How can you become a more effective leader?
It has been said that everything rises and falls on leadership.
When you lead an effective team of team-building advocates, you can accomplish incredible results.
However, as there is effort involved in leading a team, it’s essential that you see the value of building what could be your greatest asset.
Controlling your own emotions and dynamically changing how much time you invest with whom can be challenging.
Following are some things that may help you on your leadership journey:
1. Finding leaders who will follow your example can dramatically reduce your workload.
Working with great leaders in your team is like pushing a hot knife through butter. Likewise, working with people that are not yet ready to lead is like trying to jackhammer through granite.
2. Keep reminding yourself that you are in a leadership search and development process and that you only need a very few leaders to create a huge, influential, growing team.
For example, when you find a leader in 5 different teams, it’s easy to see those leaders finding other leaders who will decide to build their teams with or without you. You can add value to such leaders and their teams, but you don’t have to do it for them.
Each leader can easily find 5 other leaders. So, it is easy to visualise each leader having 100 team members, of which only 20% are leaders or potential leaders. This just follows the well known 80/20 rule.
When you find 5 leaders who develop a team of 100, you will have created a team of 500.
Many people that become part of your team will see the value of leading a team of team-building advocates. However, it can be frustrating when such people don’t do what they genuinely believe they should.
However, it helps to know that most people become briefly excited about new things.
We only need to look at how many people stick with their New Year’s resolutions to understand that this is just normal human behaviour.
It really helps when you know that you only need a few leaders in each team to create massive growth and results. You will find some people who are ready to go now and some that will be ready to go later.
3. You can’t push spaghetti. But you can pull it. People are the same.
It pays to immerse people in the CC environment and process. In particular, do everything you can to get them listening to the podcasts.
When people listen to podcasts, in general, you will find they are much easier to work with.
Let the system do the heavy lifting for you. It really helps when you can have your team engaged in workshops where they will benefit by hearing from different facilitators, learning from the Quizzes and interacting with other facilitators.
4. Make sure you use the onboarding process well
A weekly onboarding session during which you take a new team member through the steps of the syllabus works incredibly well.
This onboarding session is your chance to build a relationship while using the system to help explain important concepts and details to your new team member. When the information comes from the system and your team members understand that this will help them onboard others, they are generally more willing to follow the process.
As you build the relationship with your team members through the onboarding process, ask them to think of others they already know who may also be interested in building their network.
You can fast-track finding the leaders you seek by encouraging your team members to make a list of the people they know who may be interested in building their networks.
5. Those that are not ready for leadership can introduce you to others that are
You can personally find leaders in various ways - such as by consistently reaching out to others on LinkedIn.
However, the process of finding leaders is far more leveraged when others introduce you to people they know.
It is often a pleasant surprise to discover how many people will introduce people they believe will be good candidates to you. Often they are right. The people they introduce are looking for exactly what you and the CC system can provide.
It is essential to understand that those team members who may be not yet ready to step up to higher commitment levels know others who may be more prepared to take leadership.
6. Momentum is your friend
Initially, when you are the only person onboarding people to your team, it will grow very slowly.
However, let’s say you find just one other person who works at the same pace as you. Now you have literally doubled the rate at which your team can grow.
When your team is multiplying, it creates excitement and provides an example for others to follow. It creates an expectation that team-building is not difficult.
7. Work to create a generally positive atmosphere in your team and as much team member engagement as possible
Although you may spend most of your time looking for and developing leaders, it is vital to recognise the contribution made by all team members.
Everyone loves to belong to an encouraging, positive, uplifting team.
Encourage Good News Stories that relate to advocacy as well as network building.
Team meetings are a great way to keep everyone together and encourage the less active network builders in your team.
8. Continually work on your own personal development
In general, the more self-aware you become, the greater the leader you become.
The more great podcasts you listen to, the more you learn and are inspired. When you listen to podcasts, you are more likely to excitedly recommend those podcasts to your team members, knowing how much it will benefit them.
In particular, it’s great to work on your people skills.
Knowing your own personality type and how others perceive you allows you to become more effective in relating to others.
Knowing how to influence others for their benefit is very exciting.
Helping others to create positive habits and encouraging them on their personal development journey is also very exciting.
Knowing you can make a difference in the lives of your team members is very fulfilling.
It’s easy to get distracted, become impatient or frustrated. Learning emotional control makes a huge difference to your results and happiness - especially in the longer term.
9. Become more strategic, personally organised and productive.
We all struggle with how best to invest our time.
Among other things, making better use of our time comes down to being more effective and more efficient.
First, let’s think about increased personal effectiveness. Where will your time be most effectively invested?
Sometimes, you can spend a long-time in an enjoyable conversation. But what was the outcome of that conversation? Could you have ended the conversation sooner and still had the same result? Instead, could you have allocated some of that time to be spent with family and loved ones?
On the other hand, you may choose to block time out in your calendar to develop a mini-habit that you have strategically determined will produce the predictable results you seek. For example, this could be reaching out to a filtered list of others on LinkedIn.
Being more effective mostly comes down to deliberately and strategically spending time on activities or building relationships to produce more of the results you want.
What if you could save several hours per day simply by becoming more efficient?
Let’s look at the simple task of booking a time for a Zoom with those that you have contacted. If you attempt to accomplish this manually, it takes a lot of time and energy to find a time that works for you, and the person you are attempting to book a time with.
Booking systems like Calendly make this process so easy. You simply send the other person a link to book one of the free times in your calendar that works for them.
One of the significant advantages of tools like Calendly is that you can block time out for other activities.
Also, when using a booking system, you can pre-set an expectation for the length of the meeting. For example, the person you are Zooming with may only be able to choose a 15-minute time slot.
Such booking systems have many other great features, such as the ability to send SMS reminders and the ability for your guests to reschedule on their own. This reduces your chances of no-shows.
Let’s look at another example. Let’s say you are spending a great deal of time typing the same or similar messages to those you are reaching out to on platforms like LinkedIn.
You can save an enormous amount of time, thinking up creative responses, typing those responses and correcting typos when using simple and powerful tools such a TextBlaze.
We cover some great recommended tools in subsequent workshops.
If you find yourself complaining about a lack of time, think about:
1. How am I currently investing my time? Could I invest my time better to achieve the results I am looking for?
2. What if I could save significant amounts of time by investing a small amount of time in learning about and making habitual use of some tremendous time-saving productivity tools?
3. How can I multiply my time as well as doing a better job of how I invest my personal time?
Personal time allocation is of vital interest to most busy people. That’s why we have set up and continue to add to a Podcast of great talks that will help you and your team members gain perspective on how best to allocate and protect your time.
You can easily access that Podcast from the builder’s menu. Look for a Podcast title on the Builders menu called: “How to best allocate your time”.
