Great leaders Have a Vision and Convince Others To Share It. One critical component when relating your vision to employees is to emphasize common values. But how do you relate a vision like retaining employees to values such as providing fast, reliable package delivery?

That was the challenge for UPS executive Jennifer Shroeger. When she assumed leadership of the company's Buffalo district, turnover was an astonishing 50 percent. Four years later, the attrition rate was down to 6 percent. In an article in the August 2002 edition of Fast Company, Keith H. Hammonds described her unique approach.

Recognizing the importance of keeping employees aligned to the organization's values, Shroeger focused on understanding the demographics of her workforce. For instance, employees over the age of thirty-five spoke, listened, and responded to motivation differently than their younger counterparts. Shroeger points out what most leaders miss--that "what motivates people changes over the course of their careers, so we had to communicate differently to different groups."

Shroeger's advice is spot on, but what I really like is the way she tied her message to the company's overall purpose. Read the article and you'll agree that her plan sounds more like a training manual for UPS drivers than a guide to increasing retention. It's an interesting illustration of connecting your vision to your organization's values. Bookmark this post on del.icio.us

Sometimes I find it difficult to explain to people what distinguishes The Leading from the Heart Workshop from other management training courses. Yesterday, someone unknowingly explained it to me.

I was meeting with a friend-of-a-friend, making a sales pitch for the workshop. During our conversation, she expressed some of the frustrations she felt in a new leadership role and half-jokingly described herself as a "bad manager." But as our discussion was coming to a close, she made a statement that nearly knocked me off my chair. "I know," she said, "that it's possible to be a good leader and still have people like me."

Countless management sages advised me during my corporate career, "Leadership is not a popularity contest. Your employees don't have to like you; they just have to respect you." As a result, in my early management roles I felt a bit spineless when--in my heart--I truly cared what my employees thought of me as a leader and as a person.

Then I realized something that justified ignoring the advice of my well-meaning mentors. I recognized my own lack of respect for anyone leading me who I disliked. And my philosophy as a leader became clear: employees have to like you before they can respect you.

Values-based leadership allows managers to avoid factoring in their popularity when making difficult decisions. Getting employees to like and respect them simply requires that leaders Live By The Values They Profess. By proactively demonstrating the correlation between your personal values and those of the organization, you'll simultaneously show your employees alliance to their values and validate their fond feelings for you.

"Leading from the Heart" means having the luxury of being effective and having your employees like you. I just might have to reprint my business cards. Bookmark this post on del.icio.us

Getting workers to collaborate when they have different goals or agendas is the top challenge among today's leaders, according to a survey by the American Management Association. Sixty percent of surveyed executives listed getting people to work together as the biggest hurdle they currently face.

Perhaps it's unsurprising those same leaders ranked balancing competing demands and priorities as their second largest obstacle (56 percent). If leaders are juggling multiple priorities, is it any wonder their employees struggle understanding common objectives?

Maybe you've seen this problem in your organization: Employees in the billing department--in addition to collecting and posting receivables--are instructed to keep overhead low. In other words, operate with the fewest number of employees possible and limit overtime by squeezing twelve hours of work into eight hour shifts. Meanwhile, over in Sales, new business acquisition is the aim. Grow big, grow fast, grow now!

Then the two objectives collide. The Sales department acquires a large piece of business that generates significant revenue--and a tremendous increase in the number of payments to process. As directed, the billing department has been operating lean and mean; the new business increases volume by 20 percent and brings an already overworked department to its knees. Performance suffers, payments are misapplied, and the new customer is concerned.

Sales: "You're not servicing our clients!"

Billing: "Stop bringing in new business when we don't have the necessary resources."

Leaders apparently know how to fix the dilemma, because 84 percent of the AMA survey respondents listed communication as the most important skill needed to be an effective leader. So what's the problem? In most cases, leaders are communicating the wrong message.

Let's say the organization in our example has a mission to increase shareholder value by providing exceptional service. However, messages from management have an emphasis on numerical results: cut costs; grow now.

The secret to getting workers with different goals to work together is simple: eliminate the separate goals. If the organization's vision is to increase profits through excellent service, leaders should convey a single message about servicing the customer. When salespeople understand that an unprepared billing department will be unable to service to new customers, they'll bring billing supervisors into the sales process. When billing supervisors are informed of potential new business in the pipeline, they can plan and staff accordingly. One vision--one goal.

Communicating a common vision requires skills largely neglected in the business world. But when you master the ability to Have a Vision and Convince Others To Share It, you'll get people to work together and separate yourself from at least 60 percent of all business leaders. Bookmark this post on del.icio.us

The manager of a southeast Michigan public transportation organization was describing a leadership dilemma to me one day. In exchange for a paycheck, the manager explained, he asks only three things of each bus driver: show up, show up on time, and show up in uniform. With such simple expectations, he wondered, why is he faced with ongoing absenteeism, tardiness, and dress code violations?

A leader's expectations often create self-fulfilling prophecies, in which employees live up or down to what is expected of them. For example, when the greatest challenge their boss assigns is to dress properly each morning, workers sense a lack of trust--and an expectation of failure--from that supervisor. As a result, employees expect less from themselves. Their performance reflects those low expectations, completing a self-fulfilling prophecy.

How can employees sense a leader's low expectations? As a professor of social psychology at Harvard, Robert Rosenthal studied the concept extensively in the field of education. By convincing teachers that testing had indicated which students were about to enter a period of academic and intellectual blooming, he was able to manipulate the teachers' expectations for their students. Rosenthal found that teachers behaved differently toward students for whom they had low expectations. Notice the similarities to leaders who expect less from certain workers:

- Low expectation students were seated far from the teacher, and sometimes in groups;
- Teachers paid less attention to low expectation students in academic situations, calling on them less often to answer questions or to make public demonstrations;
- Low expectation students were allowed less time to answer questions and deprived of clues or follow-up questions;
- Teachers smiled less often at, and maintained less eye contact with, low expectation students;
- Low expectation students were criticized more frequently for incorrect responses;
- Low expectation students were praised less frequently for successful answers, but praised more frequently for marginal or inadequate responses;
- Teachers gave less accurate and less detailed feedback to low expectation students;
- Teachers demanded less work--and effort--from low expectation students.

Although forming expectations seems unavoidable, altering the internal beliefs of leaders can prevent self-fulfilling prophecies from developing. Surprisingly, it's the expectations leaders have for themselves that must be changed. Leaders must believe, regardless of their perceptions of an employee's potential, in their own abilities to teach and inspire. Leaders who consider themselves highly effective are more likely to view all workers as reachable, teachable, and worthy of attention. Managers who attribute their employees' accomplishments to their own success as leaders are more likely to adapt their behavior to help their workers grow.

To Freely Give Away Their Authority leaders must set high expectations for their employees. But more importantly, leaders must be more demanding of themselves. Bookmark this post on del.icio.us