Discover How to Fight the Great Resignation with Extraordinary Leadership Skills

A record thirty-eight million Americans resigned in 2021. The BEST BOSS EVER Newsletter exposes ideas, mindsets, and behaviors extraordinary leaders use to win the hearts and minds. Lead yourself, others, and teams more effectively.

For most of my life I've been fascinated by extraordinary leaders. My passion has led me to research and understand the art & science of leadership.?

I can save you a lot of time and energy by understanding one simple idea: the most important thing about leadership is to know you can’t learn it all - there is too much to know about it. Get rid of the expectation that you need to learn everything there is about leadership to be a great leader.

Think of the amount of information about leadership as an ocean. It's overwhelming and if you attempt to consume all of it, you could spend all of your time and energy on reading, studying, and learning. Becoming a fantastic leader is not an intellectual initiative.

I know that the world doesn’t need another newsletter. My life’s purpose is to do everything possible to create more extraordinary leaders to lessen the suffering created from bad leaders. Trust me to ‘boil the ocean’ of leadership concepts down into leverageable best practices. Accelerate your development.?

Leadership style is as unique as personalities. The foundation to becoming a Best Boss Ever, is to know that extraordinary leaders are authentic and comfortable in their own skin. There is no one style of leadership that works all the time with all the people. And there are skills that can help you make your style inspire and motivate others to higher performance.

Point # 1?– If you want to become a better leader, you must be willing to do the ‘heavy lifting’ of leadership development: plan, practice, reflect, and repeat. Leadership is like any other skill - it needs to be practiced over and over again. Deciding to become an extraordinary leader means you have decided to?practice?leadership skills and notice what works and what doesn't work. Mastery will occur. For some, the process is rapid, for others, the process may take years. It doesn’t matter.

You don’t have to become smarter. The best leaders use effort, focus, and persistence to improve. I have observed hundreds of leaders and the one thing that makes the biggest difference is how much they practiced and secondly, how much they learned from their practice.?

Point # 1 is: extraordinary leaders have an extraordinary ability to learn (connect the dots) and apply leadership skills to lead themselves, their team, and their organization. They use continuous learning. Mastery is possible. Learn how to learn!

Becoming a Best Boss Ever for others requires change (development). If you are not good at changing your behavior, start with understanding why. Perhaps in the past, you have not persistently practiced. Maybe you didn’t follow practice with reflecting and replaying the tapes (watching film). Learning to change your behavior is not that hard. It just requires you to do some things you have not done in the past.??

Point # 2 –?The three major components of leadership are: intellect (IQ), emotions (EQ), and curiosity (CQ).?

IQ is often thought of as the most coveted leadership trait. How often have you heard people say: “They are so smart!” as they refer to one of their senior executives. It is possible to improve your intellectual capabilities and your knowledge of your business & industry. Many new leaders will work extremely hard to know more and be smarter than their peers to get promoted. There is nothing wrong with this pursuit, as long as you are not always trying to be the smartest person in the room.?

However, there is a big watch out for those who care more about being a great leader versus getting promoted: people don't care how smart you are, until they know how much you care about them. One of the greatest complaints that I hear is that their boss does not trust and/or respect them. They?feel?it. People can sense whether or not you care for them. Intellect cannot engage people’s hearts.?

In 1998, when Daniel Goleman published his first book on emotional intelligence, his research changed the way we think about leaders. It was fairly common to think leaders were born. They won others over because of their charisma and they reached executive status because they were smarter than others. Emotional intelligence is more important when it comes to lead people effectively. If you don’t believe that, research all the studies that exist showing the power of emotional intelligence.

If a leader is smart but lacks competence in emotional intelligence, Goleman’s research showed why the person would fail at leading others. Goleman believes there are twelve “building blocks” of emotional intelligence and he puts them into four categories: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and??relationship management.

If you have low self-awareness you will struggle with leading others because you are unaware of what other people need from you. The chance of you understanding how others perceive you as a leader are low (researched by Zenger Folkman).

Additionally, without self-awareness, it is difficult to lead yourself by managing your emotions. Self-management can only be done well if self- awareness precedes it. Both competencies are foundational competencies leaders need to minimize the effect of bad behaviors and negative emotional triggers.?

Oftentimes, the bad bosses in the office are those people who do not manage their worst behaviors. They may have blind spots and because they don't take responsibility for their bad behaviors, they create emotional suffering as they attempt to lead others through control and manipulation.?

Point # 3?– The third key point is about “CQ”. My friend Richard Davis was the CEO and Chairman of U.S. Bank. Richard told me in an interview that of the three things (IQ, EQ, CQ) that make a great leader, he felt that CQ was the most powerful and underutilized. I was caught by surprise when he said that. He felt so many executives that he had worked with had strong intellectual abilities and leaned on them too much. Without EQ and CQ, he observed they could not lead their teams and businesses well.

Why is that? Executives with ultra-fast brains can tell where the conversation is going to go before it's over. They lose interest because their brain has already told them what the solution is, or the decision should be or what the person is about to say. The brain can work a minimum of 3 to 4 times faster than a normal person's rate of speech. A highly intellectual person loses curiosity because they know the end of the story so to speak and, therefore, they don't ask any questions.?

Asking interesting and engaging questions is one of the most important skills for an extraordinary leader. It is fundamental to effective two-way communication, otherwise known as dialogue. It is necessary to demonstrate interest, care, and concern for other people through dialogue. The most common concern employees demonstrate through their feedback in employee engagement surveys is lack of communication. What they desire most is two-way communication.

Unfortunately, many leaders only know how to tell people what to do instead of asking great questions that meaningfully engages. A tell-oriented leader is often perceived as being controlling, dominating, driving, or someone who wants to be ‘in-charge.’ They are perceived as if they are not interested in other people's ideas, suggestions, or ways of doing things.?

It’s not hard to be curious. It’s relatively easy to ask curious questions but if you are not genuinely curious, it doesn’t help to just ask a question. Demonstrating a real interest in someone else and their ideas is a mindset and a choice.

Those are the three ideas for today's newsletter. Let's turn our attention now to specific practice ideas so that for those of you that want to work on building your leadership muscle so to speak that we can help you get started and began to practice extraordinary leadership. First

Three Reflection Questions:

1.?????What are my greatest leadership challenges?

2.?????What is life trying to teach me about leadership and to lead better?

3.?????What am I called to learn more about leadership and what am I willing to practice?

Three Things to Read to Go Deeper:

1.?????Daniel Goleman’s?Emotional Intelligence?– “one of the 25 most influential business management books” by TIME or?Primal Leadership – Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence

2.?????For a useful self-assessment and sixty-six developmental suggestions – buy Travis Bradberry’s book:?Emotional Intelligence 2.0

3.?????Cracking the Curiosity Code – the key to unlocking human potential?by Diane Hamilton