Leadership of the Future

by Mark Shead
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The last 20 years has seen an incredible increase in technology. Most of the principles of good leadership remain the same, regardless of how technology changes. However, technology presents new challenges for leaders. Virtual Contact Leadership One of the benefits of modern technology is the ability to communicate with anyone anywhere in the world. While [...]

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Creating Confidence

by Mark Shead
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As a leader, you need to cultivate your team’s confidence. Your team should have confidence in themselves as well as confidence in your leadership skills. The best way to create confidence is through a series of victories. In general, people will judge the probability of future success based on past performance. As you work with [...]

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Vision and Efficiency

by Mark Shead
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In any organization, effort can be divided into two categories. Effort that helps achieve the vision and effort that does not. There is some work that is difficult to correctly categorize–especially in complex organizations with a great deal of complexity. However, most of the time there is a great deal of effort expended on items [...]

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Setting Goals

by Mark Shead
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I was working for an organization that was attempting to go through a re-branding to become more relevant to their customers. They had hired an outside consulting firm to come in and help walk them through the branding process. After talking with several of the employees, it became clear to the consultants that the employees [...]

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Leading through Example

by Mark Shead
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As obvious as it seems, many leaders forget that their actions speak louder than their words. I was managing a department at a medium-sized organization that had a casual dress code on Friday. One of the vice presidents decided that casual Fridays were a bad idea and mandated that everyone wear corporate casual every day. [...]

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Management Systems

by Mark Shead
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A lot of leaders know what they want from the people they lead, but are not particularly skilled in getting the desired results. Often, leaders in this position end up blaming the people they lead. Most often, the fault lies with the leader’s inability to focus effort toward a particular result. A successful leader finds [...]

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Cultivating Respect

by Mark Shead
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Respect is something that is earned. It doesn’t just happen because you are in a leadership position. If your subordinates respect you simply because you can fire them, you are a very poor leader. You earn respect in different ways. The biggest way to earn people’s respect is to do what you say you are [...]

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Don’t be Reactive

by Mark Shead
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The best leaders I’ve worked with are the ones that know when to wait. Early on in my career, I tended to respond to things quickly—especially when I was angry or upset. This is the exact opposite of what the leaders I respected did. Mature leaders know that some problems go away if they are [...]

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Is Your Vision Clear?

by Mark Shead
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Many leaders assume that everyone understands their vision. Often, there is a big gap between their vision and what the people they lead see as the vision. Unfortunately, many leaders don’t take the time to actually find out how well they have communicated their vision. When the vision is unclear, people tend to default to [...]

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Teaching Teamwork

by Mark Shead
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Teamwork is not something that is easy to teach. While you may know certain teamwork principles, it is something that needs to be developed in each team on its own. If you take 5 people from separate organizations and try to put them together into one team, there will be a certain amount of learning [...]

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