People thrive when they accomplish things. Accomplishment is a root source for feeling self-confident and self-assured. Unfortunately, some leaders employ a destructive shortcut in attempting to accomplish a team task. The leader mistakenly confuses his or her need to be right with making smart business decisions.
The need to be right is an essential human need that one must fill on a consistent basis. It is unproductive expression of that need in business that must be controlled. Imagine the chaos that a team of seven people would experience if all of them had the same goal of getting their personal need to be right met during one of your meetings!
Question:
How often do you express your need to be right?
Make a list of the places you most strongly need to be right first in your business life and then your personal life. Often our business life is used to compensate for failings in our personal life. The key to being a productive leader is to get most of your needs met in your personal life.
Breakdowns in life (business and personal) can be traced to two main sources – failure in communication and/or relationships. Think of any successful person and most likely, you’ll see high skill levels in both communication and relationships.
As a coach, I saw a common trend with my clients. The more my clients successfully handled their personal life, the better their business life. What actions do you need to take around being right in your personal life? Spend the next couple of months working on that and you’ll be surprised at how much easier it is to lead your work teams. As always, the solution is to take baby steps to improve your personal and business relationships. It is this slow pace that often drives leaders crazy. Welcome to the leader’s quagmire!
Shortcuts produce short-term gain at the expense of long-term success. (Note: optimizing a process is not the same as a shortcut.) IF you still want a shortcut strategy, try this one: look for and formally acknowledge every person on your team each time they are right. Do this for both big and small things yet be subtle – a casual remark about how Mary or Tom were right about something. At some point, the need each person has to be right will be temporarily satisfied. This is known as the leader’s hamster wheel. Until you and your team find a way to fully get the need met (hint – hire a good coach), you will continue to be the person responsible for filling their need to be right. Short-term productivity will improve yet long-term you’ll burnout. This is not sustainable.
Next post I’ll give you three strategies to get your need to be right met.
Posted by Byron Van Arsdale
Twitter: @headset
Author – 6 Principles of Powerful Conference Calls
ConferenceCallTraining.com
