Welcome to the February 2007 issue of Rise & Shine
Your Leadership Solutions and Resource Newsletter!
Rising Sun Goes International
(See New Horizons for Story)
Bright Lights (Tips/Solutions)
For the next several months, Rise & Shine will continue to highlight tips and suggestions from
The 10 Keys of Effective Supervision™:
- Support Growth
- Unite With Your Team
- Praise Others
- Expect Excellence
- Require Accountability
- Verify Potential
- Instill Independence
- Share Continuously
- Optimize Ownership
- Reinforce Relationships
This month’s focus is on the sixth Key – Verify Potential:
According to the Rising Sun model, “Verify Potential” is defined as: “Developing an atmosphere of hope and confidence for employees.”
You may see it every day, but when is the last time that you actually read your organization’s mission statement and reflected on each word? Do you understand how you and those you lead contribute to other areas in the organization? Do you understand how you and others actually contribute to the “big picture”?
Getting a bit more personal, how well do you know those you lead? You are probably surrounded with an abundance of talented individuals, unique to your workplace, whose expertise possibly has gone virtually unnoticed.
Think of those you lead as your personal community. Individualize each member of the community, including yourself, and then reflect on how each member relates to each other. Think of this in terms of systems theory where all components are inter-related and react to each other. Now, think of yourself as the catalyst to guiding this community through change where cohesion is achieved. This requires that you look beyond the workplace to see staff members as individuals with specific needs. By understanding what each member requires to grow within the workplace community, and providing those needs, the organization also reaps the benefits.
World Views (In the News)
Mastering "Takeaway Leadership"
Effective managers remove obstacles for employees – and then step aside and let them do their jobs.
It's tempting to ask: Has the job of CEO for a megacompany become too complex to handle? Is it asking too much of just one person to expect him or her to build fruitful relationships throughout an industry and the financial community, deliver revenues and earnings that excite the stock market, launch ambitious initiatives for the long term, and avoid product, financial, and sexual scandals -- all while presenting a perennially pleasant personality?
The answer is no, it isn't expecting too much, in part because all of that comes second to a CEO's paramount responsibility. That should be to shape the organization's goals, to communicate them through many levels to the people who are charged with getting the work done, and to demand -- and reward -- behaviors that demonstrate the company's ethical values and standards. This is one of those "simple, but not easy" tasks, and it's a critical one to master. Often, CEOs get credit for everything good that happens in a company when, in fact, their greatest impact comes from influencing the people who report to them.
OBSTACLE REMOVER. Thinking about leadership in terms of removing obstacles, rather than of piling on demands, makes the CEO role seem more useful and more humane. "You already know what to do" is a powerful message. It reassures managers that they needn't scurry back to the boss for further instructions every week, month, or quarter.
It also positions the leader as the person who really needs to know when artificial (man-made) blockages are keeping employees from hitting their marks. Imagine that -- a boss who wants to make my job easier!
In a subtle sort of way, Takeaway Leadership also shifts responsibility to all the other managers: No longer can they say nothing when confronted by an obstacle, then complain that it kept them from succeeding.
Once the Takeaway Leader sets the organization's goals, there will be course corrections -- and the CEO will communicate those in person or via e-mail. But the input that leads to those corrections will come from you and other talented managers who are closer to the action. Mostly, this type of leader will simply try to help you get to where you want to go faster.
SELF-EXAMINATION. And most of the time, that will work. You may find that you feel empowered to reach higher and run faster once you know that your boss is wired to make you successful, rather than to watch you like a hawk for signs of failure.
Could you be a successful Takeaway Leader? You should ask yourself three things:
1. Do I trust my subordinates enough to allow them to do their jobs without excess interference?
2. Am I willing to dig into day-to-day operational issues, if necessary, to eliminate the bottlenecks that so often cause organizations to stumble?
3. Am I willing to root out whatever internal cultural maladies -- fear of looking bad, risk aversion, peer-to-peer squabbling -- that are plaguing our company?
If you're able to answer yes to these questions, you could be a Takeaway Leader, and your team will be grateful for that.
Remember, as you make this Takeaway Leadership commitment, that you have to be ready to listen! You may hear unpleasant truths regarding your department heads' run-ins, or even your own management style. Some of your habits, for example, may slow down your team.
If this is the case, it's good to start the discussion: When you hear that your tendency to squash. After that, you can start knocking down obstacles with abandon. And let your leadership voice ring!
(Adapted from Liz Ryan, BusinessWeekOnline)
Rays of Hope (Stories/Parables)
Flute Player
Safety in Numbers
Whenever King Xuan of Qi had musicians playing the yu, a wind instrument with reed, he will have three hundred of them playing together. Knowing this, a student from Nanguo applied for a job. The king accepted and paid him the same salary as the others.
After the death of King Xuan, King Min became the ruler of Qi. He liked to have the musicians playing solo. the student from Nanguo fled.
The moral of this story…
One way to weed out the incompetent is to measure each individually.
-Han Fei Zi |
New Horizons (Meetings/Events)
Rising Sun Goes International
Hsinchu Holland International School
“There is an old African proverb that says ‘It takes a whole village to raise a child’. I believe this to be true especially in our case where we as a school community - a community made up of teachers, parents and students - can work together to produce a school of which we can all be proud to call our own.”
Grant Ruskovich
Principal
Hsinchu International Secondary School
At its inception in 1981, HIS was set up as a company school for Philips Electronics, the well-known Dutch consumer electronics giant. This is where the Holland affiliation comes from. Philips originally had a Dutch company school but with increasing numbers of multinational families in their employ in Taiwan, in 1981 they requested Mr. and Mrs. Lines to set up and operate an international school taught solely through the medium of English. At that time the school was called Hsinchu International School. The name was given to the school by the founders, Mr. and Mrs. Lines, and by Dr. Alvin Tong (one of the founders of Hsinchu Science-Based Industry Park), Dr. Guy Lott (Superintendent of TAS) and Mr. Anton de Rooij (Philips, Taiwan).
In 1988, the school became fully independent, registered and licensed through the Dutch Trade Office as Hsinchu Holland International School because of the number of Dutch students and parents at the time. As time went on, Philips no longer had such an extensive expatriate base in Hsinchu, and fewer Dutch families came to Hsinchu but the development of ventures such as the Hsinchu Science-Based industry Park saw many overseas families moving to our city. HIS continued to provide a full international curriculum to overseas students and gradually developed into what it is today. HIS is recognized as a fully-licensed school worldwide and is, for example, listed on the AIT (American Institute in Taiwan)
Over the decades the school has developed and matured, constricted only by the size of its current location. Next year the school will celebrate its 25th Anniversary, a fitting time for the relocation to its great new campus and the extension of grades to encompass Middle and, gradually, High School. As currently conceived, the long-term agreement described below will be spread out over the next 2 ½ years (2007, 2008, and the first half of 2009). The purpose of the agreement is to help HIS:
- Clarify the Secondary School vision, mission, and focus on growth and program development.
- identify strengths and growth areas pertaining to: style and approach; delegation, motivation, and empowerment strategies, as well as setting up an appropriate and desirable organizational leadership system.
- develop a program of professional development and team-building.
- strategically designing and implement appropriate social curriculum and program initiatives that fully support the desired outcomes that make HIS a unique and special setting for personal learning and growth.
Thank You
On behalf of all of us at Rising Sun Consultants, we want to thank you for reviewing the February edition of our Rise & Shine Newsletter and we want to wish you all. As always, we invite you to visit our website (www.risingsunconsultants.com) and to enjoy our latest book review and white paper.
Until next month: Always Keep Your Eyes on the New Horizon! |
