Posted on Monday, September 21, 2015

Achieving Effects with Your Boss, pt. 3: Decision Time

So far in the Achieving Effects with Your Boss series, we’ve covered how to make the right first impression and how to engage your boss with intention. Now that you’re comfortable with the leadership environment your boss has established, it’s time to discuss how to influence their decision making to achieve effects for you, your team, and the greater organization.

Secretary of the Army John McHugh listens as Commander of the Combined Arms Center Lt. Gen. David G. Perkins briefs during a visit at the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, April 20, 2012 at Joint Base Langley–Eustis, Va. U.S. Army Photo by Staff Sgt. Bernardo Fuller.

Posted on Tuesday, August 4, 2015

Achieving Effects with Your Boss, pt. 2: Intentional Engagement

Spotlight Ranger. That’s the label service members use to characterize people who put in average performance day to day, then put on a show whenever the boss is around. Soldiers see right through them and they earn little respect in the unit.

While you must at all costs avoid becoming a spotlight ranger (i.e. dedicate yourself to superb performance regardless of the audience), you don’t want to miss an opportunity to showcase your unit’s good work to your boss. The first post in this series focused on how to start off on the right foot with a new boss. Today’s post looks at how to engage during three types of opportunities you will encounter during your tenure as leader.

Brig. Gen. Robert B. Abrams, National Training Center commanding general, briefs Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, TRADOC commanding general, during Dempsey’s visit to Fort Irwin, Cali., Sep. 23, 2009. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Angelica G. Golindano.)

Posted on Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Achieving Effects with Your Boss, pt. 1: First Impressions

On the list of items that leaders should care about, there are few higher than achieving effects with your boss.* The purpose is clear enough, to ensure alignment while creating opportunities for your own team. But leaders often place too much emphasis inward and downward during their key leadership time, and neglect to satisfy higher headquarter’s goals.

What’s more, achieving effects with your boss is a tough balancing act. Too assertive and you come off as pushy while alienating yourself from your peers. Too passive and you won’t gain the influence necessary to achieve your goals as a leader.

This series will provide you with the why, when, and how to engage your boss in ways that support their goals while achieving effects for your team. This post, First Impressions, is all about starting off on the right foot. And not to put undue pressure on you, but the process of gaining influence with your boss starts before you even arrive at the unit.

*Above it one might list achieving the mission and building trust with your subordinates.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin E. Dempsey meets with Commander of the NATO Training Mission–Afghanistan Lt. Gen. Daniel P. Bolger in Kabul, Afghanistan, Apr. 23, 2012. DoD photo by D. Myles Cullen.

Posted on Monday, August 24, 2015

14 Simple Ways to Connect with Your People

Leaders who find ways to connect with their people are the ones who build great teams, inspire the best performance, and rise to positions of influence when others wane. If you look back on your career, you’ll likely observe that the most impactful leaders were the ones who made a personal connection with you.

Maybe it was keen professional mentorship, or timely advice during adversity, or a personality trait that invited trust. Sometimes there’s no pinpointing it…just an intangible feeling that makes it easy to follow a person.

In the culture of busyness that we face today, it’s distressingly easy to ignore the personal side of leadership. But trust will never develop without a personal connection between leader and follower. And without trust, an organization will be confined to a transactional environment of mediocre results and melancholy people.

Sgt. Donald M. Khun, San Gabriel Valley Recruiting Company, right, presents Brooke Willis, spouse of the new company commander Capt. William G. Willis, with yellow roses to signify a bright new beginning at the change of command ceremony Mar. 15. Capt. William G. Willis, the new company commander is sitting to the left of Mrs. Willis, and their son Blake is sitting to her right.
Photo by Mr. Fernando Sanjurjo, U.S. Army Recruiting Battalion Los Angeles.

Start Here

Does this sound familiar?

You start a new position committed to developing your people as leaders…but then your supervisor’s priorities emerge, external commitments pile up, crises need to be solved, and you find yourself in reaction mode with a full calendar. Your leader development activities disappear and instead of building leaders, you’re managing tasks.

But as a leader, you know that leader development is crucial to your team’s success. It’s also what people really crave. They won’t remember how efficiently you ran a meeting, but they will remember how you inspired them to become better people.

The Military Leader is born

This tension between the daily grind and developing leaders is what inspired The Military Leader. As an Operations Officer in a 4,000-person Army combat unit, I had to fight for time to develop my team. We studied leadership using not only the standard military leader development resources, but also content from successful business leaders like John Maxwell, Dave Ramsey, and Jim Collins.

Then in 2014, I figured that other leaders might be struggling with the same situation and launched The Military Leader as a way to provide easily-accessible, shareable leader development insight for those who need it.

Subscribe to The Military Leader!

An overwhelming response

The effort seemed to strike a nerve because hundreds of thousands of people from all professions have engaged the site, connected on social media, and subscribed by email. The response has been exciting but even if just one person finds value in what they read, I consider it worth the effort.

Subscribe to The Military Leader

The best way to get the latest articles from The Military Leader is to subscribe by email. You’ll get 1-2 posts per week that are completely focused on leader development to grow you and your team. When you subscribe, you’ll also get a copy of “40 Questions that Will Challenge Your Leadership,” a PDF designed to get you thinking about the quality of your daily leadership interactions.

After subscribing by email, you can explore the larger conversation that is happening on Facebook, Twitter, and Medium.

Where do I start?

The full Archive of Posts is a great place to start diving into what The Military Leader can provide for you and your team. You also might be interested in these topics and the posts that relate to them:

Does this sound familiar?

The Military Leader is born

An overwhelming response

Subscribe to The Military Leader

Where do I start?

Published Articles & Media

“12 Things Good Bosses Believe” – based on Robert Sutton’s article in Harvard Business Review)

“Twenty Habits that Hold You Back from the Top” – based on Marshall Goldsmith’s What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

Blog Posts from The Military Leader