Tom Rohrer - Success Works Coaching

Tom Rohrer
PhD, MFT

Mailing Address
1250-I Newell Ave., No. 225
Walnut Creek, CA 94596

925-595-6433
Email:drtom@success
workscoaching.com
Web:www.successworks
coaching.com and
www.tomrohrer.com

As a performance coach and the owner of Success Works Coaching, Tom works with individuals, groups and businesses on a range of human performance issues.

Tom will help you get clarity on your goals and provide strategies to achieve them, while keeping a balanced and healthy lifestyle. Coaching will help you increase your happiness, health and success.

Through coaching, Tom will help you uncover your cognitive, emotional and psychological obstacles, develop your best personal structure and the strategies and tools for developing your optimum performance.

Focuses:
  * Building Resilience
  * Authentic Happiness
  * Conflict Resolution
  * Public Speaking
  * Sports Performance
  * Test/Evaluation Anxiety

For more information about Success Works Coaching visit www.success
workscoaching.com and
www.tomrohrer.com

925-595-6433
Email:drtom@success
workscoaching.com

September 2010

In This Issue

Regardless of your role in your company, assuming leadership confers benefits to all. Read on for how you can become a better leader and inspire all members of your team to step up. As you read through the ezine, please don't hesitate to call if I can help.

Leadership as a Choice
Beyond the Box
Relevant Reading
Today's Quote

Leadership as a Choice

Great leadership doesn't require a diploma or a degree. It's not reserved for some elite group of people.

Leadership can be something for everyone to embrace, from administrative assistant to janitor to manager to CEO. Sometimes all it requires is a shift in mindset: interpreting frustrations at work as opportunities instead of barriers.

Maybe it's time for all of us to step up, to take action and become a leader and, with the support of other great leaders, help make the company (and yourself) succeed.

What Does Good Leadership Look Like?
Leadership is about so much more than strategy, operations and marketing. It's about discovering and understanding each team member's potential (as well as your own) and finding ways to tap into that resource, something many managers neglect to do.

From presidents to generals to sports coaches, the best leaders are often the ones who look outside their own field of endeavour to discover how true, universally successful leaders think. For example, take John Quincy Adams who said:

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.

Or Lao Tzu who suggested:

A leader is best when people barely know he exists. When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.

Few employees would argue about the merits of such leadership styles—with the emphasis on encouraging and channelling subordinates' intelligence and passion into the job. But for employers, those styles could also yield positive results. The 2007-2008 Towers-Perrin Global Workforce Study found that if managers recognized employees' untapped energy and ambition and then channelled it, they would increase employee engagement, defined as an employee's willingness to go the extra mile. And that engagement is golden. The study found that companies with the highest percentage of engaged workers also had the highest increased operating income and earnings per share. So by inspiring your staff, you're potentially boosting the bottom line.

How to Inspire Leadership
If you're an employee, how do you step into a leadership role? If you're a leader, how do you encourage staff to step up?

Here are some suggestions:

Trust. Leaders need to create it and employees need to, well, trust. If your words and actions are just lip service, employees will know and steer clear. Avoiding flavor-of-the-month buzz words can go a long way to proving you are genuine.

Understanding. Employee empowerment is not an event, it's a philosophy with specific strategies that allow staff to make decisions that directly affect their job. Employers need to be in it for the long term and employees need to consider how their decisions may affect the company.

Clear boundaries. When the leader is away, what decisions can staff make? Remember, assigning responsibility without authority can be a leadership killer. Make sure everyone knows who is leading whom. If you're an employee, make sure you get clear direction before assuming responsibility.

Encouragement. Second guessing the decisions of staff that have been given the authority to make those decisions undermines the entire process. Will mistakes be made? Of course. But shoot down an employee and see if anyone ever steps up with a critical idea or decision that takes the company's success to the next level.

Empowering employees is a powerful way to motivate staff. It allows them to get passionate about challenges and inspires them to step up with new ideas. It's a win-win situation. Left uninterrupted, this cycle repeats, encouraging passionate and skilled people to step up and make decisions about how to best serve customers or clients, which ultimately benefits the bottom line.

The following questions are designed to broaden perspectives, to open vistas, to widen the lens. There is no one right way to approach them. You can journal about them, talk to friends, create art, ponder them while driving, work out to them--whatever helps you explore "outside the box."

Imagine yourself taking on more of a leadership role at work. What are you doing? How do you feel?
If you're a manager, what could you do to encourage leadership in all the members of your team?
In a sentence, describe what makes a good leader. Have you described yourself?

Relevant Reading

Just Ask Leadership: Why Great Managers Always Ask the Right Questions, by Gary B. Cohen

How to Sell When Nobody's Buying (And How to Sell Even More When They Are), by Dave Lakhani

The Talent Advantage: How to Attract and Retain the Best and Brightest, by Alan Weiss and Nancy MacKay

Today's Quote

"Faith in the ability of a leader is of slight service unless it be united with faith in his justice."
~George Goethals, engineer and general (1858 - 1928)