Happy CEO

Leadership: How to have it, how to use it?

Every day, in most industries, competition and uncertainty make it harder for managers to work under pressure. What enables a true leader today to make a difference?

“It is better to be wrong with everyone than right alone.”

John Maynard Keynes

This post will help you understand the strategies that give teams the advantage and ensure performance. Thanks to its structure in the form of lists of actions to be implemented, the post will serve as a daily reference for managers responsible for ensuring the success and development of a team. We share accessible, pragmatic, detailed methods to anticipate, prepare and organize team success. It offers you an overview of the actions to be implemented, step by step.

• Identify the essential elements for the management and coordination of your teams.
• Discover the key concepts and the fundamentals to evolve in your management.
• Identify the points of progress to be more effective in your coaching.
• Select and implement corrective actions.
• Disseminate team spirit and give others the keys to change.

You will also find avenues for reflection to transform your personal and professional life by working on your values and targeting avenues for progression. Follow them, change course and you will change.

• How to succeed in your role as a Manager?
• What are the conditions of your success?
• What is your management style?
• How to be organized and prepared to progress continuously ?
• What can help you advance others?
• How do you gain the trust of your employees?
• What communication style to adopt to optimize the results of a team?

The state of mind and the mastery of certain methods revealed here will allow you to train others to obtain more results. Top leaders are like top athletes and the mind plays a key role in how they manage to deliver great achievements.

Leaders, professionals intended to supervise a team, students preparing for responsibilities, always find ways to learn or deepen their experience in the fundamental principles of team effectiveness and the concept of “Management “.

What is a good team?

You must first ensure that the following conditions are all met. Everyone :

• thinks differently depending on their nationality and therefore culture. Think about it!
• brings its qualities and its defaults.
• has a clear role, tasks explicitly formulated and mastered.
• needs clear, measurable goals and deadlines.
• should help, support and encourage each other.
• is projected in the short term. The long term is not motivating.

How to master the art of setting goals

“The trees do not grow up to the sky.”

Expression of American origin according to which stock market prices cannot go up indefinitely.

Setting goals is the art of balancing exciting challenge and realism over time. You must involve your team members in goal setting. An objective must always correspond to the quality of an individual or a group.

Give qualitative improvement objectives for each part of your action plans. If the goals discourage your team, change, otherwise the team will be underperforming. Separate the failures from the general objective to avoid any feeling of defeatism.

How many employees agree that they have more ability, creativity, talent, initiative and ingenuity than their job requires ? 99% will answer that they have more. It is recognized that resources are wasted.

Is this impoverishment of results due to poor management or to the attitude of individuals towards what is repetitive, boring and stressful?

What is your part ? How to improve the system?

You must place your teammates in the ideal balance between :

1. The positive factors:
   • Motivation : success, creativity, usefulness in the team.
   • Job mastery : Expertise, skills, network
2. and negative factors:
   • Stress : Conflicts, failures, pressure, burn-out
   • Boredness : Ease, repetition, bored-out

Your role is to coach and challenge your team so that everyone reaches the ideal situation of motivation and control. You also need to understand that we are all different. Internationally, each culture must be understood with a different management approach.

Who are your collaborators?

There are 6 types of skills more or less developed in each of our employees depending on the individual but also on the groups by country.

• Technicity
• Thinking
• Imagination
• Cooperation
• Achievement
• Methods

Each of us has all of these skills within. But depending on our country of origin, our education, training or experience, some of them dominate our personalities.

Your talent as a manager is therefore to understand individuals and combine their skills in good harmony. For example with the couple Technicity/Imagination or Action/Method…

Distribute the roles according to qualities:

• Evaluate the potential for progression and help them to develop via internal or external training plans.
• Pay deep attention to the lack of experience and diversity in the balance of the groups.
• Give your team freedom of decision and promote creativity.
• Remove non-performing team members. The manager must also know how to raise the voice or even eliminate disturbing elements in the group.

How to build a great team ?

You can use the 3Ps technique : Passion, Perseverance, Professionalism.
Constantly animate. You must create a participatory work environment where employees feel good and useful, in compliance with the directives given and the qualitative and quantitative objectives. Creative environments foster innovation at all levels of the business.

• Communicate on progress. Encourage positive ideas, innovation.
• Inspire and support your teams by setting a daily/weekly focus points and one2one informal meetings. You can allocate a specific location for this meeting with KPIs, project development charts, and list ideas for continuous progress. You must create a dynamic around your action.
• Build an internationally-minded team. It starts with recruiting a variety of profiles. Diveristy is key at international scale.
• Delegate as much as possible. Outsource time-consuming tasks.

You have to surround yourself with performers with the following qualities:

• Mastery of the best communication techniques.
• Capacity to listen
• Capacity for innovation and differentiation
• Share the Corporate values
• Autonomous in decision-making
• Active international network of contacts
• Creative entrepreneur spirit
• Analyse, understand the context and the global environment of the company
• Environmental awareness
• Project Management and planning in multicultural context

How to improve performance ?

• Contact with customers is always the priority ! Monitor the results daily.
• Encourage the natural leadership of the best team members.
• Never reject an idea without explaining why.
• Communicate and reward team successes.

Top performers listen to their envionment 360°. They take into account all the evolutions of the corporate international environment and they participate in improving the system and reinventing it.

Becoming an international expert means knowing how to apply methods. It is this intelligence of the international context that makes all the difference between a technician and an international professional.

Being efficient means producing on time and achieving set goals, but also always trying to improve itself and the whole system. Customers, quality and deadlines remain priorities in your mode of operation. Organize your teams around the current and future needs of your various international markets.

Your talent is to organize your daily schedule to be able to think, define, prioritize, implement, monitor and control all the following tasks over time.

• Identify the needs of all your team members (Annualy, Monthly). Plan the activity of each collaborator and the objectives. Define an action plan for all your international Business Units.
• Define your investment strategy; Training, purchasing… Determine the costs; Innovation, Capital, Maintenance…
• Distribute the workflows according to the forecast. Automate and delegate.
• Demand performance indicators from everyone.
• Supervise operational and commercial activity and follow up on contracts.
• Manage your forecasts and budgets. Consolidate data, reports and statistics.
• Keep track of resources and equipment for everyone.

How to master the dynamics of your teams abroad ?

“Never forget that relationships change over time.”

The only way to build trust in a group is your enthusiasm and that of the team for the project.

• Analyze the roles that team members play at worldwide scale. Rely on your most experienced collaborators.
• Identify the factors that slow down projects. If problems appear, act immediately. Conflicts should be constructive. Ask those who bring up problems to give solutions.
• Change scares people! You must discover the brakes and overcome the resistance to novelty. Organize formal and informal meetings for this purpose.
• Find the balance between creativity and action.

There is no efficiency in action without the correct and thoughtful sharing of information. One of your tasks as a manager is to choose the right information, synthesize it, simplify it and distill it to the right people. Internally or externally, to an individual or a group. You must do what you say and say what you do!

Communication is ubiquitous these days. The mastery of communication techniques and tools is an absolute necessity for the manager if he wants to succeed and progress. Written communications, oral presentations, marketing techniques, social networks, fluency in English, multiculturalism…

Inside the group

• Raise awareness, explain and promote your work with enthusiasm.
• Be sure to match your messages with your actions!
• Maintain closeness with your team by talking. Always keep in touch with traveling employees. Reinforce shared values.
• Facilitate your group to open the dialogue. Exchanges within the group helps to build together a more creative and enriching work environment.
• Train yourself in meeting facilitation and enrich your messages to convince! Invest in modern information sharing tools and technologies. Disseminate and promote the group’s achievements through these tools.
• Image your words with visuals. Your audience is made up of both visual and auditory people.
• Always try, if possible, to insert a translation into the local language when working abroad.
• Give goals in advance for meetings so that everyone can prepare effectively. Make sure the information is clearly understood.
• Train your employees yourself to make them evolve according to their weak points. The transmission of know-how is a strong act in management and perceived as such.

Outside the group

• It is the effectiveness of your actions that changes the attitude of your partners.
• You must define a political strategy to influence or change opinions.
• It is the image of your teams and therefore your leadership that is at stake!
• Your messages must be prepared to be persuasive. Facilitate understanding, improve trust.
• Your charisma determines your influence and therefore your prestige.
• You must maintain and animate your network both inside and outside the company. To do this, keep your portfolio of useful contacts up to date and communicate constantly.
• Use social media to expand sources and stay aware.
• Reduce fears of exposure to uncontrolled risks. Minimize conflicts.

How to improve the team creativity ?

Train yourself to use collective intelligence. The flow of creativity from a group is always greater than what a single person can produce.

• Write down all the ideas. Encourage the group to think with a new look, from a different, unconventional angle.
• Always look at the positive points of an idea without overtly rejecting it. Criticism kills creativity. Never criticize in public.
• Be prepared to change any element of your plans or strategies.

How to manage problems in a team?

“The only man who has never made a mistake is the one who never does anything.”

Theodore Roosevelt

Telling your employees that they are doing a good job improves morale during times of tension. There is something positive in our mistakes. They destabilize us but make us move forward. You have to get up when you fall. So, the error can be salutary. It pushes us to improve. It is a source of enrichment and progress.

• To identify conflicts, talk to individuals. Avoid covering up bad news. Rather act.
• The error exists. Everyone has the right to be wrong.
• Most people rotate around problems. The manager does not seek culprits but remedies.
• Deal with problems immediatly without letting them spread over time.
• Put yourself in the center and orchestrate the search for solutions.
• We must react calmly without punishing because in the long term, the fear of sanctions causes concealment or the temptation to accuse another employee or another team. Rather, those who dissemble should be gently corrected.
• Tell the truth about the situation and stay positive and constructive.
• Analyze the direct and indirect costs of failure.
• Attention. Blaming individuals in public kills team spirit. Treat all members with respect.

“The biggest mistake you can make in life, is to continue to fear to make one.”

Bear Gryll