leadership

How to Improve Team Engagement – A Leadership challenge

January 17, 2019 by Michelle Ray

How to improve team engagement. The burning question on the minds of so many leaders today.
What are you struggling with when it comes to keeping people engaged in their work? Do we understand why it is that people become disengaged? And what does it mean when people are disconnected and disengaged and disinterested? The consequences can be immeasurable.

In order to keep people engaged, we need to realize that it’s all about people wanting to do their work rather than feeling as though they have to do their work. When people demonstrate discretionary effort, then they are highly likely to wanna keep on demonstrating that discretionary effort.

That’s because they are connected to what they are doing. They are genuinely enjoying what they are doing. And I can’t imagine that there are leaders out there who wouldn’t want that for their teams.
So if we are gonna truly engage our teams, we need to realize that we need to be engaged ourselves, and we need to understand that that is what our teams are looking for in their leaders.

So remember: to have an engaged team, we need to be able to connect with people. When you show people the purpose of what they’re doing, and point them in the direction that they are focused on that purpose, they will feel more connected and they will feel more encouraged to be supporting your vision for your business and helping them to realize their own vision as well.

This article is a transcript from How to Improve Team Engagement – A Leadership challenge YouTube.

Michelle Ray (Twitter) is one of the best international leadership keynote speakers in Vancouver. She helps you discover your potential through presentations, coaching and consulting. With over 20 years of experience Michelle has worked with hundreds of companies around the world. She is taking bookings for speaking engagements and can be contacted at MichelleRay.com

Why is Courage an Important Trait of Great Leaders?

January 10, 2019 by Michelle Ray

What does it mean to have courage as a leader? To have the courage of your convictions, to stand up for something that you truly believe in. Courage to me is a value. Click To Tweet When people are living their values, rather than just saying they have a value of speaking their truth, and having no fear, and standing up for what they believe in, to me there is a really big difference between actually living out that value every day. I’ve seen it very often where a person will just lack the courage of their convictions. As a result of that, they may live with regret. They may, again, end up demotivating their work environment, the team environment, when all of that could have been avoided if they actually just spoke their truth.

I think that a lot of this happens because people often hide behind a veneer, and they don’t necessarily understand, as a leader, that it’s okay to be transparent, that it’s actually very attractive to be authentic and stand up for what they believe in. People will gravitate towards that. Think of the last time where you needed to make a bold decision, you needed to act with courage as a leader, you needed to make a tough decision. Whether it involved making cuts to your team, as painful as that might have been, or maybe it meant that you needed to take the business in a different direction, you needed to make a business decision that you’d never made previously, whatever it might have been.

You needed to go after a different customer base, because you realized that what you were doing was old school, or you were losing customers, and you recognized that you needed to capture that market share again, whatever it might have been. You said to yourself, “I really need to do this differently, if we’re going to sustain the business and we’re gonna grow the business.” It doesn’t matter what the issue is. It’s really important for you to be true to yourself, true to your team, true to your business, and act with the courage to make those tough decisions, because that is what great leaders do.

This article is a transcript from Why is Courage an Important Trait of Great Leaders YouTube.

Leading Self: Developing Adaptability

December 27, 2018 by Michelle Ray

Leadership Competencies is all about honing your ability to be adaptable, to be flexible. Today, I would say more than any other time, we are seeing the pace of change accelerating and so of course, we need to be flexible. We need to be adaptable, and along with being adaptable, we need to be willing to be flexible. There is no room today to stand still.

So, how adaptable are you to move with the pace of change, to recognize that things are happening outside of yourself faster than you can even imagine, faster than your business can even keep up with at times. So, if you are willing to be adaptable, and if you are willing to remain flexible, then you are in a position to teach other to do the same. You are in a position to be able to transcend change and you are able to remain on top of ever changing business dynamics and where your customers are going.

So, remaining flexible, is that you? Remaining adaptable, is that you? Because that is what we need to do as one of the core competencies to lead yourself.

This article is a transcript from Leading Self: Developing Adaptability YouTube.

The impact of a Stable Personal Life on Leadership Ability

December 20, 2018 by Michelle Ray

A key characteristic of great executive is to have a stable personal life, a balanced life. You may think to yourself, how realistic is that? Well, the best executives recognize that burnout is not the optimum state. They know how important it is to take time for themselves, to take care of themselves, to prioritize in their life the most important things: family, health, personal health, mental health, physical health, all the things that make them most productive. It’s not about working ourselves 14, 15 hours a day. It’s about realizing that the more balanced our lives are, the more effective we can be, the greater the difference we can make to our people at work and at home. So to be that great executive, we sometimes need to take an honest look in the mirror and see what needs to change, and if that’s you, the change can start right now.

This article is a transcript from The impact of a Stable Personal Life on Leadership Ability YouTube.

What is Leadership Development?

December 13, 2018 by Michelle Ray

So what is leadership development, and why is it important to your organization and the success of your business? Some people might say, “We’ve got to get more customers, we’ve got to find the best talent, the best employees.” In my view, all that is critically important. However, nothing matters as much as who you decide to develop as a leader, because it is the leaders that create the atmosphere, that mentoring your team that are making ideally the best decisions that have incredible influence on whether or not people feel motivated to stay in a job.

If your leaders don’t have the essential competencies to be successful, it really does start with you to make the best decisions and the best choices in terms of who you decide to put in those roles, and how you develop them.If you put the wrong people into the wrong role especially, thinking that they have the ability to be a great leader, that is going to cost you down the line. It’s going to cost you in terms of talent retention. It’s going to cost you in terms of lose productivity. It’s going to cost you in terms of low morale. So you need to make sure that you understand that you have the right people in place, and that when you decide to develop them, you’re investing wisely in your time, in your energy and everything associated with creating the best leaders that you can.

This article is a transcript from What is Leadership Development? YouTube.

Leading Self: Increasing Your Capacity To Learn

December 6, 2018 by Michelle Ray

It was Eric Hoffer who once said that “…the learners shall inherit the earth, whilst the learned will find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”

What an incredibly highly relevant statement that is. I love it, because it’s all about the ability to remain open, to see yourself as a lifelong learner. It makes sense that as a leader, there will never be a day where we should say that we know it all. How can that be possible when we remain open to learning, we will become better leaders, we will become sought after leaders in our organization. We will remain humble, and we will be seen as people who are sponges, who are always willing to grow.

Today, with the pace of technological change, and the speed of change, it is essential that we remain open to being a lifelong learner. Do you see yourself that way? Because that is one of the critical components to be able to lead yourself.

This article is a transcript from Leading Self: Increasing Your Capacity To Learn YouTube.

Celebrating the Opportunity of Change (Part 5)

October 24, 2018 by Michelle Ray

As leaders, you already know the importance of not only managing change, but embracing it as well. I want you to consider how you can celebrate the opportunity that change represents. Think about it, you used to wait hours or maybe even days for information to be transmitted and printed on a scroll of thermal paper.

Today, that happens in seconds. You used to travel over oceans to meet with clients and counterparts. Now, you can conduct so much of your business virtually. And think about all the information you have at your fingertips today, thanks to the internet.

So we all have a lot of experience with change. It’s not like it’s foreign to us. With awareness, we can reflect on the times when we felt we could never overcome a particular challenge. Yet we rose to the occasion. We were able to demonstrate agility and willingness to try new things. Just as athletes develop muscle memory, your ability to navigate change will become more instinctual with practice.

The most powerful choice you can make is to focus on the aspects of change that are within your control. At any point, you can choose to decipher how change unfolds. How you give meaning to the challenges that come with change will ultimately influence the outcome. When you hit your next bump in the road, ask, why am I being disrupted by change, and how can I embrace it.

That’s the leadership mindset.

This post is a transcript of https://youtu.be/VHlM080bCb8 on YouTube

Change Management Ep. 2 Power of choice: Accept. Leave. Change.

October 3, 2018 by Michelle Ray

When it comes to the status quo, you’ve got three choices. Accept, leave, or change. Let’s look at each one of these. Acceptance. Acceptance isn’t acquiescence. Acceptance is when you say to yourself, “This is okay with me, I can live with it.” Or, you may decide to leave. Some of us have had to exercise this choice. We’ve left jobs, we’ve left relationships, we’ve left managers. We’ve said to ourselves, “This situation no longer serves me, I am okay with making the decision to go.”

I would add however, that if you make this choice, what have you learned from the experience? Because, without learning something, it’s bound to catch up with you somewhere else. History tends to repeat itself. If you decide on the other hand, that you don’t want to accept it, and perhaps leaving it isn’t necessarily the right thing, you do have a very powerful choice. That is, to change.

Change who? Change you. Change how you see it, and change how you respond to it. That is one of the best choices that you can make. I know why we hold back. One of the reasons we stop ourselves from making the necessary changes that we need to make, is because we don’t trust ourselves enough. That’s all about intuition. It’s really important to understand the difference between acting on intuition, and being what I like to call, counter-intuitive. When we operate on our intuition, and we are finding ourselves facing change, we kick into what’s known as the fight or flight response. I’m sure many of you have heard of that too.

We either run away from a situation because we fear that it is threatening. Or, we decide to fight, to take it on. We are going to exercise either one of those options in the face of a threat. Whether that threat is real, or imagined. What I have learned is about being counter-intuitive. That means you’re going against the grain. You recognize your own internal fears, you actually recognize your reactivity. But, you don’t buy into it. Instead, you forge ahead. Feel the fear, and do it anyway.

We’ve all seen examples of people, and businesses that have successfully anticipated change. They’ve risen above the naysayers. They’re the trend setters, such as Apple, Microsoft, who were led by Founders considered to be the mavericks. Ahead of their time. Why? Because, they pursued their vision without buying into the opinions of the media, or competitors, who viewed them as being out there. Companies with ideas that would never fly because they thought they were simply outrageous.

What about bringing out the maverick in you? Let’s summarize. Learn to be proactive versus reactive. Trust yourself. Utilize your options. You do have a choice. Become the change agent you need to be in order to realize your vision, because when you do, anything is possible.

This post is a transcript of https://youtu.be/BVelWlZHb9U on YouTube

Change Management Ep. 1 – Assessing your Internal Lens

September 28, 2018 by Michelle Ray

The famous poet Anonymous once said, “Nothing changes if nothing changes.” Reacting to and resisting change initiatives is nothing new. Most of us are uncomfortable with change because it represents confronting the unknown, posing a threat, whether or not that threat is real or imagined.

In business, anticipating change is essential for survival. New realities regarding the pace of technological change, changing workplace demographics, and an ever changing economic climate necessitate acceptance.

There isn’t an industry that hasn’t been impacted by the need to confront an ever changing landscape. Standing still while burying one’s head in the sand is not an option. Ready or not, evolving with the times is essential. Without awareness and information, you’ll invariably continue reacting to change rather than anticipating changing market conditions.

During this video series, you’ll learn how to overcome the fear of change and alter your entire perspective regarding situations that are outside of your control. You’ll be equipped to lead your teams and organizations with greater confidence. Let’s begin by assessing your internal lens, as well as the lens you use to view the world.

We need to be asking ourselves, if we’re leading ourselves, are we being the best possible example that we can be?

We manufacture a lot of our own fear. All of us should look at leadership as being a mindset, it’s about being the leader of your own life, and we all have the choice to be able to do that.

Change. Crisis or opportunity? Well, it all depends on how you see it. Why is it that our primary reaction to change is driven by fear? That’s the main emotion that stops us in our tracks. You see, we manufacture a lot of our own fear. We often worry about things that don’t even happen. We just think that they will. For this reason, our perception regarding change determines how we see reality.

We all remember the demise of Blockbuster video, a company that viewed change through the lens of fear. Even though they were at the forefront of internet technology, they chose to stand still. It wasn’t that they didn’t make a move to change, it was the fact that they didn’t move at all that ultimately led to their demise.

Fear is a paralyzing emotion. It clouds our assessment of possibilities. When we’re stuck in the fear, we just can’t see opportunity. The question is, what lies behind our fear and why does this stop us from embracing change?

Well, this is largely due to the fact that our thoughts are driven by a fear of loss, and it’s very important to understand why this will stop you from pursuing new opportunities.

Fear of loss; what are we afraid of? We’re afraid of becoming irrelevant. We’re afraid of losing our job. We’re afraid of losing our purpose and our meaning in the grand scheme of things. And that is why we can’t see past the fear to embrace change.

I want you to ask yourself, is your fear of change real or imagined? Because when we are immobile, we can’t see the possibilities.

Here are the key things to remember about the fear of change and seeing change as an opportunity. Know yourself. Understand the core reasons behind your learned behaviors and reactions, and make a decision to reassess and reframe your attitudes to change.

This post is a transcript of https://youtu.be/Tqib3woP73M on YouTube

Why It’s Time To Stop Bashing Millennials

January 29, 2018 by Michelle Ray

Admit it. Your personal biases regarding the millennials have come up in professional conversations. You couldn’t help yourself. (Or, could you?) Perhaps you were triggered by a comment, behavior or situation at work. Or you may be oblivious to the fact that the disparaging lens you use to view them, or indeed any team member that is different to you, is reflecting on your leadership style and your business. Whether you are reacting consciously or unconsciously, the time has come to stop bashing millennials.

Some may argue that perception is reality when it comes to opinions and experiences regarding interactions with millennials. Nonetheless, there are compelling reasons to strongly counter this line of reasoning:

The economic cost to your employer brand

Your employer brand conveys your organization’s identity in the eyes of prospective talent. Therefore, to label an entire demographic who happened to be born in a specific time frame as “lazy, entitled, selfish, arrogant, narcissistic, self-absorbed, impatient”, etc. (terms often used to describe millennials) does nothing to advance your reputation and appeal to a sought-after generation of workers. Competition for their skills has never been greater, especially when you realize that millennials now represent the largest cohort of the workforce in North America. By 2025, they will represent three-quarters of the global workforce. [Read more…] about Why It’s Time To Stop Bashing Millennials

leadership

The economic cost to your employer brand

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