leader. Build collaboration and solidarity by revealing your weaknesses. Intuition . To be most effective, you need to know what’s going on without others spelling it out for you. Collect unspoken data from body language and looks given across rooms to help you intuit the underlying messages. Tough empathy . Care deeply about your employees, but accept nothing less than their very best. Uniqueness . Demonstrate that you are a singular leader by showing your unique qualities to those around you. 1. Great leaders recognize strengths in us that we don't always yet fully see in ourselves. The leader should trust his judgment more than the subordinates. It's the Pygmalion effect: expectations become self-fulfilling. Both positive and negative emotions feed on themselves. Your ...

Dealing with your boss.

Would you like a better boss? A boss who helps you obtain valuable information, win needed resources, and secure important support for your group and for you personally — in short, a boss who's a real ally and partner? If your boss provides these benefits, you're lucky. We hear far more complaints than praise from people about their bosses. If you're unlucky, this blog is for you, and its message is simple — your relationship with your boss is less a matter of luck than you think. When we talk to managers with complaints, we find they usually assume the relationship rests entirely in the hands of the boss. It is what the boss makes it, and there's little they can do to change it. Do you assume that it's your boss who sets the tone in your relationship? If so, test that assumption. Almost certainly, you have more ability than you think to shape how you work together. After all, it's a relationship of mutual dependence. You each need the other to succeed. Unless ...

Be an Optimist Without Being a Fool

There are quite a number of motivational speakers and self-improvement books out there with a surprisingly simple message: believe that success will come easily to you, and it will . There is one small problem in this argument, however, which unfortunately doesn't seem to stop anyone from making it: it is utterly false. In fact, not only is visualizing "effortless success" unhelpful, it is disastrous. This is good advice to give only if you are trying to sabotage the recipient. It is a recipe for failure. And no, I'm not overstating it. But how can this be? Isn't optimism a good thing? Yes it is. Optimism and the confidence it creates are essential for creating and sustaining the motivation you need to reach your goals. Albert Bandura , one of the founding fathers of scientific psychology, discovered decades ago that perhaps the best predictor of an individual's success is whether or not they believe they will succeed. Thousands and thousands of experiments l...