The Frisina Group, LLC Issue 42 January 2015

INFLUENTIAL LEADER Issue 42 JAN 2015

IN THIS ISSUE

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Influential Leader is a publication of The Frisina Group, LLC.

What is the difference between a leader and a manager? It is a simple question. While many of us can clearly explain the difference between the two, the fact is that many of us go about daily business simply managing things, without making the attempt to lead or influence others. In this New Year, choose to resolve, if you have not already done so, to become an influential leader. Regardless of your status or titled position of authority, make the effort to be influential in the lives others around you in your workplace.

Mark Twain said, “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” If you believe you were born to lead others, commit to doing it in an influential way.

The first step in any new direction is typically changing the way we think. The internal changes you can make to become an influential leader are self-examination, sincerity, and soliciting feedback. Throughout our writing and teaching on influential leadership, a critical component has always been the need for leaders to be self-aware and how that is the key to unlocking your leadership potential. Building on that concept, let us continue the discussion of what it truly means to be an influential leader in your workplace, and how to accomplish that goal.

Simply stated, self-examination is the fastest route to becoming self-aware. Yet, a great many leaders do not take a look inside, possibly afraid of what they might discover. The irony is that these same leaders are masters at conducting root-cause analyses on the

The Need for Leaders

Followers Desire Sincere Leaders

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The Need for Leaders

What is Leadership Development?

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The Frisina Group, LLC Issue 42 January 2015

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failures within their organizations. However, such examinations often do not lead to improvement or change in processes. They can diagnose failure, or non-performance without being able to translate that diagnosis into a solution. Still other leaders choose to cope with organizational problems rather than evaluate and then solve them. Neither of these two options will improve your leadership influence or organizational performance.

What is true of organizations is also true of individuals. Leaders are not perfect beings, much like organizations are not perfect entities. That truth is reason enough to signal a need for self-examination. Add to this fact the interpersonal conflicts or behavioral clashes that leaders face on a daily basis, and you have all the indicators that something is wrong and that “something” must be addressed. Do not mistake behavioral conflicts for personality or style issues, because they are different. Behavior is a matter of choice, while personality is an inherent trait. Self-examination is the key to making the right behavior choice to recognizing poor habits. It is the action predicated on the ability of being self-aware. Becoming self-aware is the starting point for becoming an influential leader. We cannot become influential until we become aware of the impact our behavior has on others in our workplaces.

What is Leadership Development?

Recently I presented this question to a group of professionals at one of

our engagement sessions: Where did you learn how to be a leader? To clarify, I was not asking what traits make a good leader. I wanted to know their experience on how they learned to be a leader. The answers were alarmingly similar. None of the leaders in attendance had received formal leadership training and development. Many of them had taken continuing education courses in leadership theories and nearly everyone had read a bestselling or trendy management book. None of them had been exposed to the concept of behaviorally based influential leadership and its associated behavior skill set development.

Unfortunately, this is not surprising. Many leaders today came into their titled positions by being exemplary employees and moving successfully through progressive levels of management. These former “line people” were exceptional at their day-to-day responsibilities and were rewarded with a promotion, but they had little or no training (formal or informal) or experience in leadership and management. Few organizations invest the time and money to develop or prepare their most capable employees for future leadership positions.

Even more unfortunate is that many existing leadership development programs ignore the value of studying human behaviors and the impact of these behaviors have on performance outcomes. Without proper training and associated experience in how to do their jobs, new leaders can often be clueless about how to deal with the dysfunctional situations and behaviors, the “people issues,” that occur daily and could consume 80 percent of their workday.

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Notes

“Behavior is a matter of choice, while personality is an inherent trait. Self-examination is the key to making the right behavior choice to recognizing poor habits.”

“Feedback on performance is imperative for continued growth and performance outcomes. Performance indicators always provide the answer to the return on investment for training and development at the end of the day. “

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(continued) Leadership development should revolve around issues that are most relevant to leaders, such as how to hire or retain talented people. Effective leadership development is hands on, and cannot be lecture oriented or discussion based alone. Coaching is a logical adjunct to the academic element of the learning environment. Learned concepts can be practiced, applied to actual situations, and repeated until mastered. Feedback on performance is imperative for continued growth and performance outcomes. Performance indicators always provide the answer to the return on investment for training and development at the end of the day.

Followers Desire Sincere Leaders

When leaders are willing to submit their behavior to self-examination, doing so reveals many things, including a level of sincerity, which is a trait all influential leaders share. Sincerity is synonymous with genuineness, honesty, and authenticity. Gather a group of people and ask each of them to list the attributes of the “ideal” leader. Sincerity will appear on each list every time. I know this, because I have conducted this exercise with various individuals in numerous organizations all over the world.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary notes that sincere is from Middle French meaning “honest”, which in turn is derived from the Latin sincerus, meaning “whole, unsullied, pure, honest, and genuine.” A story of unknown origin states that the literal meaning of sincerus is “without wax.” During the Middle Ages, defective marble artwork was commonly repaired by grounding marble chips into dust, mixing the dust with wax, and applying the mixture to the defect, which was thus disguised. Marble artwork without defects was called “sincerus” or “without wax.” One of the ways one could tell if their work was indeed sincerus, was to wait until summer, when the heat would melt the wax, therefore revealing the flaws or lack of flaw in the sculpture.

It is a great story, even if it maybe untrue. The point is simple: Leaders must all be without wax, in other words you need to be the genuine article. This is not to say that you aren’t to be without flaw, but crises, stress and other difficulties reveal the inner character pretenses of people. What you are on the inside will always reveal yourself on the outside when the heat is on. Sooner or later, under the heat of a trying circumstance, the real you will become evident. So challenge yourself with a reflective question: How whole, pure, honest, and genuine am I as a leader? How do I behave when the job becomes difficult? Or you simply ask those who work with you, because whether we like it, they already know the answer.

Individual leader behavior remains the singular most important predictor to both individual and organizational performance excellence. Self-awareness demonstrated in the behaviors of humility and sincerity will open the door to the feedback required for you to manage yourself and lead yourself well. Are you ready to change? Do you have the courage to do so? That is worth thinking about today.

The Frisina Group, LLC Issue 42 January 2015

The Frisina Group, LLC

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Influential Leader is a publication of The Frisina Group, LLC, and The Center for Influential Leadership. All Rights Reserved.

Michael E. Frisina, PhD, is CEO of The Frisina Group, LLC, Founder and Senior Research Scholar at The Center for Influential Leadership. An award winning educator, author of three books including Influential Leadership – Change Yourself, Change Your Organization, Change Health Care (Health Administration Press/ACHE), and conference speaker, he is committed to improving the performance of your leaders,

your people, and your organization. Michael is a former faculty member of The United States Military Academy at West Point and retired from The United States Army Medical Department. Dr. Frisina served as a subject matter expert in leadership and ethics for the United States Army Surgeon General and the Department of Defense Human Genome Project. Dr. Frisina served in a variety of leadership positions in several healthcare systems prior to founding his own organization. He received the American College of Health Care Executives 2012 and 2014 Educational Development Award. Michael can be contacted at michael.frisina@thefrisinagroup.com

Written to help leaders understand the link between behavior and peak performance, Influential Leadership reveals how successful and effective leaders are driven by a set of behaviors that enables them to become role models for followers, guide operational improvements, and sustain excellence.

“Dr. Frisina leverages a lifetime of observations and hard-earned wisdom to give us a handful of guiding principles to make us all better leader in our professional and personal lives.” -Dr William R. Berry, MD, MPH, FACS, research associate, Department of Health Policy and Management, Harvard School of Public Health