Transformational Leadership. Social Entrepreneurship

Conferences can be a powerful way to connect people together, teach them new skills and knowledge and infuse new life into the organization. Organizing such a conference need not be rocket science. With a few tips, careful planning and faithful implementation, you can organize a successful conference of varying size and magnitude.

Go back to the organizational vision, mission and goals.

These vision, mission and goals are the guiding light of any organization. Without reference to these important concepts, the conference you organize will be nothing but a nice social gathering. Yet, if you appeal to the vision and mission of the organization, you will be helping in the revitalization of the organization and the people connected with it.

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Teams have become an important part of business and organizational operations. And why not? Teams have the potential to increase individual performance of workers and employees! When one person works with a team, he or she is given a chance to work with other who can support, encourage and even challenge the way he works! That way, the output will be of a better quality than if it was done alone.

Here are fifteen ingredients of effective teamwork that a leader should nurture in the teams within an organization.

Open communication. In any collaborative effort, communicating openly is a very important component of the process. This factor helps create the ideal environment for teamwork to actually work!

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Talking with others about anything under the sun comes more easily to some people. Generally, however, small talk seems to be rocket science and they can’t find anything to talk with the colleagues they meet in the corridor, except maybe the weather?

Small talk is more than just idle banter, it actually serves a social purposes. Us, being social animals, we need other people to listen to us. Try speaking to yourself in your cubicle or in the corridor and people would start looking at you like you’re a freak! We also need to listen to other people.

While we value productivity and efficiency in the workplace, small talk can help us unwind and relax during breaks and after work hours.

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A leader can give carrots or sticks depending on the circumstances and on the performance of team members and followers. As a leader, you are duty-bound to recognize good work and reprimand bad ones.

Some leaders though fail to provide feedback, especially in cases where a member or a follower fails to deliver on commitments and results. It’s good if the leader enjoys good relationship with the followers and subordinates. But such good relationship may also be the source of cowardice in confronting the underperformers.

Here’s the cowardly leader’s guide to rewarding losers in the organization.

Beat around the bush.

During your leadership pep talk time, tell that the organization is doing “okay but we can do better” or “we’re surviving” and other such abstract inanities that skirt the real issue of performance.

Don’t confront.

Just let things be. Your subordinates and followers are smart people. You trust them. They have delivered with their commitments before; they will do so again this time. Just give them time.

Assume they’re just having a bad day.

Your underperformers might be having a bad day. Maybe some not-so-nice things happened at home. As a good leader, you should understand where your subordinates are coming from.

Close your eyes and pray that things will be better tomorrow.

You’ve had bad bays. And worse ones, too. This, too, shall pass and everything will be back to normal.

You may not be displaying all these things at once. But at one time or another, you tend to be afraid to confront and you just let things be. As a leader, you are duty-bound to ensure good performance. Leadership is not just about relationships. It’s finding balance between results and relationships.

If the above action items describe your attitude, I wonder how you could have stayed in leadership for so long. Wake up! Take a look around you. You’re dragging the organization down and you are a poor excuse of a leader.

Time to suit up, put on courage and turn your organization around!

image credit: RunningAgile

A leader should learn how to work with other people. Oftentimes, however, the leader feels that he should be doing more than the followers or other members of the organization.

Leaders often think that they are supposed to be busy. So they do a lot of things to the point that the leader becomes a soloist instead of being the conductor of an orchestra. Here are the top ten characteristics (and leadership mistakes) of the soloist leader:

1. All the “good” ideas come from him. He puts a premium on his intellect. But he puts a bigger importance on taking credit for all the good ideas. If it didn’t come from him, it must be a bad idea. Though you often catch him recycling some ideas from a while back, claiming them as his own.

2. The soloist leader considers attending meetings as “the” job. He’s always in a meeting trying to fix troubles or stirring up new ones. He measures his effectiveness by the number of meetings he attends weekly.

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