Are leaders born or made? One could argue for either position.

The real issue is that all leaders can improve. Whether you’re a seasoned executive or a high-potential team member, you can boost your performance in five crucial leadership areas.

More than half a million business books deal with leadership acumen, but studying the most respected experts’ ideas reveals a consensus on the foremost roles required for effectiveness. (photo courtesy renjith krishnan/FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

In The Leadership Code, Dave Ulrich, Norm Smallwood and Kate Sweetman have synthesized current thinking on leadership and developed a framework that blends idealism with realism. They’ve distilled leadership into five core rules, regardless of one’s industry or business environment:

Having a framework for the most essential leadership skills will help you avoid quick fixes and business-book fads. While the scope of leadership may seem overwhelming, five golden rules provide much-needed focus. It’s easy to get lost if you pursue the wrong priorities.

This article summarizes the five essential rules for leadership effectiveness and provides a framework that covers the entire leadership landscape, so that you can focus on the best ways to develop your talent.
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• Five Golden Rules
• Rule 1: Shape the future
• Rule 2: Make things happen
• Rule 3: Engage today’s talent
• Rule 4: Build the next generation
• Rule 5: Invest in yourself
• A Review of Leadership Theories
• Understanding the Five Roles
• Personal Proficiency

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“So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to do work.” ~ Peter Drucker

As any fan of The Office can attest, negative managerial behavior severely affects employees’ work lives. Managers’ day-to-day and moment-to-moment actions also create a ripple effect, directly facilitating or impeding the organization’s ability to function. (photostock / FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

The best managers recognize their power to influence and strive to build teams with great inner work lives. In The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work (Harvard Business Press, 2011), Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer describe how people with great inner work lives have:

• Consistently positive emotions
• Strong motivation
• Favorable perceptions of the organization, their work and their colleagues

The worst managers undermine others’ inner work lives, often unwittingly. Through rigorous analysis of nearly 12,000 diary entries provided by 238 employees at seven companies, Amabile and Kramer found surprising results on the factors that affect performance.

What matters most is forward momentum in meaningful work—in a word, progress. Managers who recognize the need for even small wins set the stage for high performance.

But surveys of CEOs and project leaders reveal that 95 percent fundamentally misunderstand the need for this critical motivator.

This is a brief synopsis of an 1300 & 800-word article suitable for consultants’ newsletters for executives and leaders in organizations. It is available for purchase with full reprint rights, which means you may put your name on it and use it in your newsletters, blogs or other marketing materials. You may also modify it and add your personal experiences and perspectives.

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•  What Really Motivates Us?
• Facilitating Progress
  • Catalysts
  • Nourishers
• Dealing with Setbacks
• Inhibitors
• Toxins
• The Daily Progress Checklist
• Discovering Your Inner Work Life

What good are positive emotions in the workplace?

As scientists study the brain and learn more about how we achieve optimal functioning, the term positivity has finally captured business leaders’ interests.

One study of CEOs showed that training to be more positive could boost their productivity by 15 percent, and managers improved customer satisfaction by 42 percent. Despite such training’s amazing results, many leaders remain completely unfamiliar with the concept.

Being positive isn’t simply about being nice and giving in, nor does it mean suppressing negative information and emotions. Both are critical for optimal performance. Apparently, however, a 3:1 positivity-to-negativity ratio is the tipping point for individuals and business teams to go from average to flourishing.

In business, positive emotions yield:

• Better decisions. Researchers at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business studied how positive moods affect managers. Managers who were more positive were more accurate and careful in making decisions, and were more effective interpersonally.

• Better team work. Managers with positive emotions infect their work groups with similar feelings and show improved team coordination, while reporting less effort to accomplish more.

• Better negotiating. At Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, researchers learned that when people negotiate complex bargains, being positive surfaces as a contributing factor for success. Negotiators who strategically display positivity are more likely to gain concessions, close deals and incorporate future business relationships into the contracts they seal.

This article examines how positivity benefits business and how you can raise your positivity-to-negativity ratio and flourish.

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• Emotions’ Role in Business
• The Broaden-and-Build Model of Positive Emotions
• Positivity and High Performance
• The Tipping Point: 3:1 Positivity Ratio
• Improve Your Ratio
• Raise Your Positivity

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Most managers want their people to achieve excellence at work. We really can’t ask for more. In fact, peak performance can be defined as a combination of:

• Excellence
• Consistency
• Ongoing improvement

How can managers bring out the best in their people?

To achieve peak performance, each person must find the right job, tasks and conditions that match his or her strengths. Facilitating the right fit therefore becomes one of a manager’s most crucial responsibilities. While every employee has the potential to deliver peak performance, it’s up to the manager to find ways to make it happen.

It’s easy to spot peak performance when it happens. It’s what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008). Employees who work at optimum levels experience a state of “flow,” typically losing themselves in a project, meeting or discussion. They may lose track of time or where they are.

Each of us has relished such moments, but it’s hard to purposely replicate “flow” experiences. Many managers struggle to find the right words to rekindle motivation in people who have lost their enthusiasm.
Dr. Edward M. Hallowell, author of Shine: Using Brain Science to Get the Best from Your People (Harvard Business Press, 2011) has researched behavior and performance to define a Cycle of Excellence that leads to optimal performance.

This article examines new research into five critical steps managers can apply to maximize employees’ peak performance.
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The complete 2,000 word article includes these important concepts:

• Two Sides of the Disengagement Coin
• Using Brain Science to Bring Out the Best
  • Step 1: Select
  • Step 2: Connect
  • Step 3: Play
  • Step 4: Grapple and Grow
  • Step 5: Shine

• Maintaining Excellence in Uncertain Times

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In the national bestseller Flow, University of Chicago psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi suggests two key factors determine our overall happiness:

• Our relations with other people
• How we experience our work

You can improve both areas by bringing humor to work each day.

Harvard Business Review (September 2003) reports that executives with a sense of humor climb the corporate ladder more quickly and earn more money than their counterparts.

A good laugh reduces blood pressure, increases heart rate, massages internal organs and reduces the levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the blood. It boosts blood flow to your brain, which means you learn more, forget less and feed your curiosity.

While the advantages of a good sense of humor at work are many, there is a dark side that can backfire. How can you be funny without being a jerk?

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The complete 1,000 word article includes these important concepts:

• Humor and Creativity
• Humor and Managing Change
• Motivation and Morale
• Humor Strengthens Teams
• The Dark Side of Humor
• How to Add Humor at Work

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Click HERE: Humor at Work: How to Be Funny without Being a Jerk

Anyone with workplace experience knows men and women process information and communicate differently. Dealing with gender differences can prove challenging, especially for managers and leaders.

Regardless of which industry you’re in or the position you fill, male and female coworkers can experience a shared event and come away with different emotional stories.

We seem to be hardwired this way. Now that neuroscience is becoming more sophisticated, with tools like brain imaging, what are we learning about the gender divide?

Here are the key findings:

1. Emotions are useful. They make the brain pay attention.
2. Men and women process certain emotions differently.
3. These distinctions are a product of complex interactions between nature and nurture.

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•    Brain Differences
•    Small Talk
•    Giving Orders
•    Asking Questions
•    Mental Disorders
•    ”She’s So Emotional…”

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Teams are the most common business unit for high performance. Although the
word gets used loosely and not always appropriately, there is universal
acceptance that teams create opportunities for high performance results.

The most significant research on groups of people working together occurred in
the 1930′s with the Hawthorne studies. The results revealed that being observed
and having others interested in them was the determining factor that increased
performance for a group of workers. This was called the Hawthorne Effect.

The Hawthorne Effect has importance for executives interested in increasing
results without command and control tactics: pay attention to people and their
teams, express genuine interest in them, give them opportunities for social
interaction, frequent feedback, and stand back and let them perform.

Though it may not seem like anything special, mutual accountability can lead to
astonishing results. It enables a team to achieve performance levels that are
far greater than the individual bests of the team’s members.

Working with a team coach, both individually and with the whole team, can help
define the team purpose, specific goals and mutual accountability and facilitate
communications that lead to high performance results.

Important concepts in the full 2,000 word article:

The Elements of Effective Teams
The Evolution of Group to Team
What the Hawthorne Studies Show about Teams
Emotional Energy for the Team
Specific Goals Provide Clarity and Focus
Mutual Accountability Leads to High Performance Results
Five Essential Disciplines of Effective Teams
Eight Keys to Building Team Performance
Building the Emotional Intelligence of Teams
The Challenge of Working with Virtual Teams
Using Focused Feedback and Follow-up to Build Teams Quickly
Resources on Teams

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