For a long time, I want to figure out how to pursuit “ happy leading ” in a outstanding team. During my past few years working experience, I built relationships with a lot of entrepreneurs in China. For sure, they are very rich. All of the leaders prefer to build solid team with long term vision for future outstanding performance.
Unfortunately, some of them can have outstanding performance team just for three to five years. And some of them do have solid team but with limited performance coming. The worst case is serious conflict between president and key middle management team like sales director / R&D director and marketing director, etc.
Here are the questions come into my mind:
What’s wrong with the leadership inside of the companies? Why the president can not have the loyalty from the teams? What the management team aim to get?
Not only one Chinese entrepreneur want to have more than one hundred years history like the multinational companies which I served. Mitsubishi Corp operates 136 years, and Bayer’s history is more than 150 years. However, the Chinese company can run only one generation, it is just around 30 to 50 years.
There must has secret of success among them which the Chinese entrepreneur missed. Like Harry Potter’s chamber of secrets, it is not that easy to let secrets show up automatically. Only open your heart, the secrets would let you to feel them.
Even though you are not a Chinese entrepreneur, but you maybe:
- Have no idea where to begin to lead a new team.
- You are not happy and relaxed since you have some tough relationship with your stuff.
- Feel lonely. You want to understand your team and be understood.
- It is difficult to make your team have one goal.
- Feel frustrated to make team endeavor for excellent performance.
No matter what status you are in your position, you want to influence your team, lead them and pursuit extraordinary working experience in your life.
So how do you start to pursuit happy leading? This post will walk you through the steps.
1 Start from self-improvement
Actually I started my self improvement from 2012 in which my son was born. I learnt the mindset of self improvement from my children but from my career development. Self improvement can be sort of vague concept, so that it could be mentioned as cliché in your leadership course.
Different from company’s training course, family always can give man or woman a kind of mindset for self improvement. In such mindset, you never stop to wake up when your child cry during the mid night. You never take a midday nap forgetting the breakfast for whole family. You never say “ Sorry baby, dad can not promise to give your better life anymore!”. In short, the mindset is the self improvement.
Of course, the self improvement contain a lots of aspects which I will describe later. At such beginning to pursuit the happy leading, you need to keep the mindset in mind as your first step action. It is better to paste a post-it on your computer to remind you “ SELF IMPROVEMENT LEAD SUCCESS, NEVER BE LAX! ”. The slogan can help you to relay on your self promotion.
If you want to have a better lead, please just focus on your mind. Do not always keep eyes on your team member. People follow your behavior, they do not respect the continuing “verbal pitch”.
2 Be honesty till no more delusion
As the happy leader, the second important rule is to be honesty till no more delusion. Most of Chinese entrepreneurs do not have such capability. It could be because China market is driving too fast to be ahead of crowding. In such mobile internet era, they received too much information to keep mind peacefully. Up to now, the goal of freedom wealth before thirty-five is still sort of shackles for some of Chinese bosses.
We can not request ourself to become so focus like Steve Jobs. But we still have chance to become more honesty with less delusion. Before “ follow my heart ”, the happy leader must be honesty to the nature, to the sun and moon, to the mountain and sea. Finally, we can be honesty to the truth of our life.
As a human, we mush admit that we can not be isolated from the circumstance. It is much more significant to overlook the surroundings including nature / people / relations than only the team and job which you are handling.
Stay a little bit higher position in your office and look around. It can make you have a better, different and unique perspective to find out what is really happening around you. Just watch and feel to the moment without delusion like “ so called success ” and “ so called happy leading ”
3 Do good things
We all was instructed by parents to be a good person. But being good person does not mean “ do good things”. The “ be good person ” can be belief which is shown as behavior. It is not to let happy leader to be nice all the time.
We may find out there are lots of managers who smile all the time during team meeting. They want to become “ nice person ” even when they are facing big challenge to face tough competition. Assign a work to each team members seems like begging them to help the leader. So that “ be nice ” will never equal to “ do good ” in happy leadership principles.
There are truly numerous ways to do good. Sometimes the “ happy leader ” has to use special strategy to help team members. I saw one excellent leader just critics his outstanding stuff to make stuff shame on the “ stupid ” character mistype in reporting presentation. The excellent leader just want to let his “ outstanding ” stuff to be more prudential although the stuff has the best performance in his team.
Do good things is the intention to let stuff grow up and make team better than before. It is not limited to the communication way or be nice or not. No one said the “ happy leader ” must be nice except of when you leave the position of the leader.
David dedicates to deliver basic happy leadership wisdom to global entrepreneurs / leaders and persons from middle management level.
Your comments and questions will make me understand and think better on the topic “ CREATIVE LEADERSHIP ”. David will try best to find out time to reply to the friends who show interest on happy leadership discussions.
Thank you very much for you being here.
Photos from: Unsplash.com
Photos by: Simon Matzinger / Christopher Sardegna / Fervent Jan / Justin Ng / Li Yang