The Five Basic Leader Behaviour Skills

Posted on March 19, 2019 by Catherine Osborne

At the heart of organizational performance and a performance driven culture is performance at the individual level – and more specifically, individual leader behaviour skills. To help you reframe and refocus your thinking on behaviour competency to drive performance, consider the following key behaviour skills essential to creating and sustaining the highly effective relationships necessary in a performance driven culture.

1. Build and Maintain a Core Foundation Linked to Behaviour Based Expectations.
If you lack the clarity of knowing your values and what you believe, you will lack consistency in behaviour that drives optimum performance. A clear statement of corporate values allows for clearly articulated behaviour-based expectations that can be reflected in individual performance appraisals.

2. Accept Responsibility and Take Initiative for Performance.
Technical competence is the ability to get things done and deliver results — doing the right thing, the right way, for the right reasons. Do not make excuses, do not blame shift, and do not allow yourself to become a victim to avoid accepting personal responsibility.

3. Hold Yourself Accountable.
Accountability is more than just adherence to rules. Accountability is a moral skill aligning values to behaviour. Accountability is the most difficult task for any leader at any level of the organization. Great leaders and their highly functional teams are able to hold themselves and others accountable in a culture of mutual respect to drive performance.

4. Pursue Effective Communication.
We have all been taught that the key to communication is listening. This is true but you first must care (moral skill) before you can listen (behavioural skill) to understand effectively (technical skill). Effective communication, as a highly influential trust behaviour, requires caring first, and seeking to understand before demanding to be understood.

5. The Fifth Competency – The Artful Apology
At the heart of sustaining highly effective relationships is the skill of expressing an artful apology.

Connecting leader behaviour to a performance driven culture requires a corporative attitude that begins with the skill of Positive Presence. Positive Presence is a new and deliberate way of thinking and behaving that makes the connection between human energy and behaviour and is easily practiced and developed right on the job. For many, it is just a lot of common sense, but for others it is a slow and gentle process that requires the help of both team mates and leaders.

Tagged with: accountability, behaviour, communication, culture, human energy, performance, values
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What Worked Then, Won’t Work Now!

Posted on March 12, 2019 by Catherine Osborne

The prevalence of knowledge workers and the knowledge workforce is actually less than three decades old, and we all know change is mostly slow and painful. But the truth of the matter is what worked for success in the 1990’s will absolutely not work in the 21^st century, for two very big reasons. First, our front line workers are now highly educated, and more times than not, professionals in their own right, and management and leadership skills of the 1990’s will not fly with the new front line staffers. And second, the nature of the work itself – knowledge work – brings with it innate stresses that organizations are only now starting to recognize and respond to.

Knowledge workers, the knowledge workforce, and the nature of knowledge work itself are not going away, and for the most part, will not become any less stressful. The chaos, complexity and ambiguity of organizations in today’s era of knowledge and connection are here to stay. What must change is how we support and train our leaders and managers, and how we lead and manage our workforce. The technical aspect of the knowledge economy is set and leaders must respond and evolve accordingly. Most organizations understand that the performance of their knowledge workers at the individual level, whether it’s the front line, mid-management, or executive suite, can make or break the business.

Performance management has traditionally focused on clarifying and measuring organizational objectives and outcomes, as well as setting goals and monitoring results of our human resources. For the past two decades the spotlight for management and leadership training has been on team and work-group dynamics as more and more we become organizations of knowledge-based technicians and professionals that must combine collective expertise to achieve goals and objectives. The corporate world is very aware of the power of a great team – the power of a group people to attain the unattainable – the power of a group of professionals with diverse skills to reach a higher potential than any single individual could ever attain on their own.

At the heart of a high-functioning integrated team in a performance driven culture is performance at the individual level – and more specifically, ‘influential leader’ behaviour skills. Every team member is an influential leader regardless of rank or title. What’s more, people pay more attention to behaviour than to words. It is influential-leader behaviour, not words, that determines how engaged, agile and productive the team is. Influential-leader behaviour skills are what we ‘see’ in the workplace. These are the behaviours of collaboration and connection. These behaviours have been studied and the science has confirmed that they only occur when individuals have cultivated a positive and energized mindset focused on team performance and goals.

The skill of Positive Presence is the innate ability in every individual to adjust for and create a positive and energized mind-set. It is a learned skill for a new way of thinking and being … and it is unique to every individual. It is also the intrinsic skill that drives the influential-leader behaviours of collaboration and connection.

To survive and succeed in today’s work environment calls for a new kind of training and support that starts with a focus on individual mindset and behaviour. The skill of Positive Presence makes the connection between individual mindset and/or behaviour and individual human energy. Developing and growing the skill of Positive Presence is a journey of awareness, relationships and organizational connection that will bring the human element of organizational performance to the forefront of success in today’s knowledge economy of connection.

Tagged with: ambiguity, behaviour, chaos, collaboration, complexity, connection, culture, human energy, integrated team, knowledge work, knowledge workers, knowledge workforce, mindset, Performance management, team, work-group dynamics
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Jerks at Work

Posted on March 5, 2019 by Catherine Osborne

No one wants to work with the proverbial jerk at work. These people are disruptive to performance and productivity and are now making their organizations targets for lawsuits. Note that performance failure typically is not the result of the absence of technical skill but incompetence in behavioural skill.

You may gain higher levels of organizational responsibility based on your technical skill and performance, but your overall success is clearly dependent on your social/behavioural relationship skills. The truth is that the so-called soft skills of behaviour are really the hard skills that create the measure of influence for performance success. Time and again the fundamental problems related to the lack of engagement and work performance enhancement is related to how people consistently experience their leader’s and peers’ negative behaviour. Performance failure is almost always directly linked to the absence of consistent, positive behaviour, as individual behaviour is singularly the most important predictor to organizational performance.

As a result, everyone in the organization needs to be able to confront their own behaviour. Sadly, few people have the courage and willingness, or even the awareness, to do so on their own. Consequently, it is imperative for leadership at all levels within an organization to establish accountability within their performance culture. With accountability you then align behaviour to organizational values to create and sustain highly effective relationships that powers engagement and drives organizational performance.

Learning the skill of Positive Presence brings the accountability for behaviour back to the individual level and provides a vocabulary with which people and help each other develop a new awareness of themselves and those around them. Today’s knowledge-based organizations that require highly educated individuals to bring their specialism and experience together with others for a common goal are facing unique challenges. Not only do they require a clearly articulated mutual, beneficial, and meaningful purpose for their workers, they also require a new kind of leadership awareness.

The science is clear. Negative, disruptive, and ineffective behaviours that arise from individual negative emotional energy is one of the greatest risks to organizational success in today’s knowledge-based environment that depends on a person’s mind capacity (working-brain) for performance. Did you know that people behaviour is the physical manifestation of a person’s mind-capacity?

Today’s organizational climate is increasingly more competitive and organizations are more complex and ambiguous than ever before in history. Learning the skill of Positive Presence is a programmatic, systematic methodology that will develop and sustain the necessary work culture, team force, individual mind-competencies, and explicit behaviour skills that can thrive in the complex, ambiguous and dynamic environment of today’s global economy.

Tagged with: accountability, behavioural skill, consistent behaviour, leadership, mind capacity, positive behaviour, positive presence, purpose, responsibility, technical skill
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The Cost of No Change

Posted on February 26, 2019 by Catherine Osborne

Changing behaviour is not something we like to do. Generally, being human means we lack the willingness to change even when we have the knowledge and the capability to do so. In fact, we lack the willingness to change even when we know doing so serves our own best interest in the most critical personal, familial, and professional relationships.

You see, our brain has evolved to focus on the negative – to keep us alive and safe from man-eating tigers. What’s more, when our brain senses change – of any kind, no matter how small – it automatically goes into the ‘fight, flight, freeze’ response, unless of course, we have consciously trained it not to.

In a moment of self- reflection, ask yourself the following question, “Are my current habits and behaviours getting me to where I want to go?” If the answer is “No” you need to consider making some changes, even it is just a matter of setting aside a few minutes each day for self-reflection on where you want to be and how you are going to get there. Remember though, that the first step in making any change is to first overcome your natural propensity against change itself – and the easiest way to do this is to learn the skill of Positive Presence.

Far too many people are unaware of how they are perceived by family, friends, and professional colleagues. We all know and it is easy for us to recognize, other people with bad habits, and disturbing, and disruptive behaviours. The harder thing is recognizing those same bad habits and behaviours in our self. While it may be true that what we think about our behaviour is personal and intimate, our behaviour itself is never private. Remember this – behaviour lapses are obvious to everyone except the person who commits them.

At the organizational level, there are all kinds of behaviours that damage and destroy relationships and professional careers. Sadly, many of these behaviours most likely exist and are prevalent in your own organizational culture. Gone are the days of tolerance for the “good old boy” jokes and sexual innuendos. Sexual harassment, discrimination, unethical, illegal and other toxic behaviours have always been destructive to relationships and organizational performance and remain so today. The question is not whether such behaviours are affecting employee engagement, energy and creativity, but to what degree are such behaviours impacting your performance results, at what emotional cost to your employees, and at what financial cost to you?

Tagged with: behaviour, change, disruptive behaviours, positive presence, relationships
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The Secret to Effective, Functional Relationships

Posted on February 19, 2019 by Catherine Osborne

There is a fundamental truth about organizational performance. The majority of people you know, yourself included, have a legitimate need for effective, functional relationships – personal, familial, and professional. It is actually these relationships that make you human and without which you cannot survive.

In fact, research coming from the fields of neuroscience and quantum physics suggests that much of who you are resides in your subconscious and therefore a huge amount of self-awareness is needed in order to create effective, functional, and professional relationships in the work place. But here is the reality check. Few people are willing to do the hard work at the personal level to create and sustain those relationships.

When you ask the question of how to achieve a “high performing culture,” you must begin by treating culture like any other performance indicator. This is accomplished by developing and sustaining effective and functional relationships among key leaders and their teams within the organization. And, as with any performance process, you do this through continuous feedback and improvement of relationships at the individual level.

Effective behaviour is unique to every organization and must be explicitly identified at the organizational level, the team level and most importantly, at the individual level. Survey upon survey continues to reveal that core members of an organization rate mutual respect as the singular most important organizational value. Organizational performance is predicated upon every individual in the organization learning, applying, and sustaining, effective behaviour skills – the kind of behaviour that exemplifies mutual respect.

The secret to effective behaviour skills that lead to effective functional relationships is the skill of Positive Presence – your ability to adjust for and create a positive and energized mindset through conscious thought processes. If you desire to become a “go to” person in your organization, you have to accept personal responsibility and accountability for your behaviour. Such behaviour includes all that is related to what we choose to think, what we choose to believe, how we create and focus our attitudes, and how we choose to form our habits. And sometimes, it is not so much about what behaviours are effective, as it is about what behaviours are ineffective.

Tagged with: continuous feedback, culture, functional relationships, Improvement, mutual respect, organizational value, positive presence, self-awareness
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Do You Have A Fully Optimized Brain And Mind?

Posted on February 12, 2019 by Catherine Osborne

Enlightened leaders recognize the importance of self-awareness and effective collaborative relationships and they focus their efforts on building connections with the people they lead. Collaborative relationships in the workplace are created through a special kind of ‘connection’ with others – a connection that can only be made with a fully optimized brain and mind. Optimizing your brain and mind, and the brains and minds of the people you lead, requires a strategic approach to development of quality cognitive behaviour. The six behaviour attitudes of a strategic approach to quality cognitive behavior development are as follows:

1. Develop Attentiveness
Enlightened leaders give their people their undivided attention every day. Whether in leader huddles, using the old Hewlett-Packard “leading by wandering around” approach, or health care’s rounding for outcomes, suffice it to say leadership connection begins by being available and genuinely attentive to the needs of the people doing the work of the organization.

2. Develop Alertness
Enlightened leaders have a highly developed empathic sense. They are able to detect when an emotional state of another person is in distress and then they respond to what they see. Failing to be alert to the emotional state of other people is a major impediment to execution of strategy. When you sense a negative state, the skill of Positive Presence equips you with the words and/or behaviour change needed to mitigate and/or entirely eliminate the negative.

3. Develop Appreciation
Enlightened leaders are constantly looking for qualities to praise people for – daily! All too often leaders are critically-minded and quick to verbalize errors. Leaders should spend a great deal of time identifying what people do right and acknowledging them for it. All too often there is a mindset of “that’s what you get paid for” and positive encouragement is not forthcoming.

4. Develop Thoughtfulness
Successful leaders and good business people know that effective communication is a critical element of execution and peak performance. Enlightened leaders know how to use suggestions and expressed-thoughtfulness as a form of inclusive, participative leadership.

5. Develop a Learner’s Attitude
Success in every dimension of life is related to your ability to connect with others. It is also true that your success is directly related to your ability and willingness to learn, to change, to adapt, and to grow. To learn is to change. Throughout our life there is a constant evolution in the way we think and act, brought about by new understanding, new knowledge, and new skills.

6. Develop Leadership with Humility
Humility is a key factor of leadership character and requires an affirmative answer to the following: Can you be open to new concepts of leader obligation? Can you be open to receiving candid and honest feedback about your behavior and its impact on those you lead? Can you get excited about letting others help you learn about your own habits and the changes needed to improve the effectiveness of your leadership influence?

Applying a strategic approach to quality cognitive behavior development will optimize minds and brains to create the necessary connections for collaborative work relationships.

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Six Behaviour Attitudes of Enlightened Leadership

Posted on February 5, 2019 by Catherine Osborne

It is a known fact that when people are engaged positively with their leader they are more likely to be engaged in their work. Enlightened leaders succeed where other leaders fail because they perform at a higher level, are more productive, and achieve greater results using their skill of Positive Presence

The success and effectiveness of enlightened leaders is driven by their ability to make the connection between their behaviour style and their human energy. This connection leads to positive behaviour competencies that enable them to become positive role models for followers, guide operational improvements, execute on strategy consistently, and sustain performance excellence

Enlightened leaders recognize the importance of self-awareness and effective collaborative relationships. They spend time focusing their efforts in key areas that will build connections with the people they lead to drive performance. They focus these efforts around their ability to create a positive and energized mindset for “getting it right as a leader” both with the technical elements of performance and with people too. Enlightened leaders apply a strategic approach to quality cognitive behaviour development which includes:
1. Develop attentiveness
2. Develop alertness
3. Develop appreciation
4. Develop thoughtfulness
5. Develop a learner’s attitude
6. Develop leadership with humility

When you have a meaningful relationship with another person you work more effectively together. You have a common goal and a consistent purpose. You come together for mutual, beneficial, meaningful purpose. Your efforts are channeled toward the same common outcome and you drive performance in the organization to peak levels.

Tagged with: behavior style, cognitive behavior, collaborative relationships, enlightened leaders, enlightened leadership, human energy, mindset, performance, positive behaviour, positive presence, relationships, self-awareness
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Leader Behaviour for a High Performing Culture

Posted on January 29, 2019 by Catherine Osborne

Arising from the research being done in the neurosciences, the idea of individual behaviour, group and team behaviour, and overall organizational behaviour has taken on a new importance. Behaviour is the most tangible evidence of organizational culture that there is. It is also a key performance indicator for mind health. And it is the tangible result of human emotional energy flow. “An organization cannot become what its people are not. The performance of an organization is the result of the collective performance of its people.” This quote comes from organizational expert Tim Kight.

In today’s knowledge economy where employee knowledge is the number one resource and an employee’s ‘working brain’ the main capital asset, leader behaviour as it relates to relationship building is critical. Unfortunately, significant change initiatives today often focus on technology and process, and in doing so neglect the key ingredient for successful execution — the people. It has been proven time and time again, when organizations focus on aligning people with strategy, the likelihood of effective execution improves to drive performance success in measureable outcomes.

All organizations are operating in an industry that is experiencing constant change and regulation. The fundamental challenge to all leaders is: How do I as a leader intend to lead my organization through the constant changes driven by a global market and economy? Leadership is the daily, persistent expression of behaviour that positively connects with people at an emotional level to execute and accomplish the mission of the organization.

Undoubtedly, individual leader behaviour is the singular most important predictor to a high level of organizational performance. At this level, the skill of Positive Presence equips organizational leaders with a common vocabulary and philosophy for making the emotional connections needed for a high performing culture.

Tagged with: change, culture, group behavior, human emotional energy, individual behavior, knowledge economy, leader behavior, leadership, mind-health, organizational behavior, organizational culture, positive presence, team behavior, working brain
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Do You Have The Right Stuff For Followers?

Posted on January 22, 2019 by Catherine Osborne

Organizational performance can rise no higher than the collective performance of its people. With the arrival of the knowledge economy, organizations are transitioning on a global scale from a mechanistic environment of linear control, to a systemic environment of complexity. As such, the role of leader has never been more important than it is in today’s world, and individual leader behavior is the single most important predictor of organizational performance.

In the book Strength-Based Leadership, best-selling author Tom Rath and renowned leadership consultant Barry Conchie explore the results of decade’s worth of Gallup research on the topic of leadership relations with followers. Responses from more than 10,000 interviews conducted around the world reveal the four central reasons that people choose to follow their leaders:

1. Trust
In today’s fast-paced, complex, ambiguous environment of constant change, conflicts and crises abound within the organization. So in order to succeed, trust is a necessary characteristic of any organization’s culture. Trust enables your team not only to perform its daily function but also to rise above conflicts and crises. Trust is vital to forging and sustaining connections and collaborations in the relationship between a leader and follower.

2. Compassion
Compassion goes beyond empathy. Empathy is a personal understanding of someone else’s difficult condition, whereas compassion is a commitment to help that person out of their condition. Compassion includes kindness, warmth, sensitivity, openness, and tolerance. Compassion and caring cannot exist without one another.

3. Stability
To be employed by a financially stable organization will always be a top desire of the workforce all over the world. This kind of stability is a practical need; after all, everyone has to make a living. Financial stability, however, is not just based on leadership’s ability to grow the business. It is also rooted in leadership’s consistent and predictable patterns of behavior. When leaders are honest, accountable, and transparent, they promote confidence among their employees. Employees, in turn, are assured that their leaders are doing what is necessary to the keep the organization operational.

4. Hope
Hope and stability are two sides of the same coin. Stability tends to revolve around the present, while hope is oriented toward the future. Leaders who have a positive mindset about the future and who promote enthusiasm among followers instill hope. Hope, in turn, encourages people to devise a realistic plan and to imagine themselves in more ideal situations – particularly during challenging and chaotic periods of workplace and economic disruption.

Enlightened leaders can connect through following others by practicing the principle of followership. Followership is a leader’s willingness to listen to those for whom they are responsible – their concerns, their hopes, their aspirations and the like. Making the right connection between leader and follower has never been more important than it is today.

Tagged with: compassion, complexity, environment, followers, followership, Hope, leader behavior, leadership relations, organizational performance, positive presence, Stability, systemic, Trust
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The Social Skills of Leadership

Posted on January 15, 2019 by Catherine Osborne

To be human means you need relationships which in turn necessitate social ability. Winning social behaviours are well documented, and according to Stanford Social Innovation Review, social competencies can be learned and developed with practice, the same way a 20 year old develops fluent language skills through training and practice. In a recent post ‘15 Social Skills That Will Make You Successful in Every Aspect of Life’ highlights the following social skills:

Optimism

Compassion

Politeness

Emotional Intelligence

Discipline

Diligence

Patience

Affability

Listen

Forgiveness

Resilience

Responsibility

Leadership

Asking for help

Honesty

People want to make a difference, but they can and will only do so when they have an emotional connection with their leader. If you want to connect you have to deviate from the outdated and ineffective practices of a “top-down” driven approach to leadership. As a leader you should be asking yourself daily, is my behaviour drawing people towards me or pushing them away from me? Learning the skill of Positive Presence brings with it an understanding of what endears your followers to you and is essential to understanding the great impact that connection has in driving performance and productivity in the workplace.

There are four central reasons people will follow their leader. In the book Strength-Based Leadership, best-selling author Tom Rath and renowned leadership consultant Barry Conchie explore the results of decade’s worth of Gallup research on the topic of leadership relations. Responses from more than 10,000 interviews conducted around the world reveal the four reasons that people choose to follow their leaders:
1. Trust
2. Compassion
3. Stability
4. Hope

Ineffective leaders breed ineffective followers and performance and productivity suffer as a result. Effective leaders build on the social skills of leadership to create connections. With a positive, energized, and emotional connection with your people you send a clear message that you are interested and invested in what your people experience on a daily basis.

Tagged with: connections, leadership, leadership relations, positive presence, relationships, social behaviours
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