SkillInside

There is one leadership skill that will influence your overall success more than any other. If you develop it well, your potential grows enormously—but if you don’t bother to learn it can end up costing you a great deal. Most people agree on the surface of it: That to become a truly great leader is to become a truly great listener.  Pressed to define what makes a great listener, many will say the ability to be silent. But being silent is not going to make you into a great communicator or a better leader. Instead, follow this simple six-step strategy and L-I-S-T-E-N.   L = Look interested and get interested. When someone is speaking, signal your interest with your expression and body language—and then get genuinely interested in what they are saying. Think about the motivations and reasons behind their words. In other words, pay attention. Listen in a way that tells them not only that you’re interested but also that they are interesting.  I = Involve yourself only ...

Do you lead or are you micromanage? If you've ever worked for a micromanager, you know how awful and how it can be. Working with a leader, on the other hand, can be an inspiring and educational experience. Micromanagers have a hard time trusting others to make decisions and rarely allow others to act independently, while true leaders are all about trust and autonomy. Nobody likes to think of themselves as a micromanager, but if you have any question, ask yourself these questions: 1. Do you work weekends and long hours and rarely take vacation?  This is often a sign of the inability or unwillingness to delegate or lose control. Micromanagers need to be constantly present, while leaders understand the need to integrate their professional and personal lives. 2. Does everything need your approval?  Micromanagers don't want anything going in or out without their approval. Leaders trust their people to do what they do best and empower them to take action. 3. Do you ha...

3 Simple but Effective Ways to Stop Sabotaging Yourself We all have an inner saboteur--some more powerful than others. The first step to success is often learning to recognize and work through your own saboteur. Have you ever said any of these sentences? "I can't do it!" "That's way too difficult!" "If I try, I'll probably fail anyway." " I always fail. Why bother?" If you have, you're far from alone. Unfortunately, many of us sound like this at one time or another. It's called negative self-talk, and it can do you great harm. After all, what can be worse than an enemy that lives inside your head? If these thoughts and sentences start to come on a regular basis or more often than in the past, your inner saboteur is hard at work. This destructive force can stop you from achieving your goals and deter you from being successful. Suddenly you're so worried and fearful about all the things that can go wr...

Ever since the idea of strategy came to the business world in the early 1960s, the goal of differentiation has been paramount. Customers choose the company that gives them value that other companies can’t match. A company that can show it is different from other companies, in a way that is relevant to customers, gains a major competitive advantage. As business strategists, we see endless amounts of writing about how to achieve differentiation. And we see many executives trying to take this advice to heart. But we are also regularly reminded of the lack of true differentiation in most mainstream global companies — and of the opportunities they are thus squandering. The problem starts with the way many business people think about differentiation. To them, the unit of differentiation is an individual product, service or brand. That’s what customers see, after all, relative to what the competition can provide. But differentiation needs to be sustainable; it shouldn’t liv...

Reputation is the basis of leadership, no matter the job. It is built over many years, one word at a time, one action at a time, one deed at time. In leadership, few things matter more. Reputation is among the most treasured and powerful assets . It is what others think of us, and it’s at the foundation of how we distinguish ourselves. Our reputation is ours, very personal but also very easy to lose. Reputations are earned slowly and are lost quickly. We must guard our reputation like a precious gift; we must nurture it and nourish it daily.  Character . The key goal in shaping your reputation by having your personal character stand as a driving force for everything you do and say. If you want to discover the true reputation of a person, you have only to observe what their character is all about.  Code . To make the right decisions you need the right moral compass and the right grounding to tell you what is right and what is important. At times, it may ta...

We’ve rarely needed leaders more — but wanted the leaders we have less. It’s as if we’ve forgotten what leadership really is, and confused it with what it isn’t. What’s not leadership? For one thing, performing. Leadership is not making the right faces, memorizing the right lines, pumping your fist in precisely the right way at exactly the right moment. It’s  being . Let me explain the difference . What happens, for example, when the situation goes off script, or when the audience heckles, or when the walls of the theater begin to collapse? The actor, if he cannot improvise, is left paralyzed. Yet that is what we see today: leader after leader left paralyzed by the unexpected turmoil of an uneasy age in an uncertain world, whether those leaders are political, social, cultural, or corporate. So we study the scripts, memorize the lines, carefully examine the angle of our fist pumps. I’ll give you a simple example. No one would have predicted just a decade ago that...

Some people are naturally persuasive. The rest of us have to learn to be more so. Here's how. Think about all the extremely successful people you know. I guarantee they're incredibly good at selling themselves, selling their ideas--in short, they're incredibly good at persuading other people. Maybe that's because selling is the one skill everyone needs to be successful? But being persuasive doesn't mean you have to manipulate or pressure other people. At its best, persuasion is the ability to effectively describe the benefits and logic of an idea to gain agreement--and that means we all need to be more convincing: to persuade others a proposal makes sense, to show stakeholders how a project or business will generate a return, to help employees understand the benefits of a new process, etc. And that's why the art of persuasion is critical in any business or career--and why successful people are extremely good at persuading others. How can you be...