How to Lead: Discover the Leader Within You

Newsletter 23 - 4 May 2005 This is the newsletter for www.mindtools.com. You have received this newsletter because you have subscribed to our double opt-in newsletter. This newsletter is published by James Manktelow of Mind Tools Ltd, Hardwick House, Prospect Place, Swindon, SN1 3LJ, United Kingdom. To contact us, please email newsletter@mindtools.com.

Contents: In This Issue... Mind Tools Store How to Lead Stress Management Subscriber Exclusives Executive Myths A Final Note

In this issue of the Mind Tools newsletter, we're very pleased to give you a sneak-peak at "How to Lead: Discover the Leader Within You," Mind Tools' soon-to-be-launched leadership masterclass. In this new course, we show how, with hard work, you can become a well-respected leader. We're very excited about this course: While we're very proud of "How to Lead", and we can't wait to share it with you!

We also share with you an article from the authors of "The Enthusiastic Employee" (which was reviewed in the last newsletter issue). The article takes a closer look at some of the myths about what employees think about their managers.

In this edition, we introduce a new feature to the newsletter: A monthly special offer exclusively for newsletter readers. In this issue, we offer a 7-day, 25% discount on your first session with a Mind Tools coach. This makes it even easier for you to experience the benefits of coaching for yourself.

We also take a look at stress management, as we are keenly aware that this is a topic our newsletter readers want to know more about. Considering the fast-paced, demanding lives we all now lead, it’s no wonder there is ongoing demand for more information on this topic.

As always, we hope you enjoy this issue of the Mind Tools newsletter and encourage you to continue to send us your thoughts, suggestions and comments. And as ever, if you find these articles useful, please share the newsletter with friends, your co-workers and your team.

Best wishes, and enjoy this issue!

James & Kellie

The Mind Tools Store:

• Mind Tools Relaxation MP3s: Download 15-minutes of intense relaxation in MP3 format with our relaxation MP3s. Put stress behind you, and face the rest of your day with renewed energy and enthusiasm. More >>
  
  
• Make Time for Success!: Make Time for Success teaches 39 essential time management and personal productivity techniques that help you bring your workload under control and maximize your effectiveness, so that you can make the very most of the opportunities open to you. More >>
  
  
• Personal Coaching from Career Excellence Professionals: Find career and life direction, bring your job under control, build self-confidence and put yourself on the path to long term success with a Mind Tools coach. Our coaches give you the focused personal coaching you need to make the most of your career. More >>
  
  
• The Mind Tools E-book:All of the articles on the Mind Tools website in one convenient, easily-downloadable, easily-printable PDF file. We have excluded advertising to enhance clarity and have formatted sections to be easy to read, print and use. More >>
  
  
• The Stress Management Masterclass: This e-book shows you how to tackle the deep structural problems that cause stress in your working life. It introduces you to relaxation techniques, shows you how to win control of your job and career, cope with politics and manage stress effectively. More >>

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Tools Previewed: Portrait of a Leader
An Excerpt from Mind Tools upcoming e-book: “How to Lead: Discover the Leader Within You”
By James Manktelow, Felix Brodbeck & Namita Anand

“At the age of seven, a young boy and his family were forced out of their home. The boy had to work to support his family. At the age of nine, his mother passed away. When he grew up, the young man was keen to go to law school, but had no education.

At 22, he lost his job as a store clerk. At 23, he ran for state legislature and lost. The same year, he went into business. It failed, leaving him with a debt that took him 17 years to repay. At 27, he had a nervous breakdown.

Two years later, he tried for the post of speaker in his state legislature. He lost. At 31, he was defeated in his attempt to become an elector. By 35, he had been defeated twice while running for Congress. Finally, he did manage to secure a brief term in Congress, but at 39 he lost his re-election bid.

At 41, his four-year-old son died. At 42, he was rejected as a prospective land officer. At 45, he ran for the Senate and lost. Two years later, he lost the vice presidential nomination. At 49, he ran for Senate and lost again.

At 51, he was elected the President of the United States of America.

The man in question: Abraham Lincoln.”

—— Author Unknown

Many of us are acquainted with this eloquent example of persistence in achieving victory. We read it, stop for a moment and then sigh and say: “Wow! That’s the stuff real leaders are made off.”

And in saying this, it’s all too easy for us to think about leaders like Lincoln almost as “mythological creatures”, separate from the rest of humanity and empowered by some mysterious quality that smoothes their path towards inevitable success. This is the view of leadership that many people have traditionally taken: That leaders are marked out for leadership from early on in their lives, and that if you’re not a leader, there’s little that you can do to become one.

However, that’s not the way we see it now. The modern view is that through patience, persistence and hard work, you can acquire the qualities of an effective leader. And that, just as long as you make the effort needed, you can lead successfully.

"How to Lead" helps you find and develop these leadership qualities within yourself. It shows you how to look inside yourself and understand your own leadership strengths and weaknesses. It helps you build the passion, drive and vision that others find so inspiring, and it then teaches the essential skills needed to turn this vision into reality.

Leaders Don’t Wait for an Appointment Letter

Now, I ask you to take another moment of reflection. When we said “That’s the stuff real leaders are made off”, just what is this “stuff” we attributed to former U.S. President Lincoln? What is the “stuff” that made him prevail against all odds to emerge as a great leader? It amounts to sheer determination and a desire to lead, doesn’t it?

This leads us to the most basic truth of leadership:

Leadership is a decision, not a position

Now look around your workplace, your community. Have you seen situations where the person in-charge did not actually lead? And haven’t you come across instances where a person without any defined authority has casually slipped into the leadership role?

List these instances. Note the reasons you think that the boss did not function as an effective leader. And why was the person without any formal authority able to take over the leader’s role?

A Boss Who Does Not Lead	A Leader Who Isn’t the Boss
Name, Position:	Name, Position:
Situation, Context:	Situation, Context:
Reasons:	Reasons:

You might have listed a variety of reasons for the situation. Now consider:

• If the boss really wanted to lead, could he or she have not become the leader?
• If the leader did not want to lead, could he or she have actually assumed leadership?

The answer is simple in most cases. Which brings us to the conclusion that:–

‘The desire to lead is the most necessary pre-condition to becoming a leader.’

Once you decide you want to lead, you don’t have to wait for anyone else to come along and appoint you leader. You just have to go out there and grab the leadership challenge.

This is not to say that just desire is enough to convert you into a leader. Becoming a leader is not easy. Specific skills have to be developed and enhanced. An immense amount of discipline and focus is required. Yet, the point is that if you want it badly enough and are prepared to work hard enough, you can become a highly effective leader.

Yes, you might not be in-charge, you might not have any formal authority, you might be fettered by a dozen limitations, but yet if you really want to lead, you can.

Do you too want to become a leader? If your answer is “yes,” then congratulations! You have already taken the first step on the road to leadership. And, our course will provide you with the detailed route map needed to successfully accomplish the rest of the journey. Use it and soon, with hard work, you too will have met the leadership challenge.

This is the first of several excerpts from “How to Lead: Discover the Leader Within You”, the upcoming course from Mind Tools. The Beta Test of How to Lead will start in June, with launch in one of our July newsletters.

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Tools Reviewed: Stress Management

Not only is stress deeply unpleasant, it can cause severe health problems and, in extreme cases, causes death. Considering this, it is more important than ever to do what we can to manage it.

We all experience pressure and stress from time-to-time. Providing it’s not excessive, high levels of pressure (with associated stress) can push us to perform spectacularly. And as long as this stress is short-lived, negative effects are usually minimal. However, if hard work and the stressors related to it are sustained for a long time without relief, you are at increased risk of burnout and of damage to your health.

Sure, we rest and sleep because we need to. But did you know that rest, relaxation and sleep have also proven to be effective tools when it comes to combating stress? What’s more, by making sure you engage in relaxing leisure activities, you help your mind and your body better deal with stress: By clearing your mind of stressful distractions, you can think more clearly and concentrate more effectively, improving your performance when it matters.

Rest and Relaxation

Rest is what we do to let stress subside. Rest at the end of a day, and at the end of a week, helps us to calm down.

Doing fun things that we enjoy in our leisure time compensates us for the unpleasant stress we experience at work, bringing some balance back into life. This is particularly important if unpleasant levels of stress are normal at work.

A good way of getting rest and reducing long-term stress is to take up an enjoyable, non-rushed sport or hobby. If you spend all your working day competing, then can be very pleasant to be completely noncompetitive for some of your free time. Slow physical activities such as sailing or walking are good for this, as are others where there is little or no pressure for performance. Reading novels, watching television or socializing can also be very restful.

Vacations are particularly important, and you really do need to take these. Where possible, take two weeks off rather than just one week. A common observation that people make is that they really do not start to relax properly until the end of their first week of vacation.

Make sure that you take your vacations and that you use them to relax. Also, make sure that you get enough good quality rest during the week to keep on enjoying life to its fullest.

Sleep
The "average" person needs around eight hours sleep a night (although this can vary between three hours and eleven hours, depending on the person and his or her age).

If we are regularly short of sleep, then our concentration and our effectiveness suffer and our energy levels decline. We have all experienced this.

This diminishes our effectiveness in our job, and can therefore increase stress. As our concentration wanders, we start to make mistakes. As our energy declines, we become less proactive in what we do, reducing our control over events. This means that a situation that is already difficult and stressful can become worse, needing even more sacrifice to bring it back under control.

Make sure that you get enough sleep. If you have become used to being tired all the time, you will be amazed by how sharp and energetic you will feel once you start sleeping normally.

For more on stress management, visit http://www.mindtools.com/smpage.html.

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Newsletter Subscriber Offer:
7-day, 25% Discount on Your First Career Coaching Session

More and more people are taking action to advance their careers through career coaching. High flying managers, professionals and employees alike are taking control of their own destiny by working with career coaches, whose sole task is to help them uncover their personal career and life goals, overcome the obstacles they encounter, and help them refocus energy on the things that really matter.

Can you imagine having your own, experienced career coach to help you realize your dreams?

Well, many Mind Tools reader do. That’s why Mind Tools launched the career and life coaching service in 2004. That’s why many Mind Tools clients have already benefited from working with a Mind Tools coach.

You work with your Mind Tools coach over the phone, in total confidence. A typical program of 4 sessions is often enough to resolve most situations. You have the assurance that Mind Tools coaches are highly experienced and recruited to Mind Tools exacting standards.

Before you make any commitment, we offer you a free initial consultation so that you can “meet” your coach, experience some of the benefits of coaching, and answer any outstanding questions. If you decide to proceed, the 25% discount will be applied to your first paid session. And, of course, we offer a full money back guarantee if you are not completely satisfied with the coaching you receive.

Now, we know that career coaching is still quite a new idea for many people. What better way of undertanding the benefits that intensive coaching brings than trying it yourself?

So that you can try coaching out for yourself and really start to experience what it can do for you, we’re offering you a 25% discount on your first paid coaching session, when you sign up by 11 May*.To qualify, sign up for your free initial consultation at http://www.mindtools.com/rs/Coaching, quoting code “zhi1005” in the “Objectives and Comments” field.

If you then sign up for the paid sessions, we’ll deduct 25% from the cost of the first paid session - a saving of more than $30.

Book now at http://www.mindtools.com/rs/Coaching. But hurry - this offer expires in only a few days time!

*To qualify for this offer, you must then book your paid sessions within 7 days of your initial consultation.

Guest Article: Executive Myths: Money and Motivation
High Salaries for CEOs? It's Often O.K. With the Employees
By David Sirota, Louis A. Mischkind and Michael Irwin Meltzer

In this day of multi-million-dollar pay packages for corporate CEOs, it is not surprising to hear howls of protests from stockholders concerned about their investments and charges of “fat cat” salaries from ambitious politicians looking to ride the issue to higher office.

But employees at these companies have, for the most part, not joined in the chorus. Most employees are not concerned about the difference in pay between the general workforce and senior management, just as long as the organization is doing well and workers feel that they are also benefiting from that success. Resentment sets in only when the company is doing poorly and workers are suffering in their pay and job security, while senior levels continue to “rake it in”.

Otherwise, the workers’ attitude seems to be: “Let him earn as much as he wants. He deserves it and it’s been good for me.” These employees do not regard their bosses as overpaid, a view that mirrors their opinions that they themselves are not overpaid.

This may come as a surprise to many, and it is one of several beliefs that executives hold that we found to be myths. We catalogue these in our new book, “The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit by Giving Workers What They Want” (Wharton School Publishing). Our findings are based on questionnaires filled out by 2.5 million employees at 237 companies over the last 30 years.

Pay, of course, is just one of many factors that determine whether a company has a satisfied, loyal and productive workforce. Pay is second to job security on workers’ lists of needs, but it is a very close second. Don’t believe it when experts on worker motivation say that pay is not all that important to employees. It is. Don’t believe it when they say that what employees really want is “appreciation” or something like that. That’s psychobabble. Employees want a lot of things, and money is way up there.

Workers need money for the same reasons that CEOs pine for super-big compensation. For both, money provides for material needs (although these needs may be expressed in several homes and a corporate jet for the boss, and a single house and a five-year-old car for the worker). For employees, money creates the sense that they are receiving a fair return for their labors, gives a measure of their personal achievement, and is a potent symbol that the organization values their contributions.

Our research has shown that people want to earn as much as they can, and it is rare for workers to say that they feel overpaid. In fact, because most employees (80 percent) rate their performance as above average, it logically follows that people would not feel overpaid. “The medical benefits are good and the pay is comparable to other companies,” one worker said in a typical response to our question: “What do you like most about working here?” Another said, “What I like most about the company is that the pay is decent.” And another: “I like the pay that I receive here. It is the highest, although by a slim margin, among other companies in the same field. The company shows that it values its employees.”

The last comment is quite telling. The dollars are important both for meeting employees’ material needs and also for the great symbolic value of pay to workers, representing respect for them and their contributions. We found that the overwhelming majority of employees have three main goals at work – equity (which includes pay, benefits, job security and respectful treatment), achievement (to take pride in their work and receive recognition for their accomplishments), and camaraderie in the workplace.

When the workers reach these goals, they are enthusiastic employees, and the company is in position to make big gains. The enthusiastic, well-paid employee returns the “gift” of good treatment with higher productivity and work quality, lower worker turnover (which reduces recruiting and training costs), a decrease in workers shirking their duties and a superior pool of job applicants.

Dave Thomas, the legendary founder of Wendy’s, was one of those rare executives who recognized that his business could thrive if it recognized that high employee turnover, which was widespread in the fast-food business, was very bad for business. Thomas, who died in 2002, told The Wall Street Journal 10 years earlier that Wendy’s decided to become the customer’s restaurant of choice by becoming “the employer of choice.”

“A number of basic changes were made, including significant improvements in compensation – both base and variable pay – and benefits,” Thomas told The Journal. “It worked. Our turnover rate for general managers fell to 20 percent in 1991 from 39 percent in 1989, although turnover among co- and assistant managers dropped to 37 percent from 60 percent – among the lowest in the business. With a stable – and able – workforce, sales began to pick up as well.”

What Dave Thomas realized is something that we have documented in our 30 years of research: it is virtually impossible for companies to inspire loyalty and commitment in workers who are treated as disposable commodities.

The good pay that employees seek, despite myths to the contrary held by many executives, is not a wildly generous level. They don’t expect – or even think it appropriate – to make anything near what executives earn. We must differentiate between the wish for a lot of money and workers’ views of what is reasonable and fair. The employees are capable of separating wishes and fantasies from realistic expectations.

Most workers express satisfaction with pay that they consider to be competitive and great satisfaction with pay they consider to be even a few percentage points above the competition. Pay is a necessary condition for an enthusiastic, high-performing workforce. But it is not sufficient by itself, because workers also want sense of achievement from the work itself and pleasant, cooperative relationships with their co-workers. In other words, they want more than just one thing and the widely held notion by executives that all workers care about is their pay is as wrong as the opposite extreme that “all they really want is appreciation.” These are among the 33 traditional and voguish beliefs that we have determined are wrong.

Other myths that executives hold about their employees are that people who feel secure in their jobs become complacent, and that telling people that they have done a good job makes them complacent. Other myths are that no matter how nicely a manager does it, correcting an employee’s performance will be resented by the employee, and that most employees resist change, whatever the change is. The list of myths is long, and a number of them concern money. Again and again we find that good pay for good work is essential to the success of a company and that the normal inclination of many executives to pay as little as possible is often misguided. As in most other things, you get what you pay for.

For more information, visit www.enthusiasticemployee.com.

A Final Note...

In the next issue of the Mind Tools newsletter, we look forward to reviewing the CD-based course on speed-reading we told you about in our last issue. This course is sure to generate a great deal of excitement and strong results.

We will also take an in-depth look at listening, drawing on the three basic listening modes (competitive or combat listening, passive or attentive listening and active or reflective listening) to better explain the theories of listening. In this article, we will show you the distinction between merely hearing words and really listening for the message, making this an article you don’t want to miss!

For our tools review, we will take a look at how you can develop creative solutions to the problems you face.

Lastly, we look forward to sharing with you more information on how to find the career of your dreams, relying on information we found in a newly-released book entitled “The Play of Your Life.”

And please remember, we’re keen that you share these newsletters with your friends, your co-workers and your team – please feel free to forward it to them to stimulate discussion.

Best wishes, and until next time!

James & Kellie

James Manktelow & Kellie Fowler

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