The qualities for a better Leadership

Communication: Pay attention to it in your written and oral communications. Restate the key themes over and over. Don't undervalue repetition, repetition makes for memory and memory makes for action.

Organizing capacity: Organize you day, your communications, your organizational structures, your reward systems and everything else to pay attention to what's important and then do that with unremitting diligence.

No perfectionism please: Now if you're a perfectionist, that's going to be hard for you to do. But there's not P for perfectionism in this scheme of things. No, we recognize that there are limited resources of time, energy, people, and money. Because those resources are limited, you want to go for the big stuff first.

Concentrate on what is important: Time management courses, strategy books, and management gurus all will tell you that there's not a lot that's really important. Your job as a leader is to concentrate on what's most important so that it gets taken care of. Then let the rest of the stuff take care of itself.

Contact: Effective general managers make great use of the random contacts they have with people. Those contacts could be in the hallway, at the water cooler, in the elevator, or walking down the street. They seize on those moments to talk about the things and ask the questions that are important to their leadership agenda. You should do that too.

Appreciation on what you want to do

Important: That's important, because most of us came up in a world where we didn't praise enough. Seek out opportunities to praise but don't get anal retentive about it.

A Training tool: Appreciation is your best training tool. In technical terms, praise is a positive consequence that follows a positive action. It's a reward for something done right. Use praise to get people to continue to do things or to take positive action. That's where it's best used.

Effective tool: Appreciation is a tool that is most effective when it's used inconsistently. Used consistently, praise tends to loose its force. So, don't worry so much about praising everything that people do right, but do worry about praising.

Discipline is essential

No rigidity: The management lesson here is that if you zap people too much with negative consequences, they don't just quit doing the stuff that you don't want them to do. They quit doing pretty much everything. That's why "rule by fear" and "controlled ferocity" cultures have a devil of a time getting people to take initiative. They've been zapped so often they're just not willing to risk it.

Punishment: Discipline is the mirror image of appreciation. It's a negative consequence that follows negative behavior. It follows a principle stated almost in biblical terms by one of my past trainees. "The good shall be rewarded and the unjust shall be punished in proportion to their deeds."

Means for memory: Punishment - negative consequences - are the tool you use to get people to stop stuff. If you figure out what's most important for people to quit doing in your organization, rig up some kind of negative consequence for them if they do it. Be careful though, because you may fall prey to the hot stove guideline. A cat who sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again. But he won't sit on a cold stove either.

Reward for the good results

Pay in various ways: Pay is one of the tangible ways you can reward people for doing good stuff. It's another form of praise in visible, tangible form. Don't limit your thinking about pay to just money, though. Pay people with time off, recognition, choice assignments, small gifts, and special bonuses to encourage the behavior you want.

Good communication: One of my clients used to carry around a pocket-full of restaurant gift certificates as he wandered around his trucking company. When he found somebody doing something that he wanted to encourage he was likely to whip out a gift certificate and hand it to them on the spot. It created the kind of event and drama that makes for good communication and it encouraged positive behavior.

Search for it: Seek for ways to pay for the results you want. Pay and praise are the things that get the engine of progress going.

Support the employers with best result

Promotion: The problem is that lots of organizations forget about it. They maintain reward and promotion systems that reward the old behavior, even while they're trumpeting the new behavior in memo's, meetings, and executive retreats.

Be positive: What are the stories that your people tell in your organization? What are the stories they tell about their bosses? You want those stories to be positive about great things their bosses have done. If all the stories are negatives, buddy you've got a problem.

Reaction: What do your folks say about the folks who are promoted? Do they feel they got promoted on merit because of their performance or because they just happened to "know somebody" or worse.

Pay attention: When I was just starting out in consulting, a much more experienced and wiser consultant said to me, "When you first go into an organization, pay attention to which they promote. Listen to the stories that folks tell you about who gets promoted and rewarded and why. That will tell you just about everything you need to know about what the real organizational priorities are".

All the best!