Monthly Archives: February 2011
Post by Steve Crandall
When it comes to leadership, one thing that continues to baffle me is the perception of the relationship between position and influence. Many new leaders believe that the bestowing of title and authority gives automatic passage to greater influence over others in the organization. Yet we all know of people in our respective organizations that have positions of leadership but have low influence over others – and we know of people in organizations that have not been formally “knighted” as leaders, yet have tremendous influence over what others think or do. Why does this happen? What are the dynamics that influence a supervisor’s leader effectiveness? ...Read more
Post by Steve Crandall
In my workshops it is common to see new managers in attendance. I see that they often have mixed feelings about their positions – excitement for the new opportunity, a bit of fear and uncertainty about the future, and sometimes a bit of pride about their new authority and status. If they have been in the job a while – even if just a short time – they are also often dismayed at the amount of time they spend on dealing with problems. They are hoping that leadership training will teach them how to eliminate these problems that take up so much of their time. ...Read more
Steve Crandall is President of Crandall Partners, an organizational development consulting practice. He has over 30 years of Human Resource and Management Development experience, and has used the Gordon model in his workshops and classes throughout his career. The perspectives expressed in Mr. Crandall’s Blogs are of his own making, and do not represent those of Gordon Training International or its representatives.
Blog Post by Victoria Benodi
Sometimes you read something and it just has a profound effect on you…more than you ever anticipated. I had this happen a few days ago when I was reading The Origins of Gordon Model by Tom Gordon.
I knew Tom for several years, and loved his compassion and wit and keen intelligence. He was always loving and supportive and accepting, and when you’re a teenager (as I was when I first met him), you are so grateful to have someone “see” you and “get” you it affects you deeply. But as a teenager, I didn’t realize the scope of Tom’s caring…not only did he care about me, a dorky teen with braces and glasses, he cared about the WORLD. Parents, children, leaders of government, colleagues, his family…everyone. ...Read more
Blog Post by Victoria Benodi
I spent an hour today listening to a friend of mine tell me how much she hates her boss and how unhappy she is at her job. She’s been there for over a year, and the situation has gotten progressively worse, and she’s now going to go to the director and then to HR to lodge a formal complaint. Her issues with her boss are many, but the main ones are lack of respect, pettiness, micromanaging, and favoritism. My friend says that over the past few weeks, she’s stopped offering ideas at the weekly meetings, has stopped doing her best at a job she used to love, and she suffers from daily headaches, which now make her miss work. ...Read more
Victoria Benodi has over thirty years experience working in a variety of industries, from retail and restaurants to high tech and defense contractors. She first learned the Gordon Model at the age of 15, and since then has successfully used it with CEOs, employees, and toddlers. The views expressed in the Blogging with Benodi column are solely those of Victoria Benodi, and are not coached, endorsed, or an any way represent Gordon Training International, Leader Effectiveness Training (L.E.T.), or their representatives.
Blog Post by Denise Montgomery
There are days when I feel for people who haven’t had the–how shall I say this?--diversity of employment that I have. I’ve had twelve employers in eighteen years (not counting freelance clients). I’ve been a wedding gift registrar (yes, Virginia, they used to pay people to walk around the china department with young engaged couples!), a door-to-door political fundraiser, a college instructor, a secretary, a book editor, an instructional designer, an account manager, and a consultant. I’ve got a bag of tricks THIS BIG, and I’m not afraid to use them.
If there’s anything I’ve learned in the (mumblety-five) years since I’ve started working, it’s that whatever job I’m doing today, the need for it is eventually going to go away. Life itself is a continual exercise in loss and replacement…or, if you will, change. ...Read more
Blog Post by Denise Montgomery
A few years ago, I had a chat with a friend of mine who was going through what we now euphemistically call “a career transition.” She’d been doing the same kind of work for nearly a decade, working in a creative media field. But demand for the product she made, part and parcel of traditional radio and television, was evaporating with the emergence of the Internet.
Translation: Her employer was going down in flames and she was standing on the wing strapping on a parachute as quickly as she could, getting ready for a last-minute leap into the wild blue yonder.
Her vision of the wild blue yonder was surprisingly broad. “I think I want to be a lawyer,” she said, and then immediately tried to dismiss the notion. “But if I go to law school now, I’ll be 40 by the time I’m done.” ...Read more
Blog Post by Denise Montgomery
In one of my practically feline array of former lives, I taught writing.
OK, I assigned, read, and offered up constructive criticism of writing. (I’ve more or less concluded you can’t actually teach writing, in the same way you can’t really teach people to become stand-up comedians. Some people have it, some people don’t. And in rare instances, some people who don’t have it but want it are willing to work like a colony of ants on getting better at it. Those were the very few people I taught anything about writing.)
Once the mandatory Personal Experience Essay, Persuasive Writing, and Literary Analysis assignments were (thankfully) out of the way–and here let me pause to swear I shall I never again read an 18-year-old’s argument about why Jonathan Swift was a terrible person for advocating that we eat babies–we got around to a bit of creative writing toward the end of the semester. Fiction. The opportunity to create and tell a story. ...Read more
Blog Post by Denise Montgomery
Let’s play a game, shall we?
People who haven’t been through leadership training might think that those three lines said something meaningful. They may think that I just said:
- I have an explosive temper.
- I love drinking and storytelling.
- I love corned beef and cabbage.
- St. Patrick’s Day is a High Holy Day for me.
In point of fact, only one of the above is strictly true.* Everything else is wild speculation based on pure GLOP – General Labeling Of People. ...Read more
Blog Post by Denise Montgomery
First of all, a confession. Until this very year, I had never seen an episode of Survivor.
If I recall correctly, the first season of Survivor aired in 1964, just after Ed Sullivan introduced America to the Beatles. (What’s that? No? It’s really only been on American TV since 2000? No way. I could have sworn…well, to be fair, that was three presidencies ago. But OK. I guess you’re right. I’ll get you in Tribal Council, my pretty…)
Life’s funny. After ten years of successfully avoiding the show in all its incarnations, I now find myself with a friend who has a Survivor addiction. I figure if I can hold him hostage while I blip through this week’s Project Runway, it’s only fair that I reciprocate and follow the fate of the Nicaragua castaways with him.
Here, then, ten years late, are a few newbie viewer’s thoughts on leadership, Survivor-Style. ...Read more
Blog Post by Denise Montgomery
One of the most interesting things I got from leadership training was the ability to have much more effective conversations with…myself.
Here’s but one example of an uninformed dialogue with myself, ripped from real life, before I took L.E.T.:
Me1: Ugh. This place is a sty. I really should clean it.
Me2: I don’t wanna clean it. I hate cleaning.
Me1: Mom was right. You’re a lazy, messy bum. You probably have rats living in the closet.
Me2: Nuh-uh. I just don’t wanna waste today cleaning.
Me1: Shut up, suck it up, and do it. Ew. How can you stand living here? The closet’s got dust bunnies the size of actual bunnies.
Me2: So? Don’t breathe in there.
Me1: The place is a sty. Clean.
Me2: I don’t care if the place is a sty. It’s been messy this long. One more day won’t hurt anything. ...Read more
Blog Post by Denise Montgomery
Family. You can pick your friends, you can pick your zits, and if you’re really, really good friends, you can pick your friends’ zits. (Why you’d want to is beyond my understanding, but hey, we can agree to disagree.)
But family? Family you don’t pick. Family you’re stuck with. Sort of like that dubious photo of you and you college buddies swilling down ill-advised beverages in ill-advised quantities at ill-advised hours that your Facebook friend posted and refuses to take down.
I love ‘em, bless their hearts, but without my family, I don’t know where I could go to hear three nonstop hours of Things That Make Me CrazyTM over dinner.
Suffice it to say, my family and I have an infinite number of what I now know (after Leader Effectiveness Training) to be…values collisions. ...Read more
Blog Post by Denise Montgomery
Tolstoy said, Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. In my experience, much the same can be said about bosses. I’ve been blessed with four excellent bosses in a row for the past fifteen years – bosses with mighty fine leadership training skills. While these bosses were not precisely all alike, they did all share one very important trait: They never, ever made me want to deploy the escape slide and whoosh off the job onto the tarmac, six-pack under my arm.
But a few of the bosses that came before that? Hoo, boy. Yeah, there were a few moments in the early years of my career when I’d have totally pulled a Steve Slater. ...Read more
Blog post by Marie Byson
I’m a writer, blogger, educator, humorist, and a graduate of Leader Effectiveness Training. My “other” blog out there in the wilds of the Internet has more followers than I can actually get my head around most days, which I find immensely gratifying. So when Michelle Adams of Gordon Training International asked me to contribute blogs to the LET site focused on leadership training, I leaped at the chance to join in the fun.
I found the concepts, tools, and skills that I learned in leadership training (lo, these many moons ago) to be not only incredibly useful in my professional life, but also valuable in other ways. Family interactions, social situations, and friendships aren’t all that different from workplace communication, when it comes right down to it. We’re all human beings, and human relations tend to get messy sometimes. When they do, LET has given me a language to describe, assess, and (usually) clean up the mess. ...Read more
During any leadership training workshop, ask the participants, “What is the hardest part of your job? Is it understanding the technology? Is it developing an effective business model? Sales?” Or, “Is it dealing with the people?” The executives, managers, and supervisors in the room will almost always say, “Dealing with the people.” Even though we persist in talking about “soft” skills, most believe that maintaining good working relationships is the hardest part of the job. Technical expertise and business know-how are necessary for good leadership but they are only the beginning of the story.
Leaders Need People Skills
Overwhelmingly, the research shows that people who work in a climate of respect, caring, honesty, collaboration, teamwork, and trust are the ones who work the hardest and produce the best results. In other words, leaders simply do not succeed without good people skills. While few companies would compromise on the technical abilities or the business savvy of people they develop for leadership positions, many view leadership training as an afterthought. Very risky in today’s highly competitive business environment! ...Read more
Although most people know from personal experience that the two win- lose methods of conflict resolution carry a high risk of damaging relationships and reducing organizational effectiveness, these continue to be the methods of choice for most leaders.
While there may be a number of explanations for this, two seem most probable: people have had little or no personal experience with any other approach to conflict resolution, and, in the minds of most people, having the greatest influence is equated with possessing the most power.
Most children were brought up in families in which one or both parents administered frequent and liberal doses of rewards and punishments to make their kids do what the adult decided they should do.
A well-known nationwide study of violence in families found that 80 percent of the parents said they used ordinary means of physical punishment, such as spanking and slapping. Nearly 30 percent of the parents had committed a violent act against their children for which they could have been arrested for assault! ...Read more
Synergism, from the Greek word “sunergos” meaning “working together,” is the action between two or more people to achieve an effect of which each is individually incapable. Truly the definition fits the process between buyer and seller. It is, in fact, a synergistic process; it requires two or more people to complete. The relationship between those individuals is critical to the general success and attitudes relating to the buying-selling process.
The concept of this selling model is that it takes the buyer and seller working together to create this true “SYNERGISM.” This can be contrary to the perceptions and stereotypes that some people have about selling. These feelings have been reinforced by sales training that has consistently taught skills designed to produce a “winner” in the buyer/seller relationship. This of course implies that there must also be a loser. ...Read more
