Here are 7 secrets to leadership success:
1. Leadership is about making things happen
If you want to make something happen with your life – in school, in your profession or in your community, do it. Perceived obstacles crumble against persistent desire. John Baldoni, Author, Leadership Communication Consultant and Founder of Baldoni Consulting LLC, shared this advice that had come from his father, a physician. He taught him the value of persistence. At the same time, his mother taught him compassion for others. Therefore, persistence for your cause should not be gained at the expense of others. Another bit of leadership wisdom!
2. Listen and understand the issue, then lead
Time and time again we have all been told, "God gave us two ears and one mouth for a reason"...or as Stephen Covey said..."Seek to understand, rather than be understood." As a leader, listening first to the issue, then trying to coach, has been the most valuable advice that Cordia Harrington, President and CEO of Tennessee Bun Company has been given.
3. Answer the three questions everyone within your organization wants answers to
What the people of an organization want from their leader are answers to the following: Where are we going? How are we going to get there? What is my role? Kevin Nolan, President & Chief Executive Officer of Affinity Health Systems, Inc. believes the more clarity that can be added to each of the three questions, the better the result.
4. Master the goals that will allow you to work anywhere in today’s dynamic business world
Debbe Kennedy, President, CEO and Founder of Global Dialogue Center and Leadership Solutions Companies, and author of Action Dialogues and Breakthrough once shared this piece of advice that was instrumental in shaping her direction, future and achievements. She was a young manager at IBM just promoted to her first staff assignment in a regional marketing office. For reasons she can’t explain, one of her colleagues named Bookie called her into his office while she was visiting his location. He then began to offer unsolicited advice, but advice that now stays fresh in her mind. He mentioned that jobs, missions, titles and organizations would come and go as business is dynamic-- meaning it is always changing. He advised her not to focus your goals toward any of these, but instead learn to master the skills that will allow you to work anywhere.
He was talking about four skills:
The ability to develop an idea
Effectively plan for its implementation
Execute second-to-none
Achieve superior results time after time.
With this in mind, Kennedy advises readers to seek jobs and opportunities with this in mind. Forget what others do. Work to be known for delivering excellence. It speaks for itself and it opens doors.
5. Be curious
Curiosity is a prerequisite to continuous improvement and even excellence. The person who gave Mary Jean Thornton, Former Executive Vice President & CIO, The Travelers this advice urged her to study people, processes, and structures. He inspired her to be intellectually curious. He often reminded Thornton that making progress, in part, was based upon thinking. She has learned to apply this notion of intellectual curiosity by thinking about her organization’s future, understanding the present, and knowing and challenging herself to creatively move the people and the organization closer to its vision.
6. Listen to both sides of the argument
The most valuable advice Brian P. Lees, Massachusetts State Senator and Senate Minority Leader ever received came from his mentor, United States Senator Edward W. Brooke III. He told him to listen to all different kinds of people and ideas. Listening only to those who share your background and opinions can be imprudent. It is important to respect your neighbors’ rights to their own views. Listening to and talking with a variety of people, from professors to police officers, from senior citizens to schoolchildren, is essential not only to be a good leader in business, but to also be a valuable member within your community.
7. Prepare, prepare, prepare
If you fail to prepare, you are preparing to fail. If one has truly prepared and something goes wrong the strength of the rest of what you've prepared for usually makes this something easier to handle without crisis and panic. One of the best pieces of advice Dave Hixson, Men’s Varsity Basketball Coach at Amherst College has ever received and continues to use and pass on is this anonymous quote—“Preparation is the science of winning."
Along with this are two expressions from Rick Pitino's book Success is a Choice, which speaks to preparation. Hixson asks his teams every year: "Do you deserve to win?" and "Have you done the work?" This speaks to the importance of preparation toward achieving your final goal. If you haven't done the work (preparation) the answer to the second question is an easy "no!"
Great advice comes from many sources – parents, other relatives, consultants, bosses, co-workers, mentors, teachers, coaches, and friends. The important point to remember is to stay open, listen to everyone, but also develop your own leadership style.
Showing posts with label success. Show all posts
Showing posts with label success. Show all posts
Sunday
Can India 'Spell' Success?
At a time when India is being felicitated for its potential economic prowess, it is indeed sobering to look at the facts. But most jarringly, for a country that has been hailed and derided for its fecundity of engineers and doctors, is the fact that “about one-third of world’s illiterate population resides in India”. [ UNESCO, 2000]
If you dreg the bottom further, you will come to conclusion that even this figure is hopelessly inflated and a gross misstatement of the lack of real literacy that afflicts India.
India defines literacy as the ability to read and write for a person aged 7 or above, which is roughly equivalent to UNICEF’s definition. Census figures from 2001 put India’s literacy rate at 65.4% leaving over 250 million (counting only people above the age of 7) people are illiterate. The female literacy levels are even worse. “In 1991, less than 40 percent of the 330 million women aged 7 and over were literate, which means [then] there are over 200 million illiterate women in India.”
While these figures are bad enough, the picture gets worse when one counts the real literacy attainment of people considered literate.
“A recent study by ORG-CSR (2003) conducted in rural villages across five states—Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, and Gujarat—confirms the low skill attainment levels of many literates in India. To share some key findings on reading, print awareness, writing, and functional aspects of ability with the written word in Hindi: 68.2% perceived themselves to be literate.
1. Based on their reading of an extremely simple paragraph from textbooks at 2nd to 3rd grade level, the field surveyors classified the sample as: 12% who can read with ease, 36.3% who made mistakes or read with a range of reading difficulties, and 51.7% who could not read at all.
2. Faced with a square block of Hindi text printed centered on a square piece of paper with no other graphical indicators of beginning, ending, or page orientation, 37.4% could not hold the printed matter in the proper orientation for reading. After this was shown (or known), 42.5% could not point to the end of text. Half the sample could not move their finger to delineate the left to right direction of print and a nearly equal proportion could not move from the end of one line to the beginning
of the next line immediately below.
3. Only 37.5% could write their full name correctly, 15.1% could write it partially or with mistakes, and 47.4% could not write it at all.
4. Reading the bus board, one of the most common encounters with print in village life, was, by their own admission, not possible for 51.9%. Self-reports on other functional aspects inform us that 56% could not read a newspaper, 54.8% could not read letters, and 56.7% could not write a letter themselves. Research article by Brij Kothari and others
Buoyed by stellar economic performance over the past few years, the mood in the top echelon of the country is defiantly self-congratulatory. India almost wants to grow up overnight and shed all the baggage of the past. Powered by a press, that like everywhere else in the world, reports only from the booming city centers, India was seen as chugging ahead full-steam – a land of engineers and management graduates. The mood was best exemplified by BJP’s election year message of ‘India Shining’. Only India was not and it cost BJP the election. It wouldn’t be far fetched to say that India and the world manufactured a reality that suited their overwhelming expectations. Brij Kothari says as much -
“A nation’s literacy rate is determined, to a great degree, by the definition of literacy and the method used to measure it. Countries struggling to achieve higher rates often tend to lower definitional bars, which then makes progress that much easier. India is no exception, and this raises simple but unanswered questions. How many of India’s literate people—literate according to the Census—can read the headlines of a newspaper?
…If a demonstrated “ability to decode the simplest of passages were operationalized” as the definition of literacy, not necessarily with understanding, then only 10–15% would be fully literate.” Research article by Brij Kothari and others
By this definition, there are near half a billion people who cannot decode simple passages. Given the importance of literacy in improving health to access to jobs – it is critical that India invest more money in literacy programs. Brij Kothari of IIM Ahemdabad believes that the problem can be alleviated by providing Same Language Subtitling (SLS) with popular regional language programming like Chitramala etc.
“Same Language Subtitling (SLS) is the idea of subtitling the lyrics of song-based television programs (e.g., music videos), in the same language as the audio.”
Google Foundation is currently funding the project, PlanetRead, to provide SLS for popular programs on television. The novel approach to increasing literacy leverages the fact that a lot of Indians have access to television and can improve their literacy skills by reading the translation. Initial tests for SLS in Gujarat have proven to be largely successful.
If you dreg the bottom further, you will come to conclusion that even this figure is hopelessly inflated and a gross misstatement of the lack of real literacy that afflicts India.
India defines literacy as the ability to read and write for a person aged 7 or above, which is roughly equivalent to UNICEF’s definition. Census figures from 2001 put India’s literacy rate at 65.4% leaving over 250 million (counting only people above the age of 7) people are illiterate. The female literacy levels are even worse. “In 1991, less than 40 percent of the 330 million women aged 7 and over were literate, which means [then] there are over 200 million illiterate women in India.”
While these figures are bad enough, the picture gets worse when one counts the real literacy attainment of people considered literate.
“A recent study by ORG-CSR (2003) conducted in rural villages across five states—Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, and Gujarat—confirms the low skill attainment levels of many literates in India. To share some key findings on reading, print awareness, writing, and functional aspects of ability with the written word in Hindi: 68.2% perceived themselves to be literate.
1. Based on their reading of an extremely simple paragraph from textbooks at 2nd to 3rd grade level, the field surveyors classified the sample as: 12% who can read with ease, 36.3% who made mistakes or read with a range of reading difficulties, and 51.7% who could not read at all.
2. Faced with a square block of Hindi text printed centered on a square piece of paper with no other graphical indicators of beginning, ending, or page orientation, 37.4% could not hold the printed matter in the proper orientation for reading. After this was shown (or known), 42.5% could not point to the end of text. Half the sample could not move their finger to delineate the left to right direction of print and a nearly equal proportion could not move from the end of one line to the beginning
of the next line immediately below.
3. Only 37.5% could write their full name correctly, 15.1% could write it partially or with mistakes, and 47.4% could not write it at all.
4. Reading the bus board, one of the most common encounters with print in village life, was, by their own admission, not possible for 51.9%. Self-reports on other functional aspects inform us that 56% could not read a newspaper, 54.8% could not read letters, and 56.7% could not write a letter themselves. Research article by Brij Kothari and others
Buoyed by stellar economic performance over the past few years, the mood in the top echelon of the country is defiantly self-congratulatory. India almost wants to grow up overnight and shed all the baggage of the past. Powered by a press, that like everywhere else in the world, reports only from the booming city centers, India was seen as chugging ahead full-steam – a land of engineers and management graduates. The mood was best exemplified by BJP’s election year message of ‘India Shining’. Only India was not and it cost BJP the election. It wouldn’t be far fetched to say that India and the world manufactured a reality that suited their overwhelming expectations. Brij Kothari says as much -
“A nation’s literacy rate is determined, to a great degree, by the definition of literacy and the method used to measure it. Countries struggling to achieve higher rates often tend to lower definitional bars, which then makes progress that much easier. India is no exception, and this raises simple but unanswered questions. How many of India’s literate people—literate according to the Census—can read the headlines of a newspaper?
…If a demonstrated “ability to decode the simplest of passages were operationalized” as the definition of literacy, not necessarily with understanding, then only 10–15% would be fully literate.” Research article by Brij Kothari and others
By this definition, there are near half a billion people who cannot decode simple passages. Given the importance of literacy in improving health to access to jobs – it is critical that India invest more money in literacy programs. Brij Kothari of IIM Ahemdabad believes that the problem can be alleviated by providing Same Language Subtitling (SLS) with popular regional language programming like Chitramala etc.
“Same Language Subtitling (SLS) is the idea of subtitling the lyrics of song-based television programs (e.g., music videos), in the same language as the audio.”
Google Foundation is currently funding the project, PlanetRead, to provide SLS for popular programs on television. The novel approach to increasing literacy leverages the fact that a lot of Indians have access to television and can improve their literacy skills by reading the translation. Initial tests for SLS in Gujarat have proven to be largely successful.
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