Vicki Haddock; ACC Life and Business Coach works with businesses to transform cultures from low engagement to energized and effective.
Embracing this one simple concept can be the key that unlocks every shift you envision for your workplace.
A Thermostat sets the expectation and capacity. A thermometer measures the current status.
John Maxwell is one of my favorite leadership authors. He often said “Everything rises and falls on Leadership.” The temperature of your company is set by your leadership thermostat and everything will rise or fall according to that temperature.
By increasing your own leadership quotient, you immediately expand the capacity of the workplace you lead. However, the temperature of the team you lead will rarely increase above your own personal leadership level.
Do you want to achieve significant shifts in your business? Do you want to enhance culture and increase effectiveness? You can begin influencing key metrics by increasing your own knowledge and emotional intelligence. Who is doing this better than you? Who is the expert? Raising your own level of leadership intelligence creates new insights and awarenesses that can then be used to influence your workplace.
Another significant insight is that you have the ability to increase effectiveness in multiples by investing in increasing the leadership thermostat of your supervisors and managers. Have you seen an individual who excelled at their front-line job be promoted up to the next level only to struggle? Maybe they were given a bit of training and then because they had excelled at the previous role they were expected to excel at the new leadership role. No doubt each of these individuals had the capacity for significant performance. The understanding that can be missed is that the new and emerging leader’s “leadership temperature” was extremely low. A consistent investment in raising this new leader’s individual leadership quotient would shift the odds for he or she to become a key player for the future.
There are five areas that can be focused on to significantly raise any leader’s “leadership temperature.”
- Heart-centered leadership – This skill is the one that ties all of the other areas together and is all about leading from an intuitive space or what’s best for employees, customers and business profitability.
- Emotional Intelligence – the ability to identify, use, understand, and manage emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges, and defuse conflict.
- Team Building – the skill of creating an effective team of people where each individuals talent is used to maximize the good of the entire team – everyone works together like a fine tuned engine.
- Hard Skills – How to hold an engaging meeting, delegation, communication, accountability; skills on how to train others and many more specific to your own environment.
- Financial Success Acumen – the level that each team member understands his or her role and responsibility as it relates to the financial performance of the company.
I will explore each of these areas in future articles.
What would the possibilities be for you if you adopted this philosophy of the thermostat and the thermometer? What metrics could you move towards success?
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Vicki Haddock of Transcending Limits LLC is a business coach with a focus on developing new and emerging leaders and creating high-engagement cultures. Vicki uses her 20 year background in the transportation, safety and financial industry combined with her professional coach credential (ACC by the International Coach Federation) and the latest in neuroscience to help companies create excellence and stand out among their peers. You may reach her at Vicki@tslimits.com