In October 2004 I posted a series on Delegation in the blog ITC Communication Edge. It was basically a "how-to," I have since found this article - gives much more detail on the advantages of delegation.

Why Entrepreneurs Should Delegate

Find out why sharing your responsibilities and authority with employees is essential for business success.

Do you need more hours in your day? Do you have so much work you're not even sure where to dig in? If so, you're like hundreds of other entrepreneurs who say they're overwhelmed with work. But why is that? Some of the most common excuses include these:

You're too busy to take the time to delegate or train someone else.
You don't have the time to explain tasks or projects.
You're the "best" or "only" person who can do the job right.
No one else is available or responsible enough.
If you delegate responsibility, you'll lose control over the project.

Read the whole article.

Leadership Success Tip:

Leadership success is often the result of self-motivation. Energy comes from being motivated ... so does confidence. If you act with confidence, you exude authority. People will take for granted that you have the authority to lead and will react accordingly.

Overcoming Shyness to Become a Business Leader

"Don't let timidity stop you from being an excellent leader. Get over your shyness and get your company on the path to success."

People skills are so important in management, whether you are managing a business or a community organisation. As usual Stever Robbins has the problem and its solution in a nutshell ...

"Q: I am very shy, but very ambitious. I started a company and am up to four employees. I spend much of my time in my office because it makes me uncomfortable to spend too much time being social and having meaningless conversations. I don't think this is a good character trait. How can I become more comfortable around people?
A: Bravo for addressing this now! As your company grows, people will look to you for leadership. Literally. They'll watch how you act on a day-to-day basis and will adjust their tone accordingly. Conversation from the boss, even if it's idle chit-chat, isn't meaningless. It creates culture and lets people know how to respond.

Here's one thing I can guarantee: If you stay in your office, they won't think you're shy." Read the whole article

Two lists for success in your Team Meetings

Ensuring the success of a team meeting can be difficult. Different personalities, different viewpoints, and different agendas all exist and all have their value to a team. But to bring them together to work to effective outcomes is a challenge. Use the checklists here to ensure your team has successful meetings.

Encourage members of the team to fulfil the roles that are needed. There are two kinds of group roles that are necessary for a team meeting to succeed. Task functions ensure the work requirements are met, while maintenance functions help the group with its internal cohesion and interpersonal feelings.

Task functions:

1. Initiating: Proposing tasks or goals: defining a group problem; suggesting a procedure for solving a problem; suggesting other ideas for consideration
2. Information or opinion seeking: Requesting facts on the problem; seeking relevant information; asking for suggestions and ideas.
3. Information or opinion-giving: Offering facts; providing relevant information; stating a belief; giving suggestions or ideas
4. Clarifying or elaborating: Interpreting or reflecting ideas or suggestions; clearing up confusion; indicating alternatives and issues before the group; giving examples
5. Summarizing: Pulling related ideas together; restating suggestions after the group has discussed them
6. Consensus-testing: Sending up “Trial balloons” to see if the group is nearing a conclusion or agreement has been reached.

Maintenance Functions

1. Encouraging: Being friendly, warm and responsible to others and their contributions; listening; showing regard for others by giving them opportunity or recognition
2. Expressing group feelings: Sensing feeling, mood, relationships within the group; sharing one’s own feelings with other members
3. Harmonizing: Attempting to reconcile disagreements; reducing tension through “pouring oil on troubled waters”; getting people to explore their differences.
4. Compromising: Offering to compromise one’s position, ideas or status; admitting error; disciplining oneself to help maintain the group
5. Gate keeping: Seeing that others have a chance to speak; keeping the discussion a group discussion rather than a one-, two-, or three-way conversation.
6. Setting standards: Expressing standards that will help groups to achieve; applying standards in evaluating group functioning and production.

Choose the roles to suit your team members. They will also be able to see the effectiveness of the system and work to keep your meetings successful.

Structure your speech for Maximum Impact

“Tell them what you’re going to say. Say it. Then tell them what you said”

And that is so true!! We have such short attention spans. And so do audiences. If we want to make a point that will stay with an audience after they leave the room, we have to repeat and reinforce it throughout the presentation.

Introduce your well defined theme. Present that theme. And repeat it to conclude.

You will have given your audience a great chance of remembering it.

Learn through constructive evaluation to structure your speeches for maximum impact. Join an ITC club. Visit www.itcintl.com to find a club near you.

A Twelve Step Program For Identifying and Eliminating Organizational Change (Culture)

Read this if you would like a chuckle. Mind you, it has some excellent kernels of truth in it. It also occurs to me that we also need to know how to counteract the strategies, if we need to, as well. Click on the title.

Meeting Success Tip

Prepare a written agenda for your meeting. Make sure that everyone at the meeting is aware of it, and if necessary, have the meeting agree to it. Then you refer to the agenda to keep discussion focussed.

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Target Marketing for your organisation

So who is your ideal member? What does the profile look like? Is he male, aged 28-35, living within 5 kilometres of the meeting venue, a lawyer by vocation and needing mediation skills? Or is it anyone aged 18-60, living in your town, undergoing changes in their life and needing assertiveness skills? Compile a list of these characteristics. Then this is the group you are targeting with your marketing. Theirs are the needs you are promising to meet. Theirs are the dreams you may be articulating for them and promising to turn into reality. Their needs will govern your venue type. They are the people for whom you will plan and market programmes and training, and they are the people you will target with your “Word of mouth.’

For free articles on growing your organistion, visit our website.

Team-Building

Creating teams within your organistion can be a challenge. Creating a shared vision and the ability to motivate are an excellent start. Read our free article on Delegating which is really about building teams.

But I have also come across this useful set of tips for great team-building.


Building Strong Teams
1/ Have very few rules – If there’s too many no one reads them . Or conversely an organization can be so rule driven that nothing gets done. Don’t set up rules based on hypothetical situations that may never happen. As your team grows and you gain experience through making mistakes your new rules can be built around your mistakes.

2/ What is your Mission - Different from the goal( A goal measures whether your on purpose or if you fallen off purpose. If you want to go to Los Angeles that is a goal if you end up in Chicago you are off goal. Focus on Mission Be on purpose at all times . Continuity keeps you focused with measurable team goals… helps you to measure whether your on purpose

3/ Speak in a manner that supports others or don’t speak.. Demeaning language not acceptable. Drains people. Swearing creates a negative environment. Words are tools… the most powerful tool we have… can hurt someone or build them.

How often have you been hurt by people’s words. The old adage … if you can’t say something good about someone don’t say it.. Bad language changes the whole vibe of an organization

4/ Acknowledge the other persons point of view. Listen to their point of view. You may learn something you didn’t know before. You may gain valuable info.


Continue reading "Building Strong Teams"

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DO YOU HAVE THE QUALITIES TO BE A GREAT LEADER?

Do you have the personal qualities to be a great leader?

Leaders have

1. Flexibility. Leaders must be able to adapt to change, and have their organisation able to do so too.

2. Judgement. To be able to make the right choice at the right time

3. Courage. Courage is based on belief in one’s decisions, the courage to make a choice and stand by it, or to adapt to changing situations, and new information

4. Knowledge. A leader needs to have the knowledge necessary to do the job – knowledge of the technical side of the organisation and of the people. That knowledge must be kept constantly up to date.

5. Will power. To stick with choices and decisions and to see them implemented. And to be able to stay flexible and responsive to all inputs.

6. Integrity. The foundation stone for all of these is integrity. We all respond to integrity

For other free articles on communication success in leadership, visit

Leadership Success Tip

Peter Garrett, an Australian politician commented on the leadership example of Nelson Mandela:

" ... he had the strength of will to endure a long period of hardship, the change of heart to see his opponents as human and the intelligence to see that offering light at the end of the tunnel is always preferable to blocking the way or trying to blow up obstacles."

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Writing to communicate effectively

With email and text messaging becoming so prevalent, there is a tendency to become slack in all writing and this is something that is impacting on businesses and organisations. This was highlighted in an article in the New York Times entitled What Corporate America cannot build: A sentence."

There are two aspects to communication. Getting your message read and understood, and creating an impression. If the writing is difficult to understand, then the message will not be read. We are all just too busy. If it is too awkwardly written it will not be understood, and in fact could be seriously misunderstood. Put these two together and you have a recipe for an impression that you will definitely not want to create for your organisation.

Ken O'Quinn is a writing coach who provides href="http://www.writingwithclarity.com/writingtip.htm">tips for writers who want to be able to write with clarity.

Take the time to ensure that your organisation and the people you train communicate with clarity and present an acceptable impression of your organistion.
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Speech Making Success Tip

Eye contact is a wonderful tool to convey sincerity. It is also useful to help you to stay aware of how the audience is reacting to you. Stay aware and adapt by changing your presentation style and content to keep their attention and interest.

Practise your public speaking communication skills at a club.

Publicity Strategy for your organisation

I have taken this strategy from a suggestion made by John Stanley, a conference speaker and retail consultant. He was writing to encourage publicity for libraries, but the idea would work just as well for many organisations. He writes, “An advertiser’s dream is to hit its target audience when they are not distracted by other advertisers and have time to absorb the promotion. In today’s hectic world those situations are rare, hence the high dollars to get product placement adverts on movies. … Café menu holders featuring a promotion are used in other retail sectors. The objective is to educate and promote whilst the person is having a cup of coffee. Coffee shops often have Perspex menu holders and you can use these to promote [your organisation], services and [programmes]. The great thing about these holders is that people read them while having a relaxing cup of coffee … Placing adverts in newspapers is not the way to grow [organisations], we need to be innovators and the opportunities are there.” John Stanley Associates website is http://www.jstanley.com.au
So how can we use this idea? Do you meet in a café? Then could you arrange to have your publicity displayed there? Do you know someone who owns a café who could display for your organisation? Otherwise, what do you have to offer your local café owners to persuade them to display your promotional materials? Think about it. Do you could offer training? What would it cost to advertise in your local café? How much of a year’s training does that amount to? Try offering that to the café owner. Maybe they have a friend or family member who would benefit from your training. Who from your organisation has the skills to offer this trade? If no one in the club will take it on, maybe you have a friend or relative who could negotiate for you … the options are yours.

Communication Success Tip - Listening

In conversation, listening is vital because:
- Constant talking does not contribute to the conversation
- It allows you time to consider what you are going to say next
- It allows you to polish what you are going to say for maximum impact and timing
- It allows you to watch and feel the emotions and tenor of that the others are saying
- Attentive, sincere silence offers sympathy of attention even when you do not agree and encourages confidence and the sense of appreciation that brings out the best in people

Develop your listening skills through evaluation at ITC. Visit a club

Nine Steps of Planning in your Organisation

Even though everyone in your organisation may be fairly aware of what is to be achieved, and what your organisational goals are, the goal-setting, planning process is useful to focus awareness on the aims and processes and to ensure that everyone knows exactly what their roles are.

These steps can also be used in any decision-making situation, or any problem solving session.

Planning, must, however, never stop. It is constantly adapting to new situations.

1. Assess the situation
2. Select objectives and strategies to realize objectives.
3. Develop action plans for entire long-range plan
4. Develop detailed action plans for current year
5. Establish a way to monitor activites and insure feedback (reporting).
6. Develop a budget and implement ways to meet funding requirements.
7. Measure performance; analyze feedback; compare progress with plan.
8. Act on findings: give green light to successful activities, take corrective action when needed.
9. Signoff on completed plans - abandon ones not achieving your objective or when the objective changes (as they do).

For workshops to help you grow your organistion, visit

Leadership Success Tip

This week's tip comes from Ron Sargent, CEO of the big office resources firm, Staples. He made a point of being involved in customer service. "Get your hands dirty," he said. "Before you can be a great leader, you need to understand the inner workings of the business and where and how the greatest impact can be made."

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PR The Power of a smile in selling your organisation

A smile adds value to all that you do. It makes you approachable (an opening to talk aboutyour organisation!), and adds value to your conversation (makes you more believable before you start talking about it), and it makes your message about your group far more powerful.

For more tips on Publicity and PR book a workshop. Visit

FINDING YOUR VOICE - LEADERSHIP SUCCESS

In November 2005, Stephen Covey finally released the follow-=up to his Seven habits series. The book is entitled The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness, and instructs readers how to "find your voice and inspire others to find theirs." It took much longer than expected to write, and is 50 pages longer than the total number of pages in the previous seven put together.
"Simply, Habit 8 asserts that everyone has an inner longing to seize the day and live a life of contribution," USA Today's Del Jones writes in a recent article about Covey. "It requires heavy lifting, and Covey challenges readers to get there."
We will watch to see if Habit 8 sells as well as "The 7 Habits," which has sold 15 million copies in the 15 years since it was first published.

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Speech Making Success Tip for the Week

If you want to get a message across, people need to be able to hear it, to be able to hear each word. That means articulating every word very clearly. So pay particular attention to beginnings and especially endings. Then there can be no confusion between similar words such as taken and taking, or pass and past.

To practise your public speaking skills in a supportive environment with constructive feedback, visit a club: