As with many things, defining managerial courage is often easier than demonstrating the behaviors associated with it.  When there is an absence of managerial courage, here is what you will likely see:

• A person who is unwilling to take a strong stand when one is required
• A person who can’t give tough feedback and she would prefer someone else to do it
• A person who would rather use an email message to deliver difficult news than to speak to someone directly
• A person who gets overly anxious about presenting a tough position
• A person who is unwilling to step up to issues.  Instead, the person avoids and ignores issues.
• A person who lets other people take the lead
• A person who is overly deferential to authority
• A person who is very afraid to make a tough call

Does this sound like anyone you know?  These people always try to be on the side of popular opinion, at least in public. These are the people who agree in meetings and then have a completely different opinion outside of those group meetings.

How many of these behaviors describe the way you handle difficult situations?

Being able to speak up in difficult times and make tough decisions are essential competencies for all of our leaders.  Having said this, it is also true that taking a good thing too far can turn something positive into something negative.  When managerial courage is overused, it becomes problematic and can look like this:

• A person becomes overly critical with little to no praise or positive feedback
• A person who says what is on his mind regardless of how it might impact the listener.
• A person who takes on every battle rather than carefully choosing which areas to focus on
• A person who is always looking at the negative side

Here are some things you can do to develop managerial courage and use it in appropriate moderation:

• Make sure you have all the information you need about the issue before you address that issue.
• Make sure you give the information to the person who can actually do something about it.
• If you have a difficult message to deliver, stay focused and get to the point.  Say your message directly and with respect.
• Make sure that you have a solution to give. It is never helpful to complain without showing you have thought through another possible alternative.
• Timing is everything and issues are typically best dealt with quickly but not necessarily when emotions are running high.
• Is this personal? Make sure you understand your true intentions for addressing any issue.
• Keep an open mind. You may hear new information that means you need to reconsider your original point.

It is through personal action and relationships that you can develop trust and gain commitment from employees.  Demonstrating courage is not easy, but it is vital for managers do more than just to talk the talk.  Whether speaking to an employee about a performance issue or bringing up an idea that may not be popular, you need to be truthful, constructive and responsible in what you say, when you say it and how you say it.  When your words and your actions are consistent, you build trust.

Although it may be difficult, demonstrating managerial courage can have a powerful and positive impact on your employees and the entire organization.

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” –Martin Luther King

“Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the judgment that something else
is more important.”  -Ambrose Redmoon

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The one thing you should know when setting goals with your employees is that the best goals are SMART goals.  SMART is an acronym for the five characteristics of well-designed goals.

Specific: Well-defined to inform employees exactly what is expected, when, and how much. With specific goals, managers can easily measure progress toward goal completion.
Measurable: Provide milestones to track progress and motivate employees toward achievement.
Attainable: Success needs to be achievable with effort by an average employee, not too high or too low.
Relevant: You should focus on the greatest impact to the overall company strategy.
Time-bound: Establish enough time to achieve the goal, but not too much time to undermine performance. Goals without deadlines tend to be overtaken by the day-to-day crises.

When it comes to goal setting, you need to balance your involvement with the employee’s ownership over the process. The key is to be hands-on while giving your people the room they need to succeed on their own.  Remember to get the employees’ input first. People who set their own goals are more committed.  When possible, rather than providing a finalized list of goals “to” an employee, ask the employee to create a draft of the goals, develop your own ideas for goals, and then work with the employee to more clearly define them.

Here are some things you should keep in mind when setting goals with your employees:

• Connect an individual’s goals to broader organization objectives
• Show employees that you are a partner in achieving their goals
• Learn about and incorporate employees’ personal interests into their professional goals
• After setting goals, employees should develop their own ways to achieve them.

Here are the things you want to avoid:

• Allow employees to set goals alone
• Take a hands-off approach to high performers — they need input and feedback to meet their goals as well
• Ignore failures — be sure people have the opportunity to learn when they don’t achieve goals

The single most effective way to get employees to enthusiastically embrace your goal-setting program is for you, the manager, to set and achieve challenging goals for yourself. Be supportive and express confidence in your employees’ ability to achieve goals. A manager’s positive expectations often set the stage for higher performance.  Be a positive performance role model for your team.

“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” –Antoine Saint-Exupéry

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“Behind the scenes, the massive order volume was overwhelming Nasdaq’s systems…The problems from Facebook’s debut prompted Nasday to say it was changing its IPO procedures, and would use the software it currently runs for its regular opening and closing numbers for future IPOs, rather than the software in place during Facebook’s market launch.”
-Exceprt from Reuter’s article, Dead Silence

Net/Net
Two large, sophisticated and very “public” companies failed on a spectacular scale because their software did not work as intended. While neither company is a software company per se, both are completely dependent on software to drive their business and support their customers.

My point is simple. If you don’t think that you’re in the software business, think again.

Do you really want to be the CEO, CTO or even CFO in these situations attempting to explain to the public markets and your customers that you just simply underestimated the importance and complexity of that software? Not me.

What has happened over the last decade is that software has become intertwined with almost every industry and business model. At the same time, Apple, Amazon and a few other leading consumer technology companies have raised the bar on what is acceptable—essentially delivering a phenomenal customer experience by leveraging software to the max. As a result, people expect software and technology to work the first time, every time, all the time. For those of us in the technology industry, this is one heck of a challenge.

At about the same time last year, Marc Andreessen published an essay in the WSJ titled Software is Eating the World. The theme was similar: Software is transforming businesses at a pace and thoroughness that has not been seen before and you better not ignore it.

At Alliance Global Services, we are working hard to enable our clients to be successful in this ever more challenging environment, where software is critically important. Our clients need to get software in the hands of their people and their customers that is as good as Apple and Amazon and do so quickly and efficiently—this is no small task.

Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll share our thoughts, opinions and best practices regarding how to be successful in this era dominated by software. We welcome you to participate in the dialogue.

So, welcome to the software revolution!

John Castleman
President and CEO |Alliance Global Services

Articles:
Minute by Minute, Nasdaq Chaos Engulfed Facebook IPO
Trading Firm IPO Fizzles in Seconds

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I am a father. I am one of the five brothers grew up together. I am a person who is staying away from the place I was born and brought up and I feel close to people when I meet somebody from that place. I live in Hyderabad and love it when investment on the local infrastructure is made or something good happen here. I am a family person with my wife and loving two kids. Who am I? I am all of the above. I am part of a collaborative society at every level of my interactions and have a belonging in different groups which are disparate and often have contradictions. I remember in childhood my brother was supporting the archrival of the soccer team I used to support but while working on something together we were the best friends. Anything which relates to our family we were united to the core!

Some of the identities are base identities and represent the human at the core. Some identities are historical, geographical, event based, and also depend on the upbringing of every individual.

Collaboration needs people to completely focus on the identity of the common goal to be one of the top most priorities while at it. At times they need to balance and re-prioritize some of the other identities. When a process doesn’t define all the steps or the gates for verification of the completeness and quality of the produce at each gate, it completely depends on the team to focus on the completeness and quality of the produce continuously. And to be able to do that, the team needs complete clarity on the overall goal instead of focusing only on the work at hand to be able to take decisions which help the team to achieve the goal well.

The team doesn’t typically decide the goal and most of the time the goal is given by some other entity. If whoever is setting up the goal doesn’t spend enough time and continuously be with the team for them to understand the goal, the team members don’t develop any identity to achieve the goal. The identity remains to be I am co-developer, co-tester, team member, I work in the same company for the same project instead of I am a team member whose goal is to build this for such people so that they get these benefits and which helps the sponsors to achieve these.

Understand the goal well so that you can develop an identity for yourself and a team identity can be developed around the goal. You are expected to make decisions as a team to achieve the goal through the fastest possible path and achieve it with highest possible quality.

On the other hand, if you are defining the goal, provide the team your continuous support to understand the goal instead of giving them tasks if you want the team to work together helping you achieve the goal. If you give tasks to individual team members, the identity for them would be that they all work for you. There will not be any other definition of the team. They will not have the same goal as yours and they would wait for your decisions at every step and every member will have a goal of finishing their own tasks. If you give tasks to the whole team without expressing the goals, they will only focus on achieving those tasks without having any identity of achieving a bigger goal of building something within certain time and cost. They will be zombies focusing on the tasks at hand and deliver that while you are alone on your road to achieve the goal you have without the team being beside you.

Build a collaborative identity with your team toward the goal so that everybody focuses on the same goal as you have, and achieve that together.

Happy collaborating in the year 2013!

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•  It is so easy to focus solely on improving the performance level of others that you might neglect your own shortcomings.
• Some leaders find it easier to enforce rules and regulations on others than on themselves.  A team with discipline begins with a well-disciplined leader.
• If you have done your job in preparing your team, the team is prepared to do its job in providing excellence for our clients—so let them.
• To produce results, tasks must be well organized and properly executed.
• Time is limited so focus on that which you can improve, correct or change.  Don’t waste time focusing on the things you cannot change.
• Crisis presents opportunity.  It is the opportunity to dig deeper, to get stronger and to find a better way.
• If you can work “twice as hard” tomorrow, it means you have been holding something back, not giving 100% of your effort today.
• Don’t act like you are listening when you are just waiting to talk.  People know when you are not hearing what they have to say.
• Leadership involves the task of influencing others in a positive way.  How can you accomplish this if you alienate those you wish to influence?  Avoid personal attacks, embarrassment, or demeaning comments, which would make them less likely to take your criticism seriously.
• Time spent complaining is time wasted.  The leader is responsible for the team’s performance.  The moment you try to assign responsibility to someone else, you have deluded yourself.
• Care, concern and a sincere consideration for those in your organization are the marks of a strong leader.

After you have had a chance to digest these reflections, I propose that you make your 2013 Leadership New Year’s Resolutions.  Here is a list of resolutions that I have come up with for every leader to consider:

1. The best way to improve your team is to improve yourself.  What specific things will you focus on improving in your own performance in 2013?
2. Prepare for all aspects of your leadership role.  Failing to prepare and taking care of important details are surefire ways to set yourself and your team up for failure.  What specific things will you do to incorporate better and more frequent planning in your leadership work in 2013?
3. Don’t mistake activity for achievement—when everybody is doing something, but nothing is being done.  What specific things will you do in 2013 to ensure that both you and those you lead don’t fall into this trap of mistaking activity for achievement?
4. Focus on what you can do and what is in your control.  What specific things can you start to focus on in January 2013 with a greater intensity than you have ever displayed before?
5. Make the best of the way things turn out.  There will be problems on every team and on every project.  What lessons did you learn from 2012 and how will you specifically apply this learning to your team’s work in 2013?
6. Give 100% of your best effort today, tomorrow and every day.  How do you ensure that you and your team are honestly living up to this resolution in 2013?
7. Be more interested in finding the best way, not in having it your way.  You are not the only smart person in the room.  You need to be open and receptive to other ideas.  How will you encourage and promote your team members to share their own ideas in 2013?
8. Take responsibility for those you lead.  Don’t waste time complaining or blaming others.  What specific behaviors do you need to change in 2013 to live up to the standard set by this resolution?
9. Be confident enough to care for those you lead and consistently show it.  What specific things can you do, starting in January 2013, that will show your team your concern and consideration for them?
10. Influence those you lead in a positive way.  Which of your own behaviors do you need to change in 2013 to avoid alienating your team members?

“Each member of your team has the potential for personal greatness; a leader’s job is to teach them  how to do it.” John Wooden

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No leader can do any of this without first connecting with employees.  People connect in different ways.  One leader’s personal style or technique might fall flat if another leader used that same style.  Effective leadership requires authenticity.  This means you become less authentic as a leader when you attempt to use techniques that don’t fit your strengths.  Having said this, there are some basics to serving as an effective leader regardless of style:  listening, inclusion, intentionality and interaction.  These are all component parts of the leader’s relationship with the employees he or she leads.   We need to be diligent in nurturing this relationship to keep it fresh, interesting and worthwhile.  As leaders, we don’t build a relationship with those we lead overnight.  We need to continuously work on that relationship, building trust in those we lead.

Nurturing the leadership relationship is about developing a professional intimacy with those we lead.  Some of us lead people who work in the same office as us.  Some of us lead people who work half way across the world.  Regardless of geography, we need to develop an emotional proximity even when physical proximity isn’t possible.  We need to get to know our employees and gain their trust.   Effective leaders know that developing this type of professional intimacy starts with listening well.

Listening well means really paying attention to our employees.  Those who listen well are very attentive to what people say to them.  They are not waiting for the other person to take a breath so they can say something themselves.  They are not multitasking and only giving others their partial attention.  They are interested and engaged in what others are telling them.  By showing this level of attention to others, leaders are able to demonstrate their respect for other employees regardless of their level or role.  They put themselves in the background and put the other person speaking in the forefront.  This is easier said than done.  Those who are good listeners make it look so easy.  Truth be told, most of us are not great listeners.  We are distracted by our many responsibilities and our own goals that we are trying to reach.  Listening well requires us to focus, show respect and make available dedicated time.  It also means that we have to take the bad with the good, absorbing criticism even when it is direct and personal.  Few things in life that are truly worthwhile are ever that easy.  How good a listener are you?

The effective leader is someone who knows how to promote a dialogue with employees, recognizing when to stop talking and start listening.  This two-way form of communication keeps the relationship interactive and inclusive.  Employees are not shut out from sharing their view points and the leader offers the employees the possibility of expanding their roles beyond what is currently defined.  Employees can take on the role of brand ambassador, thought leader or even corporate storyteller.  Every one of our employees can– and should– play the part of brand ambassador for the organization.  We need to seek out and really listen to the ideas of our team members.  This requires us to put our egos in check and be open to the concept that our employees may have better ideas than we do from time to time.  We are not always the only expert, nor are our ideas always the best ideas.  Our employees can also strengthen the company culture by sharing the personal stories of their experiences—how they interact with you and other leaders, how their ideas are listened to and how engaged they have become in the work that AGS does for our many clients.  Do not underestimate the importance that your team members play in these expanded, yet unofficial roles.

When building their relationships with employees, leaders have intentional conversations with them.  Professional intimacy is not about aimless conversation without agenda or purpose.  It is about the leader seeking out multiple opportunities to connect with employees to discuss business objectives, project goals or company strategy.   The leader is always conscious of what he or she is trying to achieve in each of these conversations.  These conversations are always “on purpose” and focused.  Employees often need to hear messages more than once.  Sometimes employees only take notice of a message after we communicated it for the third, fourth or even fifth time.  Employees hear what we tell them, but they pay attention to the messages that we consistently tell them and demonstrate in our daily work lives.

To become a better leader, you need to strengthen the professional relationships you have with those you lead.  Start today by really listening to your employees.

“Team members will generally tell you what is on their minds if you don’t jump in and fill an awkward silence.”  Mark Ronald 

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Alliance Global Services needs committed leaders!  If you aren’t already there, join the ranks of our committed leaders!  Here are the necessary job requirements:

• You must have a passion to succeed—a passion that drives you to prepare yourself and your team to excel
• You must not be threatened by capable peers and subordinates.  Rather, you must be committed to surrounding yourself with talented people
• You must remember that success in your role will depend largely upon your sustained willingness to work hard
• You must have the resilience to overcome disappointment and obstacles and help your team to do the same
• You must be willing to make sacrifices for those you serve and those you lead.  Sometimes this means you will spend lots of time and energy developing subordinates and responding to their needs before any of your needs are met
• You must be determined to apply common sense in solving complex problems
• You must be willing to accept the notion that you will need to work every day to become a better leader than you were the day before

Committed leadership is one of those things that a team is readily able to identify when they see it in action.  They know when a leader is genuinely interested in the team, its work and doing right by the client.  The leader’s enthusiasm, focus and drive is contagious and pretty soon others on the team are swept up in this positive experience.  Some people seem to be able to carry this off with what seems like a minimal amount of effort.  Don’t be fooled.  Sustaining this kind of energy, especially over the duration of long projects and in the face of critical problems, unexpected delays and staffing issues is real work.  It takes a great deal of vigilance on the part of the leader to ensure that he or she does not lose the commitment to the team and to the client.

There are things you should ask yourself to make sure you are in the camp of the committed leaders:

• Do I focus on the needs of the team before my own personal needs?
• How do I show my team the enthusiasm that I have for the project work?
• How do I react when I experience a project setback?
• How do I react when someone on my team experiences a problem on the project?
• How do I demonstrate to my team members my passion to succeed?
• What do I do on a regular, if not daily, basis to make sure that I become a better leader?

Leadership has a lot to do with the relationship you have with those you lead.  As part of this relationship, you will need to give of yourself and your talents.  You will also need to participate in the act of self-disclosure.  People need to know what you are thinking, what you are focused on and that you care.  If you have a passion to succeed, this fact cannot be and should not be a well-guarded secret.  You need to let your team know what you care about and what you are committed to if you expect them to care about and become committed to the same things.  Team members will respond so much more positively to those leaders who openly share their level of commitment.  But remember, we are not just talking about words.  A leader’s actions are far more important than simply what he or she says.

“If you as a leader demonstrate your commitment, people trust you and treat you with utmost respect.  They care how committed you are.”  M.S. Rao

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Employees want leaders who are honest, forward-looking, competent and inspiring.  What this adds up to is personal credibility, and credibility is the foundation of leadership.  Bottom line, what does this really mean?  It means that  leadership is personal.  It’s not about the company, it’s about you.  If people don’t believe in the messenger, they won’t believe the message.  If people don’t believe in you, they won’t believe in what you say.  And if it’s about you, then it’s about your beliefs, your values, your actions and your words.

When it comes to leadership, character counts.  Character is something that we all think we intrinsically understand and yet is harder to precisely define.  When I think about character, I have the same kind of struggle articulating what exactly I think character is.  One of the things that has helped me capture the essence of character is a poem (author unknown) that I came across a few years ago:

Be careful of your thoughts, for your thoughts become your words;

Be careful of your words, for your words become your deeds;

Be careful of your deeds, for your deeds become your habits;

Be careful of your habits, for your habits become your character;

Be careful of your character, for your character becomes your destiny.

In my last message, I wrote that people watch your words and actions more than you realize.  Many of us are thinking “inside thoughts” that we don’t think others know anything about.  More often than not, those “inside thoughts” translate into words and facial gestures.  Your body language and even some of your actions are clearly broadcasting those messages to others and you don’t even realize it.  Employees won’t want to follow leaders who ask them to do one thing while the leaders behave differently.  What you say and do really matters.  Don’t just talk the talk.  Be genuine and authentic in your own words and actions.  Be the first to demonstrate what is needed from your employees.

The second leadership fundamental I wanted to discuss is that organizations don’t act; individuals do. Organizations don’t create breakthrough products; individuals do.  It is important to make this distinction because ultimately every one of us must take personal responsibility for what we do.  Actions have consequences and we all have to account for our own.  What organizations do is to create culture.  The behavior that is modeled becomes the behavior that is followed.  Through your own individual actions, combined with the actions of our leaders, we create the culture of the AGS organization.

The third leadership fundamental is that leadership is a dialogue not a monologue.  Leadership starts with you but it is not all about you.  Leadership is a reciprocal relationship between those who lead and those employees that follow.  Employees should be able to tell their leaders what they expect from them, just as the leaders should be able to tell their employees what they need and expect  from them.  Leadership is not about being in charge and getting to tell other people what to do.  Leadership has more to do with creating vision, setting examples and providing service and value to your employees.

Something we should all do on a regular basis is take a step back and ask ourselves how congruous our own actions and thoughts are with what we are asking of our employees.  Are you living up to the standards that you are asking your employees to live up to?  Be honest with yourself—do you need to re-think your idea of leadership?  Have you been thinking of leadership as a position of power (getting to tell others what to do) and not an act of service?

“I don’t think of leadership as a position.  I don’t think of leadership as a skill.  I think of leadership as a relationship.”  Phil Quigley, Pacific Bell

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While working on your client projects, it is really easy to forget the leadership responsibilities you have.  You may be so busy doing the work of a manager—assigning tasks and checking on the status and quality of the work performed—that you may forget that you are also leaders in our organization.  As such, people are watching your actions and words more than you realize.  You are actually establishing standards of what is acceptable behavior.  This doesn’t mean that our employees are running around behaving badly—we know that isn’t happening.  Our employees may, however, not take a step back and see the importance of their work and how it fits into an overall effort for our client or what we are trying to do as an organization.  They may be so narrowly focused on their assigned tasks that they might not be thinking of how they could be adding more value to their client project and to their team.  In your role as leaders, you have the wonderful opportunity to direct the actions of others for the betterment of our clients and for AGS.  Everything really starts with you—how you view your own role, how you understand your own value to the clients and to the organization, and how you approach your colleagues and team members each and every day.

You should look around you and identify some of your colleagues who are currently demonstrating an effective leadership style and figure out what specific things that person is doing that you could incorporate into your own working style.  Strong leadership makes a big difference when we are trying to attract top talent, retain our most valuable employees and get through the tough times that every team will invariably experience on a client project.  You have the ability to make a real and significant impact on the working lives of your team members, on the quality of the work we do for our clients and the future viability of our own organization.

This ability to have such a positive impact on others is very real and it is important to recognize what an opportunity you have before you.  The thing about leadership is that it is not a task that you simply carry out.  It is not a series of activities that you follow like a recipe at certain times of the year.  It is something that you carry with you each day and you need to be actively thinking about the leadership opportunity and responsibility you have.  Your commitment to being an effective leader is something that needs to become a part of you.

Asking for feedback, sharing best practices, talking about the bigger picture, helping others understand how they add value and demonstrating the professional behaviors we want others to emulate are all a part of this leadership responsibility.

There are some very exciting times ahead of us as we get ready to close out 2012 and jump into the new year.  Think about what I have written here and make that personal commitment to becoming an even stronger leader in 2013!

“Do not simply lead by example; rather, challenge them to set a standard”   Jeffrey Gitomer

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The key part is to create a symbolic link for your Bookmarks and userContent files from your Safari Library folder to your SkyDrive folder:

ln -s ~/SkyDrive/Bookmarks.plist ~/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist

ln -s ~/SkyDrive/userContent.css ~/Library/Safari/userContent.css

If you’re updating previous links to move from Dropbox to SkyDrive, add the -f option.

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