CREATIVE SALES SOLUTIONS CONSULTING, Kimberly Mackey, MCSP, CMP, Realtor®

Is Your Leadership Tower Leaning?

By Kimberly Mackey, MCSP, CMP, Realtor®

Boy, with budget cuts and "RiF’s" (Reductions in Force) these days it is easy to feel like our organizations are duct taped together, with just a few hearty souls holding the frayed ends. In times like these, with everyone pitching in more, tensions and stress run high. Therefore, now it is more important than ever to pay attention to the building blocks of your leadership tower.

Leadership pioneer and author Peter F. Drucker says, "Effective leaders lead from the front-they do not push from the rear." And, "...leaders make the strengths of people effective and their weaknesses irrelevant". Recently, I was privileged to attend a workshop put on by Dale Carnegie of Tampa Bay, entitled "Team Member Engagement" where I received this wonderful graphic (however the editorial comments are my own):

What does all this mean? As you can see, this leadership tower is precariously balanced on oval building blocks. Now, I am no engineer, but even I know that if you stack a bunch of oval rocks on top of one another, they better be really balanced or they are going to fall over. And the base rock or foundation supports the next one and so on and so forth. So, our foundation is Communication; without that you cannot have Relationships, and without both of those you cannot have Trust. And, it goes without saying that if you don’t have Trust it is certainly going to make it difficult for your team to ENGAGE in the Vision.

"Employee engagement," as measured by Gallup's Q12 survey, "is the level at which employees are psychologically committed to their jobs and workplaces." It stands to reason that it would be hard for associates to be engaged when there is a lack of leadership; therefore LEADERSHIP = HIGHER ROI. According to a paper entitled, "Investors Take Note: Engagement Boosts Earnings" by Brian Ott and published in the Gallop Management Journal, June 14, 2007, businesses whose leadership models the UPRIGHT Leadership Tower have:

12% higher customer advocacy
18% higher productivity
12% higher profitability

Conversely, the bottom quarter of businesses, who did not model the UPRIGHT Leadership Tower showed:

31-51% higher employee turnover
51% higher inventory shrinkage
62% higher accidents

Now comes the big question, "OK, I see your point, but how do we get there?" The not so easy answer is that you get there together, as a team. There are many exercises and programs, and consultants, who can help you to get started and build a great foundation. However, the UPRIGHT LEADERSHIP TOWER is not a one time team building event. It is a 24/7/365 commitment. It requires leader’s abilities to put aside what they think they know, and allow themselves to become humble and open to the possibilities that lie within a fully engaged team.

* Kimberly Mackey, MCSP, CMP, Realtor® is the founder of Creative Sales Solutions. A company dedicated to providing the Sales and Leadership Solutions You Need Right Now. She can be reached at kmackey@creativesalesnow.com or by visiting http://www.creativesalesnow.com.

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