• Keep Your Head Up In The Corner
• What Makes Teams Work?
• Resource Review - Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence

• The smallest number of people possible and no delegates.
• Selfless, action-oriented, positive thinkers
• Individuals that are fiercely independent and intensely collaborative at the same time
• Diversity: a cross section of people who have different opinions about things and who approach their work in different ways.

• Makes people feel at ease
• Creates an open channel of communication from and to each member
• Is always on the lookout for distractions, tangents, and unproductive or ancillary issues.
• Creates an environment in which people can practice and make mistakes before they're pressured to produce.
• Focuses on managing the interactions between people, as opposed to managing individual behavior
• Brings intellectual, emotional, and spiritual resources to the team.
• Creates a shared culture and ensures new players buy into the team's culture

• A clearly defined and articulated mission which everybody understands
• A team created for the right reasons and in the right way.
• Trust and mutual respect between all team members
• A cause or common goal that everyone agrees on.
• Clarity on the process - how you're going to get where you need to be, who drives what, and who is the ultimate decision maker
• A company culture that rewards groups and not just individuals
• Time taken in startup to understand what you're going to do and how you're going to deal with the possible bumps along the way.
• Provision of new kinds of shared space that allow new kinds of collaboration and creativity to take place.

Leadership Perspectives selects 4 or 5 key articles, learning stories & best practices each month that offer fresh perspectives & new ideas on dealing with the challenges of:

• Formulating & communicating vision,
• Developing strategy,
• Motivating & inspiring stakeholders & team members,
• Discerning future trends, &
• Developing leadership skills

We'd love your feed back and to hear of any topics you would like to see addressed.

Keep Your Head Up In The Corner

In my work in executive development, I have, for a long time, coached managers and leaders to spend at least some of their time on environmental scanning…..paying attention to what is and sometimes isn't, happening in their marketplace and the overall economic environment.

In times like this, when everything seems to change so quickly, some business leaders are worrying about how their businesses will survive and thrive. Challenging times often cause us to turn inward…to focus more of our attention on operations …. maybe trying to become as lean and mean as we can be. And sometimes, while focussed on the internal stuff, you miss seeing something significant happening in your marketplace i.e. the emergence of a new competitor; a shift in market forces that affects your value proposition, etc.

The advice given by my first hockey coach holds true for the managers and leaders of today's organizations: "keep your head up". In some ways we're all in a "corner" and our very survival may depend on paying some attention to what's really going out there.

Last month, I discovered a very impressive company called Competia.com. Based in Montreal, they are experts in the field of gathering competitive intelligence. However, as well as doing it for you, they will teach you how to do it yourself. I took a course from them on doing web research and while I'm a reasonably experienced user of the internet, I learned so much in the session that I believe it was the most useful educational experience that I've had in many years.

The firm was started by Estelle Metayer, an ex-McKinsey consultant who in a few short years has created a real dynamo of a company. Check out their website at competia.com …. there's a lot happening. For example, under the "Express" button, you'll find a portal leading you to more information than you'd ever imagine, about over 40 different product/service categories.

Competia offers a cost-effective way for companies to get a better handle on their markets. They offer one way to help you keep your head up.

Some other ways might include talking, on a regular basis, to your suppliers and customers….find out what forces are really driving and shaping their markets. This is a task that should be shared by all senior management.

Try reading outside your industry….read one trade journal from a different industry every month. Meet with your colleagues and talk about what's driving the industries that you've been reading about.

Have an off-sight management meeting and ask your people to design a scenario that involves your Company being driven out of business. Ask them to describe a company that could beat us at our game.

There are lots of ways to keep your head up….make it a priority for all managers. <by Peter Buchanan, Management-Transitions Ltd.>

By Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis & Annie McKee

Although the characteristics of great leaders are often described in terms of strategy, vision and execution, in fact, great leadership works through the emotions. Great leaders move us. They ignite our passions and inspire our performance.

In Primal Leadership, Goleman, Boyatzis & McKee make a case for a neuroanatomical basis for the importance of Emotional Intelligence, why it is important and how you can develop it. Leaders who exercise primal leadership drive the emotions of those they lead in the right direction.

The authors begin by laying the groundwork of the four domains of emotional intelligence and the 18 competencies that are central to primal leadership. Although even the most outstanding leader will not have all 18 competencies, effective leaders will exhibit at least one competency from each domain. The four domains and their competencies are:

• Self Awareness:
  Emotional Self Awareness, Accurate Self Assessment, Self Confidence
• Self Management:
  Emotional Self Control, Transparency, Adaptability, Achievement, Initiative, Optimism
• Social Awareness:
  Empathy, Organizational Awareness, Service
• Relationship Management:
  Inspirational Leadership, Influence, Developing Others, Change Catalyst, Building Bonds, Teamwork and Collaboration

The authors then show how these competencies form the basis of six styles of leadership:

• Visionary:
  The visionary leader articulates where the group is going but leaves it to the team to work out how to get there. He or she provides the group with the freedom to innovate, experiment and take calculated risks. The most important EI competency for this style is empathy which helps the leader sense what others feel and understand their perspectives. With this as a basis, the leader can then articulate a truly inspirational vision.
• Coaching:
  A coaching style flourishes in the domain of one-on-one and focuses on helping people identify their unique strengths and weaknesses and build on this foundation. Effective coaching requires the EI competencies of emotional awareness, empathy and developing others.
• Affiliative:
  Central to this style is the collaborative competency which allows the leader to promote harmony and foster positive interactions. It often works in tandem with the visionary style to provide a potent combination.
• Democratic:
  A democratic leader builds on a combination of EI abilities: teamwork and collaboration, conflict management and influence.
• Pacesetting:
  In this style, the leader holds and exemplifies high standards for performance and combined with empathy can be an inspirational style. However, applied excessively by a leader without a strong empathy competency can lead to poor morale and decreased productivity.
• Commanding:
  The commanding leader demands immediate compliance with no explanation for the reasons. Although effective in crises and emergencies, used inappropriately and without the EI competencies of self-awareness, emotional self-control and empathy, it can erode people's spirits, motivation and job satisfaction.

To increase your leadership effectiveness, you must determine your leadership styles and then strengthen the Emotional Intelligence competencies necessary for each style you will use. The authors maintain that leadership development must be a self-directed process and describe five discovery stages that a learner must move through.

The first stage involves uncovering your ideal self - who do you want to be, what are your guiding principles, what are your core values? The second discovery stage focuses on seeing your real self - which means not only taking stock of your strengths, weaknesses, talents and passions but actively seeking negative feedback to render a more complete and unbiased picture.

Moving to the third stage involves creating a practical plan of how to build on your strengths and reduce the gaps. The fourth stage requires you to reconfigure your brain through practice and repetition around new behaviours designed to foster the EI competencies you need to develop.

And finally as you begin to put your learning into practice you reach the fifth stage. At this point you need to develop supportive and trusting relationships, with a mentor or a coach, who will help you make positive changes in a trusting and honest environment.

However, when it comes to leadership, changing a single leader is only the beginning. The rest of the job is to develop a critical mass of resonant leaders and thereby transform how people work together. Goleman, Boyatzis & McKee finish with a description of how to maximize the emotional intelligence of groups throughout your organization and create sustainable change.

Primal Leadership provides an excellent blueprint of how to leverage a prime mover as old as humankind and maximize your impact as a leader.

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