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Stepping into a management role isn’t just a change of task — it’s a fundamental shift of identity.

“To be successful, first-time managers must make the transition from a person who gets the work done themselves to a person who gets work done through others,” says Kim Leahy, global portfolio manager of Center for Creative Leadership’s Maximizing Your Leadership Potential (MLP) program for managers of individual contributors. “It requires a different definition of success, a new level of self-awareness and an additional range of skills.”

Your definition of success must now include the success of others. Rather than focusing on your own performance, you need to be asking, “How does the group or team accomplish its work?” “Are they effective as individuals?” “Do they collaborate?” “Are team members committed and engaged?” “How are individual motivations and needs connected to the work and the organization?”

At the same time, you should take stock of your own strengths, weaknesses and patterns. “Who you are drives how you lead,” Leahy explains. “Even though the emphasis is no longer on your individual performance, you need to understand your behaviors, preferences and tendencies — and consider that the most effective way to lead others may not always be your default approach.”

For example, you might be a person who thrives on the pressure of a tight deadline and, as an individual contributor, earned a reputation as someone who will roll up your sleeves and get the job done. As a manager of others, these same practices and preferences could lead to poor planning, micromanaging or inadequate use of resources. If you assume everyone operates the same way you did as an individual contributor, you won’t see or leverage the array of talent on your team.

Build a foundation of four leader competencies

To make the transition from an individual performer to leading a team, you’ll want to build a foundation of what CCL calls the “Fundamental Four” leader competencies: self-awareness, learning agility, influence and communication.

Other key competencies for leading others at this stage of your career are:

•Delegating.
•Building and maintaining relationships.
•Resolving conflict.
•Leading team achievement.
•Coaching and developing others.
•Confronting problem employees.
•Embracing change.
•Innovative problem-solving.
•Adapting to cultural differences.

“In today’s flattened and downsized organizations, many skilled people are put into team leadership or management roles with little preparation and support,” says Leahy. “But these emerging leaders are crucial for the implementation of the organization’s day-to-day work. When they understand what is required to manage others and learn — in a practical way — how to be effective leaders, they can be powerful agents for organizational success.”

From Leading Effectively Newletter, Center for Creative Leadership

By Ernie J. Geeting

Every day thousands of people decide to enter the world of internet marketing. They have heard the stories of others earning fortunes online and hope they might be able to get a piece of that pie themselves. Most have no previous background in sales or marketing. Some will succeed but many will fail. In this article I will expose the main reason people fail and then I’ll reveal to you the single most important thing you must do before promoting any product or service online.

Here’s the most important thing you must know about internet marketing…it is all about the MARKETING. Forgive me for stating the obvious but most people really don’t know what marketing really is or what it involves. So what is it exactly? Marketing is the process of promoting a product from a producer or supplier to a prospective customer in a manner that persuades the prospect to buy. It’s about matching products and services with people who want, and will pay for them. The marketing process requires study of the product itself, researching the potential market, testing, presentation, and promotion. Most people who want to make money on the internet know nothing of the process of marketing, fail to do proper research and are unwilling (or too broke) to do testing. It has been said over 95% of people who try doing internet marketing fail. Now you can understand why. You wouldn’t try flying an airplane without proper knowledge and hands-on training but yet hundreds try to start a home business in marketing without having a clue as to what to do. They are destined to crash and burn.

Making money on the internet comes from making sales, nothing more. This is done by advertising. The NUMBER ONE REASON why people fail as internet affiliate marketers is that they have insufficient knowledge and experience in selling and advertising. The cause for their lack of success isn’t the product they represent or the companies they choose to affiliate with, the problem is with the prospective marketers themselves. If you want to succeed online you need to understand the sales process and need to be willing to always be learning sales and copy writing techniques. While there may or may not be such a thing as a ‘born salesman’ (or copywriter) there most certainly are personality differences that allow the concepts of selling to come easier to some than others. However these concepts can be learned and applied by anyone desiring to do so. I urge you to seek out good books and courses about selling and copy writing. This knowledge will be extremely helpful to you when writing the content for your advertisements, capture pages and sales pages. Fortunately, most publishers or network marketing companies will provide you with a professionally written affiliate sales page and advertisements. However….

A frequent temptation newbies fall into is taking the shortcut of using a publisher provided affiliate sales page as the landing point for their visitors. A sales page is the main website page for a product that contains the advertising copy (aka: sales pitch). This is a grave error that will cost them untold wasted hours and advertising dollars. Never link directly to a ‘stock’ sales page. Did you get that? This is an important key to success: DO NOT link directly to an affiliate sales page. Why not? Because that sales page is the exact same sales page that everyone else is using. You offer no more than anyone else advertising the same page so customers have no reason to buy from you over someone else. This is the most important thing you must do before you try to market anything online. Fail to do this and you will sabotage your chance to succeed. The same goes for ads and for the same reason. Never use company provided ads exactly as written, but rather reword or rebuild them while keeping the main points emphasized

So what should you do? Here are some options…

1. Make a Capture Page. On you capture page offer a free report series or e-book about a topic closely related to the product you wish to sell. The idea here is to give away some useful information, not a sales pitch. Deliver it via autoresponder in a series with each installment having a recommendation at the end (with a clickable link) for the customer to purchase the item you wish to sell. That link can be to your company provided sales page (embedded with your affiliate id). This approach works the same way for network marketing. Give first, sell second.

NOTE: Sometimes a product you might sell might be from an online store with multiple products. Always link to the sales or catalog page specifically for that product. If you are promoting a business opportunity such as MLM, link directly to the recruiting presentation page.

2. Build Your Own Sales Page. If you are savvy at website creation you can create your own sales page. Sometimes companies will allow you to copy and paste, or even provide you with images of their product or components of their sales page for the purposes of building your own sales page. Sometimes publishers of digital products will offer a Resale Rights package you can buy that contains all the essential graphics and ad copy for creating your own pages. If you do create your own sales pages reword the advertising copy and somehow personalize your pages so they are ‘branded’ to you. Finally, make sure the finalized page is in compliance with the publisher’s rules for such pages.

3. Create a Review Page. This has become a popular way to promote products. You simply write a review (or do an audio or video review) of the product you are selling from your own perspective and then link that page to your sales page. This can be done as a stand alone website or even a a blog. Just a caution here the FTC is really cracking down on sites like these because of their covert approach. You need to make it clear to the reader that you are an affiliate and will profit from the sale of the products reviewed at your site. Be sure to visit the FTC website for the details and play by the rules. Don’t turn your ‘review’ into a sales pitch. The only reason people will read your review is to get an honest opinion and some further detail about the product. While you want to be careful not to give a detailed description of every facet of the product, you do want to give the reader enough information so they will know whether this is the type of product they are looking for and would like to see the sales page on. By the way, it never hurts to also put a link for your autoresponder capture page on your review site, perhaps you could send them review alerts when you’ve done a new review or listings of other products you’ve reviewed, etc.

4. Use Lead Capture Drop-ins. Drop-ins are nifty little tools that allow you to turn any web page into a capture page. You simply use this tool to create an opt-in form that ‘drops in’ on top of the web page you are promoting. You then link the request form an autoresponder for follow up emails. You can use these much as you would a capture page, offering a free report, ebook or just ‘further information’. These are much faster to create than capture pages and work great with company provided sales pages as they allow you to offer something personally that others aren’t while also helping you build your contact list, just like the gurus do. They are the closest thing to a short-cut.

Having read this article you now know why so many fail online and exactly what you must do to set yourself apart from everyone else. Start putting this information into practice today and you will be positioning yourself for internet marketing success.

Ernie J. Geeting is an internet marketer and writer. He loves helping people to experience more success in their lives. You can see his blog and get a free course with insider secrets to internet marketing success at http://earnonlineincomenow.info

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ernie_J._Geeting

“Leadership is like a muscle. The more intelligently you train, the stronger you get.”

From Center for Creative Leadership, Leading Effectively e-newsletter

John Ryan, CCL’s president and CEO, is a big believer in giving leaders a serious workout. Based on CCL’s research and practical experience and Ryan’s 40 years of leadership in the military, higher education and nonprofits, he advises leaders to step up their leadership training in five areas:

1. Teamwork and collaboration are critical for organizations in two ways. Internally, you won’t get much done without it. Externally, you need partnerships with like-minded firms that advance your strategy, whether it’s developing new products or breaking into emerging markets. But fostering teamwork is not easy. In a recent CCL study, 97 percent of senior executives told us collaboration is a key factor in organizational success. But just 47 percent believed the leaders in their organizations are skilled collaborators.

2. Managing change. In our work at CCL, we have found a few key principles for tackling change. First, view it positively and, of course, with a sense of urgency. There’s no point in fearing change since it’s inevitable and we can’t control it. Second, focus on adapting plans as necessary to external pressures. We all had our strategic plans before the recent recession hit. Some organizations stubbornly stuck with them, believing things would return to normal quickly. Others saw a sea change in the marketplace and adjusted their plans accordingly. Third, it’s important to manage the resistance to change you are bound to see in your colleagues. It’s your role and responsibility to help them understand what’s going on externally and why your organization needs to adapt. Be sure to involve others in the design and implementation of major change initiatives, whether it’s a workforce restructuring or a new product development process.

3. Communication. As an executive with a demanding schedule, it’s easy to be cut off from the rest of the organization. We can all learn a lesson from A.G. Lafley, the retired CEO of Procter & Gamble. He was a great listener, often visiting consumers in their homes or joining them for trips to the store. In addition to being P&G’s CEO, Lafley also established himself as the company’s Chief Listening Officer. He knew that getting good ideas required asking people for input and listening to it very carefully. We should all be Chief Listening Officers in our own organizations.

4. .Learning agility. To succeed in a world where our work is always changing, where challenges are unpredictable and competition abounds, we need to be agile learners. We need to apply our new knowledge. Perhaps most of all, we need to believe we can rise to the challenge. There’s a growing body of neuroscience research that says we can learn new behaviors and modify deep-set behaviors at any age. It takes hard work and real focus, but all of us really can learn new and effective behaviors — and help take our organizations to new levels of performance.

5. .Judgment is at the core of leadership. Fundamentally, it’s about getting the most important calls right — when it comes to both people and strategy. Without good people judgment, you won’t have a strong team. Without a strong team, your strategy will not be executed effectively. Look first of all for men and women who have demonstrated strong performance, integrity and the desire to assume higher levels of responsibility. Watch out for candidates who treat others insensitively and abrasively and put their self-interests above the company good.

Strategy judgment calls require leaders to find new paths. Success depends on asking the right questions, experimenting and constantly adjusting your approach. It hinges even more on your level of humility. Are you too confident in your own judgment? Do you believe too strongly in your old ways of doing business? Do you think that because something has worked many times before, it will work again now? Do you have the humility to understand that even with great collaboration you will not get everything right, and that you can’t know everything yourself?

By Jan Leslie and William A. Gentry

In the office the word politics makes many of us think of favoritism, back-stabbing and self-promotion at its worst. But workplace politics is present in all organizations and probably always will be. Avoiding or ignoring it limits you and your organization. To be an effective leader you must acknowledge political reality in your organization and develop your political skill.

Politics, at its core, is neutral. There is good political skill, which most people appreciate, and there is bad political skill, which causes a lot of dissension. People who think badly of politics often associate it with negative personal experiences. Someone got a raise that didn’t seem justified or a promotion for which better candidates were bypassed. When politics works to a person’s advantage, however, they are more likely to see it as a justified result of skill and hard work.

Politics: the ability to understand and effectively influence others

What is political skill? We define it, based on the work of Professor Gerald Ferris, a management and psychology professor at Florida State University, and his colleagues, as the ability to understand and effectively influence others for personal or organizational benefit. Politics does not have to be a zero-sum game, so good political skill can bring positive results for all parties, allowing people to tailor their behavior to particular contexts and people and helping organizations unlock their potential. Leaders continually need to adjust to different people and situations, particularly in this economically rocky time. Politically skilled people know how to do that. They can diagnose a situation and adjust their behavior accordingly. They can also rally support for their views because their peers typically perceive them as more competent than leaders who lack political skills.

A lack of political skill, on the other hand, can have serious consequences both for leaders and their entire organizations. Our research at CCL shows that managers who are not politically astute run the risk of being demoted, fired or otherwise slipping off their intended career tracks, inevitably leading to real disruptions in personnel charts and organizational performance. We’ve found that the less politically skilled managers are, the more likely they are to have problems with interpersonal relationships and with building and leading a team. That means they’re more likely to damage their careers, since CCL research has also shown that poor interpersonal skills are the biggest reason promising leaders’ careers go off course.

Leaders who aren’t skilled look manipulative or self-serving

Here’s an important paradox: If you have political skill, you appear not to have it. That’s because skillful political behavior usually comes across as genuine, authentic, straightforward and effective. Leaders who aren’t politically skilled, on the other hand, end up looking manipulative or self-serving. We all know both kinds of people.

Professor Ferris says politically skilled leaders are masters in four crucial areas: social astuteness, interpersonal influence, networking ability and apparent sincerity. At CCL our research has identified two additional dimensions of political skill: thinking before speaking and managing up. As a leader it’s wise to work steadily on each of them. Here’s a rundown of all six:

–Think before you speak. Politically skilled managers are careful about expressing feelings. They think about the timing and presentation of what they have to say.

–Manage up–and down. Leaders need to skillfully manage up by communicating with their bosses and keeping higher-ups informed. But this can become a double-edged sword; research shows that the people who are most skilled at managing up tend not to invest enough energy in building and leading their teams. True political skill involves relationships with teammates and direct reports as well as higher-ups.

–Influence effectively. Managers who are effective influencers have good rapport with others and build strong interpersonal relationships. They also tend to have a better understanding of broader situations and better judgment about when to assert themselves. That, in turn, creates better relationships. Skilled influencers are not usually overtly political. They are seen as competent leaders who play the game fairly. Their graceful political style is taken as a positive, not negative, force within the organization.

–Get your cues right. Socially astute managers are well-versed in social interaction. In social settings they accurately assess their own behavior as well as that of others. Their strong powers of discernment and high self-awareness contribute to their political effectiveness.

–Network well. Skilled networkers build friendships and working relationships by garnering support, negotiating and managing conflict. They know when to call on others and are seen as willing to reciprocate.

–Be sincere. Politically skilled individuals display high levels of integrity, authenticity, sincerity and genuineness. They really are–and also are viewed as–honest, open and forthright, inspiring trust and confidence.

Whether we like it or not, politics are a mainstay of organizational life. As leaders we can pretend they don’t exist, or we can get in the game right now in a positive way.

From Center for Creative Leadership

By John Riley

Recently, I was invited to lunch at a Business Clubs America luncheon where the speakers were owners of a successful jet-management company. It was the usual business luncheon where invited speakers recount their experiences in building successful enterprises. But it didn’t turn out that way.

When the CEO rose to speak, I quickly noted he was a well-built, robust looking 45-year old whose commanding presence told you he was an executive. Instead, Scott Bolzan was a man whose life literally began a little over a year ago because his former life was completely erased from his memory. On that fateful day in December 2008, he walked into the bathroom of his office, slipped and fell striking his head. With that fall went his knowledge of his former life.

When he awoke in the hospital, there was no memory of his school days, his college education, his pro football career or his wife, Joan and daughter or the business he built. Doctors diagnosed his problem as profound retrograde amnesia and historical and autobiographical amnesia.

Doctors expected his memory to return so he was released three days later. The thinking was that being in familiar surroundings would help him recover faster. His short term memory was fine. Now, nearly a year and half later, the only memory he has is what he has learned from his wife and friends. Joan told herself the business was dormant, but Scott would be back.

With a succession plan, the business could have continued to prosper

No one could have foreseen what happened to Scott. So his business suffered. Had there been a succession plan, the business may have continued to prosper. Too many companies fail to devote time to designating potential successors for their key executives and consider it a risk worth taking.

Owners and CEO’s themselves can be a big part of the reason because:
1) They feel indestructible
2) They don’t want to be replaced prematurely by a potential successor
3) They don’t want to share power
4) They feel there isn’t anyone that can replace them
5) They want to wait until they decide to retire and then worry about a successor based on the circumstances at the time.

Establishing a succession plan is usually a Board imposed process. Larger companies usually have succession plans that will go down several layers in the management structure where they identify three or four candidates to replace the incumbent for each position. It’s a dynamic process and the plan is reviewed and updated each year.

A combination of top operating executives and an HR executive constitute the personnel selection committee.

Personal development is a key component of the planning

One of the outputs of the committee is a personnel development component. Fast trackers are identified and gaps in their training or experience are identified. Subsequent assignments are decided upon to give those individuals the training or experience they need to prepare them for greater responsibilities. Each assignment is a test whose outcome will help determine the individuals’ future career path.

Scott’s experience is not unique in corporate America. Anyone who follows business can recall some top executive whose health unexpectedly intervened to temporarily or permanently remove him or her from active duty; Steve Jobs at Apple is a well known example.

For the health of the company, succession planning is an essential diagnostic tool.

How your employees can make or break a brand relationship

By William J . McEwen

In today’s volatile economic environment, companies are understandably worried about their customers. Will they stay or will they leave? After all, customers have options, and they certainly know it. Competitive overtures, often trumpeting lower prices and intriguing promotional offers, have intensified. The Internet beckons, with its impressive array of available alternatives. And so, as many company CEOs have attested, it appears that today’s customer is indeed king.

But in focusing on maintaining the continuing patronage of their customers, too many companies appear to be ignoring their potentially most powerful marketing weapon. In their attempts to build stronger customer relationships, many companies emphasize managing the traditional “four Ps” of marketing — Product, Price, Place and Promotion — while appearing to overlook an essential fifth P: People. Admittedly, most organizations that have employees who touch customers will at least give lip service to the critical importance of their human resources.

Empty promises

Their websites proudly proclaim “our people are our most important product”; “our people make the difference.” But these can be empty promises, representing nothing more than meaningless puffery. Corporate mantras don’t always translate to where it really matters: the “moment of truth” when the customer actually comes in contact with the employee who has been challenged to “live” the company’s brand promise.

For the complete story, go to:  www.gallup.com ,  Gallup Management Journal.

Five Leadership Skills You and Your Organization Cannot do Without…

Leaders today live in an age of remarkably complex challenges. They range from expanding into volatile international markets, to dealing with the fallout from natural disasters, to navigating their organizations through a broken global economy while preparing for future opportunities. Complex challenges, our research has shown, don’t yield to quick fixes. They don’t respond to standard approaches or conventional knowledge. In fact, 92 percent of executives surveyed by CCL said the challenges their organizations face are more complex than they were just five years ago. On average, they take two years to solve.

Our research also tells us this: you and your colleagues at every levelof your organization do not have all the skills needed to lead effectively in the future. CCL surveyed more than 2,000 leaders from15 companies in the U.S., India and Singapore. We asked these leaders to rate 20 leadership skills in terms of how important they are rightnow for success and how important they will be for success over the next five years.

The upshot: the four most important future skills – leading people, strategic planning, inspiring commitment and managing change – are weak points among today’s leaders. There exists, in other words, a glaring gap between the skills leaders have now and the ones they will need in just a few short years. At CCL, we call it the “leadership gap.”

In a world of increasingly complex challenges that demand leadership traits many of us do not yetfully have, there’s no time to waste in developing ourselves and the men and women in ourorganizations. Based on CCL’s research and practical experience over the past 40 years, we believethe leadership gap can be closed by focusing on these five areas:

Teamwork and collaboration

Managing change

Communication

Learning agility/growth mindset

Judgment

Printed with permission of Center for Creative Leadership. The complete white paper from which this Executive Summary is taken, is available in its entirity on the Center for Creative Leadership website… www.ccl.com.

By Jeffrey Yipp

Nothing teaches leadership like experience, but often those powerful lessons don’t have a place on a resume or performance review. In fact, they can easily be overlooked.

In a new book, Return on Experience: Learning Leadership at Work, Jeffrey Yip pulls together key themes of CCL’s leadership development expertise to introduce a new framework for learning from and leveraging work experience.

By acquiring what Yip calls “a Return-On-Experience mindset,” you are able to understand and clarify accomplishments that may not be measured easily, but are essential for leadership success. The ROE approach allows you to evaluate and communicate important lessons from previous experiences. Just as important, it can drive your on-the-job learning from today forward.

Think of your experience as having value in three ways: mastery, versatility and impact.

Mastery is about sharpening existing skills, building greater depth of skill or knowledge. To increase leadership mastery, the first step is to identify what needs to be learned or improved. You’ll want to look at this from two perspectives: the needs of the organization and your own needs. Then ask yourself, through your work, what skills are you building? How can you sharpen your existing skills and ability to lead? To heighten your skills, seek experiences that offer challenges that will stretch your capabilities and deepen your expertise, such as job rotations or strategic assignments.

Whereas mastery represents a move toward more expertise, versatility represents a move toward breadth of capacity. It is about the expansion of your capacity through learning. If your experience is too narrow, you can begin to expand your repertoire of skills and abilities by working across different organizational boundaries:

• Go vertical. What assignments require you to work across organizational boundaries of level and hierarchy? Examples include supervisory responsibility, mentoring roles, managerial responsibilities with hierarchical-reporting relationships and special assignments with senior executives.
• Reach across. Horizontal assignments require managers to work across organizational boundaries of function and expertise. Examples include job rotations, working on a cross-functional team and action-learning projects involving different subject matter experts.
• Engage with outsiders. Stakeholder assignments require managers to work across the boundaries of the firm, to interface with stakeholders. Examples include managing joint ventures, working with vendors and being responsible for public affairs or corporate citizenship functions.
• Cross geographic boundaries. Assignments that require managers to work across geographically-defined boundaries of regions and nations also enhance versatility. Examples include international assignments, regional or global management responsibilities and management of geographically-dispersed teams.
• Discover new demographics. Some assignments require managers to lead or work with members from different demographic groups: age, ethnicity, gender, nationality. Where geographic crossings involve cultural boundaries by location, demographic crossings often occur in the same location, with members of different cultures. Examples include working in or managing a culturally diverse team, being responsible for organizational diversity initiatives and mentoring employees of a different culture.

Finally, the true measure of learning is impact — your ability to apply it. To have value, learning must be transferable to different situations and to other people. Consider how your lessons learned have (or can be) applied in other ways. Pursue strategies for transmitting your knowledge to others in the organization. Look beyond your current scope and seek out relationships or processes to help you capture and disseminate lessons learned.

Printed with permission of Leading Effectively, Center for Creative Leadership.

Birmingham, AL & Greensboro, NC – The ROI Institute and the not-for-profit Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) have just completed the first ever ROI certification for individuals involved in leadership development. This comprehensive one-week workshop, designed to prepare leadership development professionals to conduct impact and ROI studies on major leadership programs, was conducted on CCL’s headquarters campus in Greensboro, NC. Each workshop participant must complete an impact or ROI study to achieve the designation of Certified ROI Professional. A total of 18 professionals representing four countries and several major organizations such as Cisco Systems and Boeing attended the comprehensive workshop on September 14-18, 2009. The week of training focused on measuring the impact of leadership development, coaching, executive development, management development, and executive education.

“To date, more than 4,000 individuals have been involved in the ROI certification process,” said Jack Phillips, chairman of ROI Institute. “While participants usually come from many different functional areas, leadership development is emerging as the hottest area for this level of measurement. It’s an important topic and this certification provided an opportunity to focus just on this discipline. This certification is the beginning of a partnership with CCL to focus on the business contribution of leadership development,”

Based on this success, the ROI Institute will plan another special ROI certification sometime in 2010.

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL®) ranked among the world’s top providers of executive education in a biennial BusinessWeek survey released today.

BusinessWeek rated CCL No. 3 worldwide for Custom programs, up five spots from 2007. In the Open-Enrollment category, CCL ranked No. 5 after not being ranked in 2007.

CCL, which provides leadership training worldwide from its offices in Asia, Europe and North America, is the only institution in the survey that focuses exclusively on leadership education and research. The BusinessWeek rankings were based on surveys of organizations from around the world that rated leading executive education providers, such as Harvard, Duke and Wharton, for quality and impact.

BusinessWeek is the second major news outlet this year to give CCL high marks. In May, the Financial Times ranked CCL No. 6 worldwide in executive education.