Leadership Skills iLead – Language of Leadership – Strength of Your Stance

July 29th, 2015

Leadership Skills iLead – Language of Leadership – Strength of Your Stance

I’m often asked what is the one thing that a course participant can do to ace that next job interview.

It’s a great question.

There is one technique that I share as part of the Language of Leadership module in the iLead program that will give you greater authority and confidence when you speak. You can get the details here or by clicking on the image below.

You can get the details by clicking on the image below.

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Transcription Leadership Skills iLead

Here is a technique on how you can increase your presence, your authority, when you’re in any interview-type situation.

The Language of Leadership module is the fifth module in the iLead leadership skills program, and it shows you and gives you techniques on how you can be a stronger leader through individual techniques of why you say it the way you say it.

Leadership Skills: Your Stance

How do you stand? How do you sit? Do you fidget? The strength of your stance shows the strength of your message. If I’m talking to you here and I’m standing nice and solid and strong, it gives you a reassurance.

You may not even notice it, but if I don’t stand still and strong, if I talk about how you need to sit still and that will help you get your message across while I’m talking and moving so much, it makes it difficult for you to follow.

The strength of your stance shows the strength of your message. Be aware of how you’re sitting, how you’re standing. Is your weight evenly balanced or are you sitting around like this?

iLead Leadership Skills: Let’s Discuss

What I’d love – below, can you pop in a comment or a message on how you have seen people fidgeting and looking nervous and moving around, and how it affects your feeling of what it is that they are trying to get across.

The strength of your stance is just one of the exercises and techniques I teach in the Language of Leadership module as part of the iLead leadership skills program. This program helps your organisation develop leaders at all levels, so you can go out and achieve more, and there’ll be greater career and job satisfaction within all your organisations.

Leadership Skills iLead – Bullet-Proof Belief – Personal Alignment

July 22nd, 2015

Leadership Skills iLead – Bullet-Proof Belief – Personal Alignment

We all have personal values that we hold dear to ourselves. For some it’s fairness, others it’s doing what is right and for others still it is about something completely different.

It’s the variety between us that makes the world interesting.

When our personal values align to organisational values there is a click that makes it easier to do our job. It enables us to go that extra step to achieve a budget, keep a customer happy or to stay back late to complete a task so you don’t let the team down.

But what happens when personal values don’t align to organisational values? How can your values and a person whose values you don’t like both align with the same organisational values?

I’ve put together a quick video that shows you how personal and organisational values can be aligned, and what to do if they don’t.

You can get all the details by clicking the image below.

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Transcription Leadership Skills iLead

Here is a great technique about belief and belief in yourself and how you can help build that within yourself.

The fourth module of the iLead leadership skills program is a powerful module. It focuses on belief and how you can lift your own belief. The old saying of “Fake it till you make it” gets a bit of a bad rap. But I encourage you to try it, and there are a couple of reasons for that.

Leadership Skills: Let Yourself Succeed

First, we hold ourselves back. We don’t think we’re as good as people around us think. Why? Because society makes feel as though we need to buy something to be better. So we hold ourselves back.

If you fake it till you make it, there’s something that happens. We operate here, and we say, “Okay, I’m going to take a step forward and work here.” And you think, “Oh, my goodness, I’m faking it! Don’t people know what I’m doing? I’m pushing myself and faking it,” And then you try the next level because no one’s noticed.

So then you try stepping out, faking it a bit more, and you say, “My goodness! Nothing’s happening, no one’s noticed! But I’m faking it!” And so you go, “Well, I’ll try it another level.”

When you try it a third or fourth time, what happens is you are so far beyond your comfort zone, but no one’s noticed. Then you’ll try it one more time, and those around you will go, “Ah! Finally! This person’s operating at the level we want them to! Ripper! Now, push yourself!”

Even though in our own mind, we’ve been pushing ourselves for quite a while.

iLead Leadership Skills: Push Yourself To The Next Level

The ability to have the belief in yourself is about knowing you have the leadership skills, and then pushing yourself further forward with those skills. This is just one of the many techniques that I share on how to build confidence within yourself, build confidence within your team so they can go off and be the leaders that you need and want them to be. When they are, they will achieve more; they will produce more and become more effective salespeople, admin officers, market leaders, organisational leaders.

What I’d like you to do is, below, share the technique that you find most useful for building self-belief. Love to continue the conversation just below.

Leadership Skills iLead – Authenticity – How to Give Feedback

July 15th, 2015

Leadership Skills iLead – Authenticity – How to Give Feedback

The annual feedback session from manager to staff is often awkward. No one likes situations that could include confrontation. If there is a tough message to be delivered, it’s even worse.

Most managers use the sandwich method to deliver feedback. This is where you give something positive, an area for improvement and finish with something positive again. This is a great structure to follow, but it is only part of the story.

As part of the iLead Leadership program I teach managers how to give feedback so it is helpful to the person receiving it. I’ve put together a short video on how to do this.

You can see it by clicking on the image below.

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Transcription Leadership Skills iLead

If you’ve ever had to give feedback to somebody, you know how daunting it can be – the once-a-year performance appraisals.

Here’s a technique that will help you give better feedback so it’s easier for you to deliver and better for your audience, the person you’re giving the feedback to, to receive.

iLead Leadership Skills: Authenticity

The seventh module of the iLead leadership skills program is about authenticity.

How do you be authentic to who you are and what it is that you stand for, and how do you give authentic feedback and deliver your message in an authentic way so people want to hear it, want to listen, and act on what it is you have to say?

The once-a-year or twice-a-year feedback sessions where you have the manager and the staff comes together for the feedback session are often awkward for both sides. What are they going to say? And how am I going to say this?

Whilst there should always be strategies in place to ensure that nothing new comes out in these meetings, delivering that new message at any time of year can be difficult.

Leadership Skills: The Why

Most people are familiar with the sandwich method or the commend-recommend-commend. Start off with something positive, something that can be improved, and finish with something positive. It’s a nice way to sandwich the recommendation or the area for improvement. That works, but how do you give the commendation and the recommendation so they are listened to?

In the commendation, it is: what was good and why it was good. We need to know why what it is that I’m doing works.

Leadership Skills: The How

For the recommendation: what can be improved, why it needs to be improved, and here’s the part that you need to include – the how. If you don’t include the how, and you give me “I need to improve,” well, how am I going to do that? And to simply say, “You need to do it better” is not going to work, because I would have done it better if I could.

This is just one of the many techniques I share in the Authenticity module of the iLead leadership skills program. It helps staff give authentic messages and be who they are, so they are more likely to turn up to work and be involved in the message.

What I’d love you to do if you can is below, pop in a comment about your favourite time giving feedback, or, god forbid, the least favourite time giving feedback – or receiving feedback – so we can continue this conversation about authenticity and help you become a more authentic person in your roles, and help your organisation achieve more.

Executive Leadership Coaching iLead – Total Trust – Honesty

July 8th, 2015

Executive Leadership Coaching iLead – Total Trust – Honesty

I’ve got a client that has amazing buy-in within their organisation. Average staff tenure is 10+ years and in their market they are growing at a compound rate of over 8% per year when the rest of the market is shrinking by 5%. It’s an amazing organisation.

How do they do it?

One of the keys to their success is how they share information.

We all know that information is power. So they give everyone the information and thus the power. This stops gossip about business, concerns about job security and encourages problems to be solved before they become major issues.

I’ve put together a short video on how my client does this.

You can access the video by clicking on the image below.

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Transcription Executive Leadership Coaching iLead

Here is something on the sharing of information and the level of honesty within sharing information that helps build trust within organisations.

The Trust module within the iLead executive leadership coaching program looks at how information is shared, and the way this comes out is under the heading of honesty.

Now, sharing information – I’m not talking about lying, but that naturally comes into it. What I’m talking about is the level of information that is shared.

Holding Information Back

We, as humans, all know that information is power. And because of that, we tend to hold that information back. If you’re in management, you only trickle down what it is the staff needs to know.

When you have a higher level of honesty and you want to build trust, instead of creating information and trickling down that the staff needs to know, you flip that model on its head. Every piece of information you create is open to everybody. Then you apply the classification filter.

People Fill In The Blanks On Their Own

So information is designed and produced and looks as anyone can have access to it, except this part, this part, and this part, and that gets re-classified. Why do we do that? The reason we do that is because when staff have information – enough information – they will make decisions in accordance with that information. But if there are big holes sitting in the information that you’re sharing to your staff, where the holes are, they make up information to fit in there. They start guessing, they start wondering what it’s all about. And that builds a gap in the trust. And they stop trusting you.

What do they use to build up that information? Well, they use maybe media reports, what they see going on in the economy, gossip, rumours, but most importantly, they use their own personal paranoias and their own set of beliefs.

There’s a good chance that that is going to be completely wrong within your organisation. Why? Simply because information is held high and then trickled down as opposed to starting free for everyone and then re-classifying. This is not an exercise in raising people’s classification. It’s an exercise in declassifying information down.

iLead Executive Leadership Coaching

This is just one of the steps that we look at in the Trust module in the iLead executive leadership coaching program to help your organisation produce leaders at every level who have the confidence, the ability, and the desire to make decisions to take action to help your team, your organisation achieve its organisational goals.

What I’d like you to do is below, pop in how you see the organisational information strategy within your organisation. Are you organisations that hold information up or do you filter it down? Love to continue the conversation down there.

Leadership Skills iLead – Confident Communication – Cognitive Structures

June 22nd, 2015

Leadership Skills iLead – Confident Communication – Cognitive Structures

Just about every meeting these days has a death-by-PowerPoint session included.

This is terrible as no one likes having slides read to them.

But it’s understandable why it happens – we simply don’t have the time to prepare.

To help you, I’ve put together a short video on how to use cognitive structures to enable you to step away from reading slides to your audience. This is just one of the techniques in the iLead program.

You can get the details by clicking on the image below.

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Transcription Leadership Skills iLead

Leadership Skills iLead – Confident Communication – Cognitive Structures

Here’s a tip that will help you and your organisation get away from the death by PowerPoint presentations that are so common.

Confident Communication is the eighth module in the iLead leadership skills program, and what it’s designed to do, is show you and your staff how to communicate in such a way so people are joined to the message.

Status Quo: Death By PowerPoint

In organisations these days, when you come together for sales meetings, briefings, whatever the message happens to be, you’ll normally find the PowerPoint, and it’ll have the death by PowerPoint slides, with the bullet point, text, bullet point, bullet point, slide, the new logo, and another new slide with the logo on it.

These disconnect the audience big time. They have an effect that sedates the audience.

Death by PowerPoint.

Why does this happen? Well, we’re all very busy at work, we don’t have time to sit down and rehearse presentations, put half a day into this one-hour presentation to all the staff. You just don’t have the time.

So you put the notes up on the screen that you want to talk to, and then you end up reading those notes. The fact is, though, the audience reads them as well.

Leadership Skills: Cognitive Structures

A more engaging way for your audience is to set up the cognitive structures within your mind – and this is what the program Confident Communication teaches – on how to talk about Idea 1, and how Idea 1 leads into Idea 2, which leads into Idea 3.

When you have these cognitive structures – and they’re very simple to apply – what you’ll find is you’re able to produce longer presentations in a much shorter period of time, you have more confidence delivering them, you’re more engaging for your audience, and your audience wants to listen.

It’s a win on all fronts – there’s no death by PowerPoint.

iLead Leadership Skills: Discussion

This is just one of the modules, the Confident Communication module, that I share with my clients in the iLead leadership program so they can produce leaders who can get their message across in a way so audiences, the staff, internal, marketplace, customers, external, want to listen.

Please, below, pop down comments about some of the greatest speakers you’ve heard – not only the professional motivational speakers, but also bosses and leaders that you’ve had, and how they were able to engage you in their message with their leadership skills.

Executive Leadership Coaching iLead – Language of Leadership – Permission to Stop

June 21st, 2015

Executive Leadership Coaching iLead – Language of Leadership – Permission to Stop

Have you ever seen a weak politician speak on TV? They just seem to dig themselves a hole and crawl into it. Every word they say makes them look weaker, and often gives away more information than they should be.

It’s funny to watch, until you realise that they are the ones running our country!

The reason this happens, is because they have not given themselves permission to stop. This is a simple, yet powerful technique that you can use TODAY in your next conversation to increase your ability to influence.

You can get all the information by clicking the image below.

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Transcription Executive Leadership Coaching iLead

Here’s a technique that will help you have greater power and greater influence when speaking.

The Language of Leadership module, part of the iLead executive leadership coaching program, is probably my favourite module of them all. And the reason for that is this is about the slight-edge techniques that you can use to be seen as someone who is influential, someone who has power.

iLead Executive Leadership Coaching: Permission To Stop

The technique is about permission to stop. Permission to stop is about how you control your message under the pressure of what you think other people want. It’s used often in job interviews or sales presentations, where the audience will be quiet when you’re speaking, you’ll finish speaking, and they’ll just remain silent.

That often will cause the speaker to speak more information, and when they deliver more information, they’ll often dig a hole for themselves, or they’ll reveal the true message that they’re hiding. The technique is permission to stop – give yourself permission to stop when you have answered the question. If your audience wants more information, they’ll ask for it. And when they ask for it, you can provide it.

Start Using Your Permission To Stop

But if you use permission to stop, you’ll stop digging those holes that you could potentially fall into and ruin your job interview or miss out on the sale.

What I’d love is below, if you could pop in comments on whether you’ve given yourself permission to stop, and what it had, the effect on you and your audience, or when you didn’t give yourself permission to stop, and what the outcome of that was.

This technique works in our executive leadership coaching.

Executive Leadership Coaching iLead – Simple Sales – It’s not about you

June 3rd, 2015

Executive Leadership Coaching iLead – Simple Sales – It’s not about you

Alert: This is a bit of a rant!!!

As a single guy, it’s funny to watch how people go about selling themselves on a date. Most women get it wrong (I assume that men do too…I just haven’t dated any of them).

The number one rule of dating is simple. It’s interesting.

No one wants to hang out with or date someone who is boring.

But most people end up being boring on dates. Why?

The thought process goes something like this:
1. I need to be interesting on this date.
2. I need to identify what interests me.
a. Animals
b. Camping
c. Walks on the beach etc

3. Talk about that.

It seems simple enough and should work. But what if the person on the date isn’t interested in what interests you?

What happens is you don’t form a connection to see if there is a chance for a much deeper connection later on?

Unfortunately, many sales people do this as well, and it causes more sales to be lost than anything else. I’ve put together a short video to show you how to overcome this problem so you can sell more.

You can get it by clicking on the image below.

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Transcription Executive Leadership Coaching iLead

Here’s a technique about how can get people more interested in your message.

Simple Sales is the ninth module of the iLead executive leadership program and what it shows you is how to go around creating your message so when you sell it’s easier for your audience to listen.

Executive Leadership Coaching: It’s Not About You

One of the techniques is the ‘It’s Not About You’.

Recently, a telemarketer wanting to sell me roof restoration called me. I picked up the phone, “Hello,” and he started introducing himself and his company and all the awards that his company had won and how good their company was.

And I was sitting there going, “I don’t care. I don’t care about you.” The reality is I care about me.

Most people who don’t understand selling will go in to sell to you from their perspective. That’s the completely wrong perspective to start from because you care about you.

When you set your team up to sell, when you sell messages yourself, start with what’s it about for the audience. It’s not about you.

iLead Executive Leadership Coaching: Discussion

This technique is small, it’s simple, but it is very powerful, and it’s just one of the many powerful techniques that are in the Simple Sales module of the iLead executive leadership coaching program.

Below, pop in what it is that you like when people come to sell you, or what techniques you have found that grate you or rub you up the wrong way. We’ll continue this conversation about simple sales so you and your organisation and your staff can increase the power of their sales pitch.

Executive Leadership Coaching iLead – Personal Positioning – New Program for Success

May 26th, 2015

Executive Leadership Coaching iLead – Personal Positioning – New Program for Success

When I left school I was told to get a job at entry level in a law firm, study hard at uni, and one day, I might have worked my way up to being a partner in a law firm. Once I’d done that, I could look at going to the Bar and even the Bench. Depending on what I wanted to do, it would only take a few decades to get the experience to move to where I wanted to be….and earn the money as well! This is what most of us were told.

Have you noticed that Gen Y and the most recent recruits aren’t interested in a program that takes that long?

There’s a simple reason for it.

I’ve put together a short video explaining why new recruits aren’t interested in waiting that long, and want to be the CEO within 5 minutes of joining. You can get the details here or by clicking on the image below

You can get the details by clicking on the image below.

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Transcription Executive Leadership Coaching iLead

The world of leadership has changed since you and I left school. Here is part of the discussion I have with people about executive leadership coaching.

The Old Program For Success

When I left school – maybe when you left school as well – the program to be successful at work was:

Go to university
Get good marks
Get a job in the bottom end of a firm
Work your way up

As you go up through the ranks you drive production costs down, lift sales prices.

Maybe you get to the age of 50 and you’ve done that well. You’ll get a handshake and be the CEO for a couple of years, and walk out in five, ten years’ time as a multi-millionaire.

That was the program to being influential and successful in business that we were sold, that I certainly was sold when I left school.

But what’s the program that we’re sold today, that kids leaving school are sold today?

Go to university, do what it is that you want, drop out, give stuff away, and like Mark Zuckerberg, you can become a multi-billionaire by the time you’re in your early 20s.

Now, sure, not everyone’s going to be that billionaire, but how is that program so much different to that which we were sold?

iLead Executive Leadership Coaching: Working With Young People

In the Positioning module of the iLead executive leadership coaching program, we look at how the world of leadership has changed, and how the new generations coming through need to be led in a different way.

It’s no longer, “I’m the boss and we’re doing it my way.” It’s a case of “This is the future, this is the vision. We need to get on board.”

Just think – most people leaving school today have known nothing but the ability to vote people off TV. When I was at school, if you wanted to progress in TV, you had to have the smarts. Now, it’s about relationships and getting people voted off from the viewer watching at home.

What I’d like you to do is below, pop in a comment on how you have seen the younger generations come into your organisations, and how they require and want and are looking for different things. If your organisation is responding to that, I’d love to see how.

Pop your comments in. Let’s discuss executive leadership coaching.

Executive Leadership Coaching iLead – Confident Communication – Connect with stories and emotions

May 20th, 2015

Executive Leadership Coaching iLead – Confident Communication – Connect with stories and emotions

I’m often asked what is the best way to get people to listen to a message. This could be selling, getting staff to follow directions or a supervisor to give permission for you to start a project.

The solution is to go old school and tap into the way we have thought and communicated for thousands of years. You can get all the details on what it is here or by clicking on the image below.

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Transcript Executive Leadership Coaching iLead

Here’s a technique on how you can connect with your audience, your staff, your marketplace, in a way that will bond them, and draw them to your message. I’ll share with you in a moment.

Confident Communication is the eighth module in the iLead executive leadership program. It shows individuals how to communicate in such a way, so others want to follow. This communication might be at the front of the room, on email, telephone, across the table meeting. The way we get people to follow our message and bond with it is to elicit the emotions in what it is you’re talking about. How do we do this?

How To Connect With Your Audience: Stories And Emotion

Well, humans, we’re emotional creatures, and we will bond to emotions. Where we find the emotions is the stories that sit behind the data. If you have information to share, what is the story behind it that your audience will listen to?

Now, your stories don’t need to over the top. They don’t need to be, “I climbed Mount Everest with a Sherpa on my shoulder and a broken leg.” Those sort of stories of “I’m over the top” are great, wonderful to listen to from motivational perspective, but from an engage-your-audience perspective there’s a disconnect that happens. “I wish I was that good to climb Mount Everest.”

Sharing Stories: Keep It Simple

The stories you use need to be simple, basic, and every day. If you use a story about coming to work, I can relate to that. If you use a story about having a tough weekend or fun with the kids or whatever it happens to be, I can relate to that. When you find an appropriate story and match your data, your message, to it, it comes alive. I will remember it, and therefore I’ll bond with your message. That is what brings the emotions out.

iLead Executive Leadership Coaching

Confident Communication is just one of the modules in the iLead executive leadership coaching program. Leaders need to be able to communicate, and that’s what this whole module is about. How do they communicate in a way that an audience wants to follow?

Please pop your comments in below, of some of your favourite stories that you’ve heard from speakers, managers, your boss, customers, that you’ve remembered over the years, and why you remembered it. And I guarantee you’ll find that there’s an emotional content to it. That’s what we do in our executive leadership coaching.

Executive Leadership Coaching iLead – Buy In – Know My Name

May 13th, 2015

Executive Leadership Coaching iLead – Buy In – Know My Name

Sorry, but this is a bit of a rant!!!

I was recently working with a very senior business leader who had over 500 people in his business unit (there were several thousands of people in the organisation).

He was complaining that no one was (apparently) reading his e-mails. He wanted to know how to change this.

This is a common problem within big organisations. Messages are sent, but no one is reading them.

I asked him if he knew the people who weren’t opening and he couldn’t name them.

And that’s the problem.

To ensure that your organisation doesn’t have the same problem, I’ve put together a short video that will give you one powerful technique to help get e-mails opened, people on board with your message and improve productivity. You can get the details by clicking on the image below.

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Transcription Executive Leadership Coaching iLead

Here is a great technique on how you can help your staff buy into the message that you’re selling.

iLead Executive Leadership Coaching: Know My Name

The third module of the iLead executive leadership coaching program is about buy-in.

How do you get staff at all levels to buy into the message? Senior leaders have their strategies they need to get the organisation to implement. The level of success out of that strategy depends on how much the staff buy into it.

One of the easiest ways to get people to buy into your message is to know their names. Every person you manage – do you know their name?

And if the answer is yes, do you know their partner’s name, their children’s name, what they like to do on the weekend? But at basic level, you need to know the name of every person that you’re leading.

Now, I know some people are going, “I’ve got over 400 people in my organisation. That’s not possible.”

Well, don’t worry – this is not in addition to your normal job. This is your normal job.

Executive Leadership Coaching: Be A Leader

If you’re the leader and you want people to follow you, there needs to be a level of intimacy. People need to come together. And that intimacy starts with you knowing my name. If you want me to follow you, I need to know that you care about me. And that starts with knowing my name.

What the benefit of this is when you send out a group email and I see it’s from your email address, there’s a chance that if I know you know my name, I’m going to open your email. And there’s a chance that as I read your message I will hear your voice saying it to me.

If you’re the leader of a team, if you’re the leader of an organisation, of a business unit, you’re the leader, and the leader needs to know the names of the people they’re leading. Otherwise, there’s no incentive for the people to follow.

This is just one of the small techniques that are shared in the Buy-In module of the iLead executive leadership coaching program. What I want you to do is below, share with me the times where leaders, that you’ve worked for or had in your organisation, have known everybody’s name, and what it does for that individual who is known by the leader, and also for organisational success.

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