Happy New Year!
I hope your holiday season with filled with joy and that 2007 brings you health, happiness and prosperity. This past holiday season was a little stressful for me. The heavy snow in Denver made travel difficult and made for a lot of shoveling. But that's in the past, on to bigger and better things in this new year.
In this post, I'm continuing my series on how great leaders engage and motivate the people they lead...
Leadership is about helping the people you lead succeed. In a previous post, I provided a list of tips for helping the people you lead succeed, grow and flourish. I’d like to discuss one of those leadership tips in more detail here.
Lead by rewarding, not punishing, good performance.
What Great Leaders Do
- Great leaders compliment the people they lead who do a good job.
- Great leaders avoid “rewarding” the good performance of the people they lead with more work and difficult or unpleasant tasks.
- Great leaders do not take the high performers they lead for granted.
- Great leaders listen to the high performers they lead.
How Great Leaders Do It
Great leaders know that the people they lead will continue to do the things for which they get rewarded. Therefore, great leaders recognize and reward the people they lead who perform well.
Great leaders recognize and reward two types of people they lead.
- Consistently good performers. Most people probably fall into this category. Great leaders recognize consistency on the part of the people they lead – for doing the right thing and getting things done the right way.
- People you lead who have gone to extraordinary lengths to solve a problem. When leaders take the time to notice, they’ll see the people they lead doing heroic things everyday. These people need their leader’s recognition too – or they might not continue going to such extraordinary lengths.
Great leaders know that most of the people they lead don’t want or need constant reinforcement, but almost everyone needs and appreciates an occasional sincere “thank you” for their efforts.
Great leaders provide specific, sincere feedback to the people they lead. They know it is the best way to provide positive consequences for good performance.
Great leaders don’t just tell one the people they lead that she “has done a good job”. Instead, great leaders pinpoint what the person did, how it relates to her goals and/or responsibilities, and why it is important to the work group in specific, and company in general.
Great leaders make sure that their feedback to the people they lead is timely. Positive reinforcement that follows soon after a particular action is much more effective than feedback given later in a performance review.
Great leaders keep things balanced with the people they lead. They don’t fall into the trap of having one or two “go to” people who get all of the difficult and time sensitive assignments. Great leaders spread out the work evenly.
Great leaders find a way to reward the exceptional performers they lead. If they can’t get a raise or bonus for one of the people they lead, because of your compensation system, they find some non monetary way to reward for them for their efforts.
Great leaders make sure that the high performers they lead know how much they value their performance. Great leaders give high performers plenty of encouragement and pats on the back.
Great leaders pay attention to what the high performers they lead have to say. They solicit the advice of their high performers on solving problems. Great leaders use the suggestions of the high performers they lead whenever they can.
That’s it for today. Please log on to my other blog www.CareerSuperStar.com for common sense advice on becoming a leader and the star you are meant to be.
I’ll see you around the web, and at Alex’s Lemonade Stand.
Bud
PS: Speaking of Alex’s Lemonade Stand – my fundraising page is still open. Please go to www.FirstGiving.com/TheCommonSenseGuy to read Alex’s inspiring story and to donate if you can.
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