As an executive, you are the leader of your unit or organization, and you will set the emotional tone for the people with whom you work. If you tend to be pessimistic about what is going on in the business and outside in the bigger world, that attitude will filter down to everyone else. You might see a lot of scowls, poor performance, and even resignations. But if you’re optimistic about the future and the possibilities for the organization, others will sense your enthusiasm and mirror it. You are likely to see people taking informed risks, performing above expectations, and associates who want to transfer into your unit.

This enthusiasm is called “Engagement,” because you are emotionally and actively engaged with your job, the business, and opportunities for the future. Your engagement level will probably fluctuate somewhat over time, but it should be especially strong during times of change. Change is usually difficult for people and others will look to you to initiate enthusiasm for how the change will improve their lives.

If you tend to be naturally enthusiastic about everything you do, congratulations! But if you, like most people, struggle at times to be as engaged as you know you need to be, here are a few tips that might help.

• Check your work/life balance. Are you regularly working far more hours a week than you really can maintain? If so, you might need to change your priorities for a while until you regain your enthusiasm for your work. Also, if you’re expecting your staff to work 50-80 hours a week on a regular basis, you will probably be dealing with retention issues. Cutting back expectations to a more manageable level will probably help everyone on your team to be more engaged.
• Instead of always thinking about how difficult everything is, remember those initiatives of yours that have succeeded. You would not have been promoted to an executive position if your initiatives had regularly failed. So, for a few minutes every day, remember your successes and tell yourself that you can succeed again.
• Develop a support network to help each other through difficult times. This might mean reaching out to your peers in other parts of the organization and scheduling regular meetings to discuss your ongoing struggles and successes at work. Chances are that, if you are struggling, others are, too, and you can help each other.
• Consider what has happened to lower your level of engagement. Once you discover what changed, you might need to do something to help the situation. This might involve talking with a person whom you find difficult to deal with about the circumstances, scaling back on the number of change initiatives your team is undertaking at any one time, or letting go of some aspects of your job that you find overly difficult or frustrating.
• Consider how you truly feel about your job or organization at this time. If you can’t find a way to increase your engagement level, you might need to consider stepping aside as leader or making some other major change. Your team deserves a leader who is enthusiastic about the future, just as you deserve a job that excites you. Once you are honest with yourself, you will be able to make the changes that are necessary to revive your enthusiasm.

Effective leaders are enthusiastic about their work, and this enthusiasm and drive inspire others to perform at increasingly high levels. Enthusiasm will often turn difficult situations around, and optimism is contagious. No one is enthusiastic all the time, but, given some thought and effort, you can increase your engagement and therefore, your effectiveness.  

Risk-taking doesn’t come naturally to everybody. If you are a person who prefers a more stable, risk-averse situation, you will need to make an effort to change this attitude. The realities of work in the 21st century require that executives be innovators and risk-takers. The biggest reason that people are reluctant to take risks is the fear of failure. The truth is that everybody fails. Everyone makes mistakes. Your challenge is to learn from your mistakes and not repeat them. Effective executives choose to innovate and take risks, and they don’t allow their fear of failure to stop them.

If innovation and risk-taking are not your strong suits, here are some tips you might consider:

• Try out your ideas for innovation on your team. Listen carefully to their reactions. They are the ones who will need to implement your vision. If they are pessimistic, challenge them to come up with better ideas.
• Choose one area for innovation that you want to champion. Break down the innovation into its component parts and decide how far you can go before you will have to make a decision about whether your innovation is likely to succeed. You may find that, if you divide the innovation or risk into segments, each step is not so scary. And you will have the opportunity to make changes as you go along.
• Think about one risk that you have taken that was successful. Was it a small risk or a big one? What did you do then to overcome your fear of failure? How did others talk to you about the risk? How did you feel when it was clear that you would succeed? Remembering your successful endeavors will help you as you consider undertaking additional risks. The reality is that you may not fail—you may succeed!
• Innovation involves being willing to hear ideas that may seem crazy or impossible without immediately rushing to judgment. When people tell you their ideas for change, force yourself to say, “That sounds interesting. Tell me more,” instead of “That won’t work.” Even if that idea really is crazy or impossible, people will be encouraged to tell you their other ideas, and one of them might be fantastic!
• Consider one problem that doesn’t have an easy answer and schedule a meeting to brainstorm solutions. Encourage people to come up with as many ideas as possible, write them all down, and then see what jumps out as being a possible solution. Even if you don’t find the best answer during this meeting, you will be considered an executive who is open to new ideas. Be willing to support a solution to the problem when it comes, and stick with it until you are convinced that the solution will either succeed or fail.  

There is a balance to risk-taking. If you take too many risks or try to change too quickly, your team will be confused and exhausted, so your initiatives may fail. On the other hand, if you are risk-averse and try to take as few risks as possible, your team might be so entrenched that they are unwilling to make changes, even when they are positive. Every executive has his or her own way to find balance in this competency, and it is an ongoing task. Use your skills in (A) Leadership Vision as an anchor for the risk-taking and innovation that you pursue.

Leaders who know their industry well are rarely blindsided by abrupt changes in the marketplace; rather, they have followed the trends closely enough to have anticipated the changes. They consistently track the actions of their competitors and correctly decide how to respond. They are probably regarded as the “go-to” people for information about marketplace shifts and how they are likely to affect the business.

But what if you aren’t one of these super-heroes with x-ray vision about the market and the future? What if you don’t know your industry very well or you tend to react to trends rather than proactively anticipating them? The truth is that people aren’t born with the ability to accurately assess the industry and the market; they learn these skills through trial, error, and determination to improve. As with any skill, awareness and practice will improve your abilities. Here are some suggestions that might help.

• First, identify your most similar competitors and then gather all the available information you can find about them. For example, read their annual reports and become familiar with the information on their websites. See how they are similar and different from your organization. Is there anything you can learn from them that might help you improve your products or services?
  
  
• Read business journals, industry reports, and anything else that will help you understand the overall industry of which your business is a part. Don’t just read them once. To stay informed, you will need to spend time weekly keeping up to date. The market waits for no one.
  
  
• Explore futurist publications, regularly attend industry conferences, and talk with other people in your industry about what changes they believe the future will bring. You will need to synthesize all of this material, but doing so will greatly improve your knowledge about your industry, your business, and the overall environment, while increasing your value to your organization.
  
  
• Identify the assumptions upon which your business is based and then consider what would happen if something in those assumptions changed radically and rapidly. For example, how nimble would your business be if a competitor discovered a breakthrough technology that changed everything? Conduct your own “thought experiments” about what might change in the environment and how you would respond to those changes. This will help you to think more creatively about the future and what it might bring.
  
  

It’s true that life is very busy, and it is easy to allow daily activities to overwhelm your desire to keep informed about the industry and the market. However, successful executives regularly set aside a few hours per week to stay abreast of changing conditions, and their companies benefit from their efforts.

Effective leaders are known to be those who quickly understand the implications of business data and can apply it to operational advantage. Their decisions are financially sound and do not put the business in jeopardy.

Less effective leaders might never have learned how to effectively read spreadsheets and other data sources, so they are embarrassed by their lack of knowledge. As a result, they may depend on others to analyze and present the data, so miss opportunities or details that would impact their decisions. Or they might not even know what data would be useful to them for making decisions. In this instance, they might rely on “seat of the pants” decision-making. Everyone can cite examples of when this type of decision-making was successful. But, for the most part, the best decisions are data-driven.

If you are one of those executives who is intimidated by data, now is the time to rectify that lack of knowledge. Here are some tips to help you gain more comfort and skill in this area.

• Become familiar with the key financial indicators of your organization. Words such as sales growth, net income, cash flow, and earnings per share should not cause you to cringe. If they do, enroll in a class or workshop on financial analysis. You might be embarrassed to admit that your skills are lacking, but the teacher will be delighted to help you learn. After all, that is what they do.
• Ask someone in the organization who is good at financial analysis and data-driven decision-making to be your mentor. Again, they will probably be happy to assist you in recognizing the areas where you are lacking and helping you to increase your skills.
• The finance and accounting departments in your organization are your friends! They are there to be your support system, so do not hesitate to use them. They can help you figure out which metrics would be most useful to your department or unit, and they can set them up and train you in their use. There is lots of help available to you if you ask.
• Do not delegate the task of understanding what the data are telling you. This is your responsibility. You may, however, delegate the task of gathering the data and analyzing it on an initial basis, as well as providing you with regular reports. These operational monitoring systems will provide you with critical information that can inform your decisions.
• Analyze how well your decisions have worked out. If they weren’t successful, you might discover that you ignored data in an area that you didn’t realize at the time was critical. You are not likely to make that mistake again.

Good decisions are based on good data. And data can also tell you when your initiatives are going astray so that you have adequate time to make smaller changes instead of dealing with a catastrophe at a later date. Understanding and making use of data are not the only things that impact the bottom line of your business, of course, but they are a great start.  

Effective executives talk to people in all areas and levels of their organizations on a regular basis. They make a point to travel to all of the locations under their purview and to maintain an awareness of what is happening in even remote geographic areas of the organization. They maintain an open-door policy so their team members can come and speak with them about issues or personal problems as soon as they arise. It is better to take the time upfront to deal with an issue when it is small than to have to cancel numerous meetings to deal with it once it has erupted into a crisis.

It is also important to be aware of who might support your change initiatives and who might oppose them. Best of all is to speak with these people before the initiatives are even introduced so you can respond to their concerns and possibly make changes in order to gain their support.

Leaders who struggle with internal politics may have one of several problems. First, they may lack skills in interpersonal communications. For example, these people might miss verbal or nonverbal cues from a team member that could indicate a problem or potential crisis is brewing, whereas leaders with stronger skills in this area might pick up on the cues and respond to them appropriately. In addition, ineffective leaders may not understand how to control their tempers, resulting in harsh words to team members or outbursts during meetings. In this instance, they might be unaware of how their hasty words impinge on their staff’s motivation and work satisfaction. Finally, they might make decisions precipitously without considering how the decisions could impact people. If they had gathered more information before making the decision, the outcome could have been much better.

It is critical that you do an honest evaluation of your skills in navigating internal politics. If, after you’ve done that, you find that you need to improve your skills in this area, here are some suggestions.

• Look around and identify several people who are good in this area. You will know who they are because they nearly always succeed in their initiatives, people generally like and respect them, and they regularly manage to get complicated things done smoothly. Choose one person to emulate. Watch how that person deals with internal politics and practice analyzing what he or she did right. And then practice some of those behaviors yourself. If possible, take the person to lunch and ask him or her to mentor you in this area. Most people will be flattered by the attention and will agree to help.
• Get to know people in the organization. Many people who need to improve in organizational savvy are those who are shy or introverted. They don’t make an effort to network or get to know people in other parts of the organization. If you put yourself forward more often and get to know people on a personal level, you may find that you have more supporters for your initiatives. At the very least, people will feel comfortable coming to you with their concerns.
• Before you propose a new initiative, make a point to consider who might support that initiative and who might oppose it or even sabotage it. Think about why people might respond as you suspect and then watch the situation play out. If you were right, consider making an effort to get the people who opposed your initiative to support the next one. This might be as simple as asking them to support it, or it might involve a private conversation about what you could do to regain their support and a clearing of the air. You might never get support from everyone, but successful executives will figure out how to garner more support than opposition.

Politics are everywhere, and they aren’t just internal. Executives who learn how to manage all their constituencies will have a much easier time successfully leading their teams to greater productivity.

If you are insecure about your ability to envision opportunities, take heart. You wouldn’t have been hired in an executive position if you didn’t have at least some of these skills. Every skill can be learned and improved. And every organization has staff members who naturally excel in thinking up new ways into the future. Even if you don’t envision the opportunities yourself, your strength may lie in recognizing and promoting them when they come to your attention.

Leadership requires bold thinking. Not every innovation works out, of course, but failure to innovate creates stagnation, and stagnation leads to reduced market share and, ultimately, failure. It’s crucial that you support creative ideas and put them to work. Your enthusiasm for innovation encourages others to support your ideas and help you implement them.

If envisioning opportunities is not your strong suit, here are some tips to help you improve in this competency.

• The biggest reason people don’t undertake a bold vision is because they are afraid of failure. The truth is that everybody fails. Everyone makes mistakes. Your challenge is to learn from your mistakes and not repeat them. Effective executives choose to innovate and take risks, and they don’t allow their fear of failure to stop them.
• Make sure you thoroughly understand your organization and its history. Be able to articulate the organization’s existing vision statement. Know where you can support this vision and where you will want to change it to take the organization into the future.
• Identify the creative visionaries in your field and get to know them. Better yet, hire them for your team if you can.
• Keep current on the trends that will shape your industry. Regularly read newspapers and periodicals that report on your industry. Attend conferences and other meetings that feature futurists and ideas for innovations.
• Get to know your peers in other parts of the organization. If possible, form a “visionary group” in which you meet regularly to discuss trends and ideas for the future.
• Try out your ideas on your team. Listen carefully to their reactions. They are the ones who will need to implement your plans. If they are pessimistic, challenge them to come up with better ideas.

If you pay attention, you will notice that good ideas are everywhere. Effective leaders aren’t always exceptional innovators or legendary risk-takers on their own, but they recognize good ideas when they see them and support those skills in others. If you encourage visionary thinking in yourself and your team members, everyone will benefit.

Several sets of conditions may affect the tension level of your group. First, consider any unresolved conflicts, either between team members or between the team and yourself. If these are festering, they will need to be addressed straightforwardly and resolved satisfactorily in order for the tension level to be reduced. Second, look at your own behavior. If you are overly critical of people, fail to pass information along to your team members, or in some other way create obstacles for people that get in the way of their performing their jobs, then you need to work on fixing these problems. Finally, consider the organizational environment. If layoffs are threatened, for example, tension level will be high. It will be up to you to do the best you can to mitigate the effects of tension within the organization.

Here are some suggestions for dealing with an unproductive tension level among your group:

• Review your scores on earlier phases of the Task Cycle, particularly in planning and managing conflict. If you plan more collaboratively, you will increase involvement of team members and this will likely reduce any tension related to deadlines and expectations that your team members consider to be overly stringent. You will understand the source of discontent early and have the opportunity to deal with it. Conflict also needs to be addressed in a straightforward manner. If your team members see that you are attempting to resolve conflict, they will likely exhibit more patience with the problem, thereby reducing tension.
• If conflict is an ongoing problem in your team, you might want to consider participating in training opportunities related to conflict management, negotiation tactics, or nonviolent communication.
• High tension is not positive engagement. An honest look at your leadership style will help you see your part in creating high tension in your team. Yelling at people may make you feel better for a while, but it is likely to result in team members who do not tell you about problems until it is too late.
• If things in your team are easy and productivity is high, congratulate yourself for a job well done. If productivity seems to be slipping, however, you may want to re-examine your vision and possibly increase the level of challenge involved in your goals and objectives. Your team may appreciate being involved in riskier initiatives, particularly if they regard these as a team effort and know they will not be punished if the initiatives are not as successful as hoped.

If the high tension level in your team is caused by organizational policies beyond your control, you could look at assuring your team that you will keep them informed as things change. Ultimately, successful management comes down to communication. Even if you can’t change the things around you, you can change the way you communicate about them to your team.

The most effective way to achieve team goals is to utilize the steps early in the Task Cycle, such as planning ahead, setting appropriate standards of performance, and providing motivating feedback. Unfortunately, some managers rely more on pressuring their teams to perform than they do on other techniques. Goal pressure may result in short-term performance gains, but it is not likely to be your best tool over the long term. Too much pressure results in burned-out team members, inconsistent results, and poor relationships.

On the other hand, pressure that is only applied occasionally could be quite effective. But it should be a rarely-used tool in your tool box. If you rely on it too much, you could be pushing, not leading. People might consider you to be abrasive or overly aggressive, and they might not want to work on your team. Conversely, if you never use this tool, you could be considered to be less than committed to the success of your project.

How can you achieve your goals without over-reliance on goal pressure? Here are a few suggestions.

• Study the early parts of the Task Cycle. Techniques such as Goal Setting, Problem Solving, Planning and Collaboration, and Coaching are much more effective than pressure for motivating team members.
• When you set goals for your team, make sure you stress the importance of achieving them. Ask people to talk to you right away if they believe they are not likely to reach the goal in a timely manner. If you know this ahead of time, you have options. Pressure might not be the preferred one.
• Make sure your expectations are appropriate and not overly ambitious. Your colleagues who are also managers can help you decide whether you are asking too much of your team members.
• Remember that each person responds to different motivational techniques. Rewards are often much more effective than pressure. Tailor your strategies to the needs of each individual team member.
• If you decide that this is one of those rare occasions when pressure is most appropriate, be up-front about it with your team members. Assure them that the need to work late, drop other assignments, miss training opportunities, etc., will not be the norm. If possible, explain how long the pressure situation will last (hopefully no more than a few weeks) and demonstrate that you will also be working long hours alongside them.
• When you meet your goal, congratulate your team for a job well done. Then return to the status quo.

Be careful not to overuse this skill. The pleasure that team members feel from accomplishing goals that have been planned for and executed appropriately will be very different from the relief they are likely to feel when success comes from pressure. And you will be happy to have a variety of tools in your toolbox from which to choose.

If you enjoyed this post, you may be interested in:

How to Set and Enforce Performance Standards

The Delicate Balance of Delegating

Giving Feedback That Works

You may or may not have the ability to increase your team members’ compensation, but it is always within your power to praise good work and to thank people for their extra efforts. If you get in the habit of providing recognition and rewards for good work, you may be amazed at how far this takes you in terms of increasing your team members’ motivation to succeed.

Even though recognizing good performance is easy and fun, not every manager thinks to make it part of their daily routine. Other, more pressing concerns may take priority. Or managers think they have provided adequate recognition, but the team members do not experience it the same way. Sometimes managers fail to understand and appreciate how much their own success depends on the work and support of others, so they take more credit for the success of their teams than is appropriate.

If you are wondering whether you provide adequate recognition to your team members, here are some things to consider.

• Do you think to acknowledge people’s small achievements as well as their large ones? Large efforts are made of daily decisions to go above and beyond what is expected. If you thank people for doing small things, they are more likely to achieve in the large ones, too.
• Do you walk around and see what people are doing right, and thank them for it? Some managers think they shouldn’t thank people for doing what they’re supposed to do, but that isn’t the case. People will continue to do what has been praised. So make a point to praise them, thank them, acknowledge their hard work, and do it as often as possible.
• Do you acknowledge your team’s efforts when someone outside the team praises you for your success? In a work environment, everything is achieved through teamwork, and your successes are built on those of your team. Don’t forget to admit that.
• Are you aware of how each team member would like to be acknowledged? Not everyone wants to be praised in public. Some people would rather read a personal thank-you note or be taken to lunch to celebrate their achievements. Don’t assume that everyone is the same.
• Do you acknowledge the good work of low-visibility people or those who are geographically distant from you? These people need praise, too.

Providing praise and recognition are some of the easiest, most rewarding parts of your job. If you remember to do them regularly, people will likely clamor to work on your team.

If you enjoyed this post, you may also like:

• How to Achieve Team Goals Through Goal Pressure
• How to Set an Enforce Performance Standards
• The Delecate Balance of Delegating

Getting delegation right is difficult and takes some practice, but it is certainly possible. Delegating is difficult because people need to be given different amounts of responsibility depending on the circumstances. A person who is new to the job should be given less responsibility and receive more supervision than someone who has extensive experience in the job. Even an experienced worker will need more supervision when learning something new.

Effective delegation requires more than just understanding the employee’s ability to succeed in the task. The manager must also understand her/his tolerance level for mistakes. For example, when a task is critical to the team’s effectiveness or safety, the tolerance level should be minimal. But when a mistake would result in few repercussions, it is probably worthwhile to allow the employee to learn from her/his mistakes.

Too much delegation will often result in high levels of mistakes as well low confidence in you as manager. Conversely, too little delegation can result in an over-dependence on you and a lack of initiative by your team members. You may be considered a micro-manager, and people might end up quitting because of you.

What’s a poor, longsuffering manager to do?

If delegation is a particularly difficult skill for you, consider the following suggestions.

• When assigning responsibilities, consider whether you need to have the work done without errors or whether you can tolerate a few errors as the person learns. If the work needs to be done error-free, you might want to delegate the assignment to your most experienced person, and only serve as back-up to that person. If you can tolerate a few errors, consider assigning it to a less-experienced person and possibly asking the more experienced person to be back-up. That will allow both people to experience a stretch assignment.
• Ask your team members what kind of assignments they would like to receive in the coming year, and then do your best to honor their requests.
• Make sure you discuss the expected result when you delegate a task. Both you and the person responsible for the task should understand what is acceptable performance, when the assignment is due, and how often the work should be monitored by you. That will keep any unpleasant surprises to a minimum.
• Consider your team members as collaborators rather than subordinates. Collaboration involves people acting as a team and using their strengths, whereas thinking of team members as subordinates implies that you have all the answers and you may or may not share those answers with them. People who are treated as collaborators are much more likely to rise to expectations than those who are considered to be subordinates.
• Consult with colleagues or with your own manager to receive guidance about the best way to delegate. These people will probably be happy to collaborate with you to help you become more comfortable with delegation.

Managers who delegate well can probably trust their team members to effectively plan and handle their assignments and to ask for help when they need it. That level of trust isn’t automatic; rather, it needs to be earned. Don’t automatically assume that team members can handle this level of trust, but do provide it when it has been earned. Team members are more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt if they see you are trying to master this skill.