"Follow Me" Leadership

There was a series of essays done on military leadership. The series was made into a book called “Follow Me” - it is also the way I have heard several people sum up several elite unit’s and army’s leadership “school”.

What a wonderful point. Leadership is about inspiring action in others toward a goal. A huge part of that is behavioral. What better way to think about this, teach this and inspire this than model that behavior and turn to those who are looking to you and say … follow me.

We all want to feel like we are a part of a goal and destination. We all want to know that we are heading somewhere. And we all want to know that we have people in it with us that we can count on and be inspired by their actions.

So whether it is picking up things from the ground, smiling and greeting customers or finding ways to improve your own work we all have ideas and items we know are crucial to our success.

Take a moment and think about what some of these behaviors may be.

Put some time in your day when you are with you people and make sure you show them this behavior – and be proud of it.

Because what you are saying is this:

“What makes us work here isn’t just dependent on you, it isn’t just dependent on me. We are all in this together and I am willing to ‘walk the walk’ with you to make sure we do what we need to do to make our goals a reality. I am not just going to tell you, I will show you. I will do it with you. Here is what we need to do to get better every day. Follow me”

And they will.

Elements of Great Managing

I was reading over a study that Gallup did on managing in an uncertain future. Of course the future is always uncertain – but they were discussing with some much change going on how do managers need to think about their people and how they are working with them to make the feel good about where they are working.

They had a list of “what does great managing look like?” that there are a couple of key points that we can look at and ask ourselves “do the people on my team feel like that?”

These are the items that from Gallup’s research of what people who perform best and feel the best managed claim

1. I know what is expected of me

2. I have the tools to do the job right

3. I get to do something I am good at everyday

4. I have received recognition or praise for my work in the last 7 days

5. My supervisors cares about me and respects me

6. I feel as though I am encouraged to get better and do more at work

7. My opinions count

8. I feel my job is important

9. My team and I are committed to doing quality work

10. I have had opportunities to learn and get better in the last 12 months

As a thought exercise we should all take a moment and see how we would guess our team would score themselves on some of these questions. It may lead us to trying to coach some of our people differently and see what their response to the change looks like.

What is clear from this list is what we have always said about managing people is true.

- Clear Expectations

- Timely feedback – especially positives are key – the closer to the moment of the behavior the better

- Fairness and Respect to the whole team is vital

Managing people and performance is an active task – we all have to own it and take pride in the results. Whether you are doing everything on this list or none of them (although I suspect y’all – like me – do some well and some … not so much) thinking about these approaches and asking “what is it that we can do tomorrow to improve ourselves over yesterday?” is a key to our success and improvement.

We all can be better at helping our people be better. They in turn can help us be better. No matter what the times we all know the power that comes from a team that is well run and runs together.

We should all take this as good food for thought, digest and see what we can do –

Keep it up