Coach for Executive Presence
Amy Jen Su, coauthor of Own the Room, offers five practical ways to cultivate your employees’ leadership presence. Â Â Â WATCH VIDEO ON HBR.ORG
What Micromanagers Really Mean When They Try to Explain Their Behavior Leading
What Micromanagers Really Mean When They Try to Explain Their Behavior Leading: A helpful chart to help you gain perspective. Â Â Â READ ARTICLE
Signs That You’re Being a Pushover
If collaboration is key to succeeding in organizations today, doesnât it pay to play nice in the sandbox? You have to get along with others to get things done, right? Yes, this is true â to a degree. You want to be a cooperative colleague but you donât want to be seen as an ineffective pushover. Persuading others matters as much as getting along with them. Â Â Â READ ARTICLE
Signs That Youâre a Micromanager
Absolutely no one likes to be micromanaged. Itâs frustrating, demoralizing, and demotivating. Yet, some managers canât seem to help themselves. Dealing with a controlling boss who doesnât trust you is tough, but what if youâre the one doing the micromanaging? If youâre like most micromanagers, you probably donât even know that youâre doing it.    READ ARTICLE
The Questions Good Coaches Ask
In the HBR Guide to Coaching Employees, executive coach Ed Batista defines coaching as a style of management characterized by asking questions. With those questions you can move away from command-and-control leadership to a dynamic in which your direct report grows through self-reflection. Â Â Â READ ARTICLE
Signs That You Lack Emotional Intelligence
In my ten years as an executive coach, I have never had someone raise his hand and declare that he needs to work on his emotional intelligence. Yet I canât count the number of times Iâve heard from people that the one thing their colleague needs to work on is emotional intelligence. This is the problem: those who most need to develop it are the ones who least realize it. The data showing that emotional intelligence is a key differentiator between star performers and the rest of the pack is irrefutable. Nevertheless, there are some who never embrace the skill for themselves â or who wait until itâs too late. Â Â Â READ ARTICLE
Get Over Your Fear of Conflict
Most of us have some resistance to conflict. Instead of addressing issues directly, we try to be âniceâ and end up spending an inordinate amount of time talking to ourselves or others â complaining, feeling frustrated, ruminating on something that already happened, or anticipating something that might happen. Â Â Â READ ARTICLE
Is Your Employee Coachable?
As a manager, you provide some level of coaching to all your direct reports, helping some attain higher levels of professional achievement, and helping others improve their performance to fulfill their current roles. But while every manager should have the capability to coach, you also need to have the ability to discern when coaching isnât working. Â Â Â READ ARTICLE
Why Executives Should Talk About Racial Bias at Work
For the past several months, it seemed that everywhere I turned people were talking about events in Ferguson, Staten Island, and North Charleston â in living rooms, classrooms, anchor rooms â everywhere but in most corporate conference rooms. In fact, I have not heard one corporate leader make the link between what happened in these places and what goes on inside their organizations. But there is a connection. After all, itâs not like the racial bias that underlies these social events doesnât exist inside corporate walls. It does and executives shouldnât be silent about it.    READ ARTICLE
You Canât Achieve Your Goals Without the Right Support
My sonâs karate teacher recently asked his young students, âWhatâs the one thing you really want to improve on in the new year?â Hands shot up immediately, with responses like âWatch less TV!â and âImprove my karate form!â and âWork on my time management!â He asked each student to get more specific, write down the goal, and bring it to the next class. With a wide grin, he told the kids to expect that he would periodically stop class throughout the year to engage everyone around how they were doing.    READ ARTICLE
Signs That Youâre Being Too Stubborn
Theyâre hardheaded. They dig their heels in. You know the type â people who are way too stubborn for their own good. While itâs easy to point the finger at others who exhibit this behavior, it can be hard to recognize this trait in yourself. Are you being too inflexible? Find out the signs in this article by Muriel Wilkins.    READ ARTICLE
Being a Better Leader Today: Get Out of Your Own Way
âCan I even factor, that I’ve only been an actor. In this staged interpretation of this day? Focused on the shadow, with my back turned to the light. Too intelligent to see it’s me in the way.â  -Lauryn Hill
Every client who I coach has a âsomethingâ that gets in his or her own way. Sometimes it is anger towards others in their organization, impatience, fear of being judged, being the only woman on the executive team, past mistakes, a different professional or personal background and the list goes on. Their inability to transcend this âsomethingâ trumps their ability to live up to their full leadership potential. So how does one get out of their own way? There are three rules:
Rule #1: Do not make it all about you.
Donât indulge in a blame game or victim mentality. I have had executives who in an âahaâ moment share that once they stopped making whatever situation they were facing all about them, they were able to step up to the plate and be the leader that they could and needed to be.
Rule #2: Give benefit of the doubt to others…
even when they doubt you. Time and time again, I find executives who want more out of their teams yet at the core donât believe the team can do it. Or who think less of themselves when they hit a rough patch and are no longer the rising star of the company. Being able to get past yourself and see the possibilities in otherâs capacity is fundamental in reaching a new vision.
Rule #3: Laser focus on what works and cut out the noise.
As executives, it is easy to get caught up in  oneâs own internal noise and that being made by the organization. It is imperative to check your assumptions, the mindset by which you are viewing your leadership role and organization,   and laser focus on the ones that will help you put your best foot forward.
So next time you find yourself in a leadership challenge, check the rules. You may find that part of your success to make it to the end will be based on your ability to get out of your own way.
Getting out of oneâs own way as a leader starts with recognizing when you are in the way. This requires taking a step back, helicoptering up and looking at the situation from the outside. Think of a challenging situation that you face now whether it is interpersonally, trying to move a change initiative along or transitioning into new responsibilities.
Reflection Questions
- What are you doing to help the situation? What are you doing that either maintains the status quo or negatively impacts the situation?
- How does your mindset or attitude towards yourself and/or others need to change to get to where you are trying to go?
- What one step are you willing to take to get out of your way to being a better leader today?
– Muriel Maignan Wilkins