Search Results for: Brian Canning

Turmoil, stress and uncertainty would all describe the working experience of many of us over the past three or four years and even today as we are beginning to look forward to an improving economy, many millions of Americans remain out of work. Many millions more remain marginally employed and stuck in a world that does not give them the luxury of choice. A job, any job, remains a blessing and upward mobility remains a distant memory to many among us. Confidence remains tenuous in the American work place. As leaders, not only are we tasked with hitting our benchmarks and goals, we are also responsible for looking out for the welfare of our people. The current economy gives us the chance to do both.

The greatest victory any leader can enjoy is mission or task accomplishment. That is what we are here for and the standard by which we will be measured but before we achieve that lofty goal, before we get to celebrate that success, we have to do something toward getting our people to do the things we want them to do. That, of course, is what leadership is all about but too often that is where the seeds of failure are sewn and where we miss the opportunity to assure a complete and overwhelming success.

Mainly because a great many among us continue to misunderstand the far reaching implications of effective leadership, I find myself amazed at the number of middle and senior level managers who are dying and desperate for results and through poor planning and time management,  find themselves too busy to lead. That leadership is one of the most valuable assets any manager could bring to the table would seem lost on a mentality that looks upon leadership as little more than a word and with the enthusiasm that most of us reserve for a dental appointment or a colonoscopy.

In my many interactions with business owners and senior managers over the years I would maintain that the single greatest challenge facing most of us tasked with the oversight of a business or organization is leadership and specifically, our understanding how to motivate our people. Getting them to do the things we want done, how we want them done and when we want them done is always a challenge.

I recently made the transition from a small service driven organization focused on staff training to a very large and diverse organization that seems to have forgotten about training. I find myself shocked on a daily basis when I see smart, hardworking people struggling to perform the tasks that make up their daily work life, in a broad organization that has not made the investment in training.

There is no doubt that for the past couple of years the economy has been a major source of concern, not only for individuals like you and me but also for business owners, broad industries and entire governments around the world. Suddenly banks were failing; real estate values were plummeting, housing foreclosures skyrocketed and unemployment rates nearly tripled. Job security was suddenly a thing of the past. For many, this instability came out of nowhere, on the heels of decades of growth and expansion. The effects of this collapse are still very much in evidence. Fear and anxiety are tangible realities.

Very likely the result of my military background, I confess to being very demanding of the leadership structure within a business or organization. Part of this is because I have seen and experienced the incredible things we can accomplish with just the slightest smattering of leadership and part because I have seen and experienced the disastrous effect of our being unwilling to lead.