CEOS. Parents. Dishwashers. Teachers. Children. Anyone can be a leader, including you. When you bring the best out in others so they become higher-performing with and for others – you are a leader. Here are three traits that such leaders share.

1. Act Like You Want Others to Act

Gandhi said “We must be the change we wish to see in the world”. To lead, we must demonstrate the attitudes and behaviors we want to cultivate in others. If you’re a business leader and you want your staff to dress professionally, you set the example by arriving in a suit every day. As a teacher who wants students to learn to make and keep agreements, set deadlines for turning in homework and the timetable for when they will get their corrected assignments back. Keep your part of the agreement.

2. Prove You Care and Value Others Who Do Too

The second element of true leadership is to inspire others to care, not just for those closest to them but as an attitude of support towards all others.

One of my mentors, Dr. Tim Goddard, lost his daughter, Cpt. Nichola Goddard, when she was killed in Afghanistan in 2006. The family was devastated. Thoughout their time of grief for the loss of their daughter, they also sought ways to find positive outcomes from their tragedy, and hope for peace in the world. One way was to start a scholarship fund in memory of their daughter. Scholarships are awarded to graduate students at the University of Calgary are citizens of Papua New Guinea, Nichola Goddard’s birthplace, as well as to citizens of Afghanistan, where she died and to Canada’s First Nations, Inuit or Métis people, with whom Captain Goddard spent many of her formative years.

Canadian Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. Stephen Harper, thought this scholarship was such an important tribute that he added $25,000 from the Canadian government.

By instinctually acting to care for others, leaders demonstrate an “I’ve got your back” attitude of support that inspires others to act the same. That contagious mutual support enables us to feel part of a larger whole, to be resilient and thus ready to serve each other.

3. Expect Their Best

Leaders empower others by acting as if we can accomplish great things. One of the key ways leaders demonstrate that ‘act as if’ attitude is by appealing to the best side in someone, their strongest talent and deepest belief. When I was coaching a resourceful, dedicated director of a university international language program, she kept describing the barriers she faced. She was frustrated with the limited funding and time she had. I replied that her deep caring for her students and her ingenuity to leverage what she did have were priceless lessons for her students. Her very resourcefulness could be a source of inspiration for her students along with the topic she was teaching. In short I appealed to what mattered most to her and what we both knew she did well. Later, she told me that was a pivotal conversation for her, as she realized that her first order of business was to serve her students and help them become the best they could be.

By practicing these three traits in your work and life situations you’ll hone your natural strengths as a leader and raise the bar of performance for yourself and for others around you.

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Does your team operate as a healthy community? Here are the three things we had to do to stay sane under one roof:

#1: Trust Each Other

To build trust in a relationship, everyone should be able to say the following statements to their colleagues and leaders.

1. I believe that you care about me as a person.
2. I believe that you won’t judge me on second-hand information. If you hear someone saying negative things about me, you will vow to check this out for yourself.
3. I believe that you won’t talk negatively about me to others. If we have a problem, you will come to me to talk about it. If you have to sort things out with someone else first, you will come to me shortly after.
4. If I have a problem with you, I will ask to speak to you privately soon after the offense occurred. I will then:
   • Get clear about what I believe happened that made me feel the way I do.
   • Listen to your perspective and try to understand what you meant
   • Work toward an agreement with you about how we will handle these situations better in the future.

#2: Honor the changes we are all experiencing

Every time priorities, job responsibilities and the make-up of the team changes, so do we. Plus, our lives outside of work are constantly changing. Therefore, we should honor and support each other as we live through change. Periodically, we should renew our relationships by asking:

• How do we describe our relationships? Are they easy? Hard? Why?
• What needs to be celebrated about how we have related so far?
• What can we agree to leave behind?
• What should we agree to continue/stop/start doing from this point going forward?

This is an especially useful exercise when one peer is promoted or given a great new assignment above his or her friends. Looking at the new relationship will help to relieve hard feelings.

#3: Commit to playing together

There is nothing more nourishing and renewing than play. To create healthy bonds at work, you need to laugh with your colleagues and share fun experiences.

Good peer relationships are vital to your success. Bad relationships can be fatal. It’s not enough to make sure everyone is talking. You have to continually talk about how you can get along better to reach your peak of effectiveness. Create a healthy community to ensure your team’s success.

© Marcia Reynolds

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You should try to make your company, your division, your department feel to them like a furniture shop felt to the workers, before the industrial revolution.

“Perhaps eight men work there. One of them is the boss. He owns the shop, but he works there, visibly. The other seven receive wages. The work done by the boss is not all done with tools; sometimes he uses a pencil. He draws designs, writes occasional letters, puts down figures about wages, costs, and prices,” wrote Alexander Heron in a little-known 1942 masterpiece, Sharing Information with Employees, the first book ever written on employee communication.

Read Heron’s description of the shop, and reorganize your employee communication program to create a meaningful workplace where workers know what’s happening, and why.

This kind of workplace:

The shop or factory is on the same lot as the house where the boss lives; he owns it. The other seven know how much his taxes are each year. … They were all in on the discussion before the new lathe was bought, and they remember the price and the freight. They remember how the boss borrowed some of the money from his wife’s sister.

They know that the dining room “suit” on which they are working now is for Jane Winton, [who] used to be Jane Carey, the schoolteacher, before she married Bill Winton, the banker. They know it has to be as good as the furniture she saw in Buffalo, and that if it is good Bill’s mother is going to give the boss an order for another lot which will keep them all busy through the winter.

They see the finished job emerging under their skilled hands, day by day. They know how difficult it was to get the seasoned walnut, and what it finally cost, what price is to be paid for the finished job, how much the boss will “make” on it, and how much of that will go to pay off the loan from the sister-in-law.

They know that the boss has gradually built a reputation for honest quality and skilled workmanship and that they are part of that reputation. They know why once in a while they have had to wait a little for their wages—when the taxes had to be paid before the money came in for the new counter and fixtures at the drugstore.

Above all, they know the boss. Their attachment to him is basically not sentimental but practical. He is the salesman who gets the orders which bring work to them. He collects the money which pays their wages. He manages to accumulate the working space and the equipment. They are realistic enough to know that they can get their full and fair share of the income of the business. …

They know. Because they know, they understand. And in that full and simple understanding they “put themselves” into every job.

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When you add it all up – incessant Web surfing; over-allegiance to chat rooms, forums and discussion groups; fixation on online pornography, gambling and games; music, movie and other media downloading; and a wide variety of other fixation – the portrait of a society and indeed a world sitting on its derriere, breezing through one
screen after another emerges.

By some estimates, as many as 10% of Web users are living with one or more forms of Internet dependency, which has now been given the name of Internet Addiction Disorder, or IAD. IAD, as acknowledged by the American Psychiatric Association, is characterized by individuals who devote gargantuan amounts of time to online activities to the detriment of their careers, studies, families or loved ones, and social and community participation.

If you find yourself spending increasing amounts of time online and experiencing a growing sense of anxiety when you’re not online, you may be at risk. What’s more, the phenomena is not confined to the Internet per se. People who check their cell phones, pagers, telephone answering devices, and any electronic information or communication gizmos on a too frequent basis may be exhibiting addictive behavior.

Are you spending less time devoted to career, community, social and recreational pursuits because of the amount of time you find yourself online. You know you’ve gone too far when you’re experiencing relationship woes, loss of friendships, loss of sleep, and, in particular, career or academic jeopardy.

The key to overcoming any addiction is to first acknowledge that you indeed are afflicted. Following that acknowledgment, you then have to summon the requisite motivation to change. Without realization and motivation, nothing is likely to happen.

Unquestionably, the Internet is a marvel of our age. The ability to find answers, make connections, order goods, satisfy curiosities, control the vast sea of knowledge contained therein is certainly enticing. It boggles my mind to think what Da Vinci, Newton, Einstein, and other geniuses throughout human history could have achieved aided by the knowledge they could have gained using the Internet. At the same time, such geniuses, being all too human, may too have fallen into some of the same traps in which we mere mortals now find ourselves firmly ensconced.

As with so many aspects of life, the key to using the Internet effectively is to achieve a fine balance. First, if this works for you, establish a time limit for daily use. Thirty minutes a day many not be enough, three hours may be excessive. At work, depending on your job responsibilities, all day may be the norm. Thus, your task is to choose the limits for your personal life.

Recognize that excessive Web use may be the indicator of problems in other aspects of your life. Are you devoting time here because there are voids elsewhere? Or are you using the Internet as a tool of procrastination in shirking your responsibilities? If you recognize that you’re using the Internet to avoid the challenges of life, shying away from battles that need to be fought, it might be a good idea to speak to a therapist.

Most of us surf the net alone. But if you find reading up on the news or keeping current in some other pursuit is rewarding and enjoyable, you don’t have to forsake your family or friends in the process. Can you arrange your space so that you and your significant other, you and your children, or you and whoever can be online at the same time in close proximity, such as at the same table, so that, much like playing cards or a board game, you achieve a variation on the theme of togetherness. That in itself may go a long way towards alleviating some of the problems that excessive time on the Internet may be causing.

What step will you take now to turn from the screen, to go out and enjoy time with the people you value – proving to them that you do?

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Here’s a handy checklist to make your next meeting so productive that people leave with a strong sense of purpose and plans to support each other.

Running the meeting

Be sure to have a clear purpose for each meeting that can be articulated in advance to invited attendees.

Only invite individuals who are needed for the decisions to be made at that meeting.

It is the rare meeting that needs to last more than 20 minutes.

Agree to discuss topics that need joint decision-making or timely clarification of information for individuals to prepare their next actions.

Don’t use meetings for:

• disseminating information that can be shared in other ways.
• report-outs of information that is not relevant to all individuals in the room.

The only people invited to a meeting should be those who have some value to add or something to contribute to the agenda and purpose of the meeting.

What to do before, during and after a meeting

Before the meeting, make sure the topics on the agenda are going to be relevant to everyone in the room. Determine the agenda ahead of time and send it to everyone. Invite them to add to or clarify something on the agenda so that the attendees have some say in what is going to be talked about. They should be part of the decision-making.

During the meeting, engage individuals by name and related to the topic being discussed.  Avoid side conversations or tangential comments.  Avoid “death by PowerPoint” by using it sparingly and with images versus words to best engage the right side of the brain.

To ensure a thread to the group’s conversation, evoke the Native American tradition of using a “talking stick.”  Whoever has the stick gets to talk. When done it is passed to one person who wants to pick up the thread of that conversational point. This helps introverts break into the conversation and be heard without interruption, and it reduces the frequency of people talking over each other or interrupting.

The underlying rule is to let everyone be heard while keeping the conversation flowing towards a collective decision – even if that acknowledged decision is that the group has not yet reached agreement.

Before the meeting is adjourned, review the actions items agreed upon, the person accountable for each and the related timelines. When people feel heard, appreciated, and able to use their best talents, they are more likely to volunteer for tasks.

As a core Rule of Engagement for your meetings, those who are accountable for actions meet their deadlines, brief colleagues sparingly by email and warn them in advance when a deadline cannot be met, providing their alternative plan for completing it.

Some researchers believe that 90 percent of meetings don’t have to happen. If you are calling for a meeting, clearly state the mutual benefit or main goal for all attendees to participate and the specific need(s) for each individual to attend. That is your surest sign of respect and understanding amongst your colleagues.

Further tips for productive meetings

1. Confirm that the suggested meeting time is convenient for all participants
2. Make and stick to an action-based agenda that has received input from participants before the meeting.
3. Listen well: specifically respond to what you hear, proving you understood, and then offer your opinion.
4. Be clear, brief and specific in your communication.
5. Be engaged, purposeful and thoughtful so that you don’t derail the conversation and stay focused on reaching decisions in a timely, collaborative manner.
6. Recognize individuals for their specific contributions.
7. Honor participants’ time: if you are finished with the agenda for a one hour meeting in just 30 minutes, adjourn.  If you are not finished a 30-minute meeting at the 30-minute mark, schedule another meeting and adjourn.
8. Eliminate unnecessary meetings by reviewing the agenda to see if the items could be accomplished by email, phone or smaller meetings of fewer people.

DON’T’S

1. Don’t hog all the airtime.
2. Don’t reprimand anyone in front of the group.
3. Don’t check or use your blackberry, iPhone or other device while in the meeting.
4. Don’t do the opposite of any of the tips listed above – unless you have a better rule to propose – and I encourage you to propose it in the comments below!

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I wonder if this sounds familiar at all. Have you ever had this experience at work? Begun a meeting or a conference call, or even initiated a project, running full steam ahead and expecting others to keep up. Or perhaps you’ve been the one pulled by someone else. We do it all the time.

In my pursuit and practice of Working for Good over the past three decades, I’ve found that how we work is as, if not more, important than what we do. We can work in a green business, a social service organization, or some other endeavor focused on making the world a better place, but if we treat others and ourselves with disregard or disrespect in the process, we end up creating something far short of our intention. The process is the product.  And the process is about connecting.

The more I practice the skills of Working for Good–which I identify as awareness, embodiment, connection, collaboration, and integration–while carrying the intention to serve through my work, the more I relate to an insight by Mother Teresa:

I never look at the masses as my responsibility; I look at the individual. I can only love one person at a time—just one, one, one. So you begin. I began—I picked up one person. Maybe
if I didn’t pick up that one person, I wouldn’t have picked up forty-two thousand. . . .The same thing goes for you, the same thing in your family, the same thing in your church, your community. Just begin—one, one, one.

Working for Good is essentially about how we show up for one person at a time, and for each person we encounter. There is no “saving the world,” but there is co-creating it with one another. To do that, we have to truly be with one another. The place we start from is always the same. Right here. And the time of our departure is always the same. Right now.

Try this: Slow down. Connect with yourself. Connect with whomever you are with. And move from there.

Image courtesy www.sxc.hu.

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Buon Giorno Coffee, located about a mile from my office, has built a booming business for that very reason.  It sells good coffee, but those who gather there go for connection.  It’s definitely a destination stop; there are no other shopping attractions nearby.  On any week night, you’ll find teens hanging out there to do their school projects.  On weekday mornings, moms meet for muffins, Bible studies, investment seminars, and after-workout lunch dates.  Business professionals take their laptops there to work out spreadsheet data with a colleague.  Couples meet friends there after a ball game.  Lines are long, but nobody seems to mind waiting for a table.  Tables are not the point; hanging around is.

What do they all have in common?  Talking to someone who cares to listen.

Starbucks also generates buzz because it creates community for those who gather there.  A couple of years ago, it “featured” a book called Listening Is an Act of Love, a collection of compelling excerpts from more than 10,000 interviews recorded and compiled by StoryCorps founder Dave Isay.  Each story—a single moment in time, either historical, emotional, or personal—grabs the essence of that person and reflects their human struggles with love, family, loyalty, or whatever.

StoryCorp’s founder had a correct hunch: Many people feel invisible. They believe that what they think, feel, and say doesn’t matter.  They fear they’ll be forgotten once they leave planet earth—that their lives will not have mattered.  So all the producer had to do was to provide a facility, recording equipment, and a facilitator, and then wait for people to invite their family members and friends to sit down and talk.

The results:  Poignant stories for those willing to listen.

French philosopher Voltaire summed it up well:  “The shortest route to a man’s heart is through the ear.”

As you approach the high school or college reunion, graduation ceremony, wedding, family gathering, or other social event, consider your listening-talking differential:  Which body part does most of the work when you’re with friends and family—ears or mouth?   Where’s the love?

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“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Are you upset with your sweetheart; unsatisfied with your raise; bearing physical pain; worried about something; suffering from depression; feeling ignored?  Yet you say “I’m fine” and sweep your emotions under the rug.  We’re not dealing with burnt toast, folks.  The experiences and issues that weave the threads of your life together warrant both attention and discussion.  What’s worse…many of you keep silent the good stuff as well.  If you’ve got a brilliant idea; can help out a situation, love someone with all of your heart… Well, SPEAK ON, DEAR FRIEND!  We spend half of our lives biting our tongues when we should speak up and share ourselves!  Chat up your truth –the connection you make will bring solution, satisfaction and peace of mind.

Net-net:  You want to “stickitivity”, folks? Create an unshakably positive, people-packed future by seeking authenticity in all who surround you.  But more importantly, choose respect for yourself by unabashedly standing in truth and talk it up!  Reveal its power and revel in the liberation it returns.

©2000-2009 by Kimberlie Dykeman. SOAPBOX® is a registered trademark of Kimberlie Dykeman.  This article contains excerpts from copyrighted SOAPBOX® vignettes and Kimberlie Dykeman’s book “Pure Soapbox”.

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And contrary to the psychology industry’s biological notion that we choose our mates based on a biological desire to keep our species going, we actually come together on a psychological plane. What actually happens as we mature into adults, and experience relationships that do not lead to marriage, is we develop an unconscious picture of this soul mate. Anyone who has met that one person understands that falling in love is not a biological experience but a mental one, that falling in love happens at a speed unimaginable to those who have not had this most wonderful experience.

But now comes the hard part, trying to figure out how to develop a life together. While the falling in love part happens beyond any imaginable time frame, the falling out of love happens at a turtle’s pace. What is needed to understand is this change in the relationship that takes someone from “for better or worse” to it’s over.

As it turns out, we develop our emotional perspectives from birth, by the examples given to us by our parents. In marriages where the couple struggles between sticking together and splitting up these influences can determine the outcome. What cause those conflicts in so many marriages are these negative insecurities from our past that cause us to fear the same result from our partner today.

What we are doing when we introduce anger and arguments into our marriages is projecting these past insecurities onto our partners, fearing those same results that we have seen before. This is where the wedge in the marriage comes from. What eventually happens after we project those insecurities enough times is we transfer those negative emotions from our past relationships onto our partner causing us to decide to get divorced.

The secret to success is confronting our demons and slaying our dragons, as the sayings go. And this takes courage. For us to be able to look at our partners from a clear, objective perspective we must understand and overcome those influences from our past, we must forgive those who we believe have caused us to be fearful of our current relationship. In psychological terms this is called catharsis. What we must do as individuals is realize that we can look anew at our perspective of our own insecurities. Only then will we be able to develop a marriage where we can stick together throughout whatever life dishes out to us.

To give an example, I forgave my parents when I was 25. I had a conversation with a friend where each was trying to outdo the other on who had the worst childhood, only he still loved his parents. I realized after that conversation that I was wrong in the anger I had built up towards my parents. I admitted for the first time in my adult life that I was wrong. Admitting your mistakes gets a lot easier after that first time.

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In my training as a business coach, I was fascinated to learn a term for the space between where you are and where you want to be: edge.

Two examples in my manual are:

1. Trying on a new idea or perspective.
2. Being a shy person and choosing to speak up.

I certainly know the feeling and suspect you do, too. That’s where the word edgy comes up – that uncomfortable place between who you are now and who you’d like to become.

The illustration in one of my coaching manuals describing this scenario as an upside-down V.  Over the holidays I received a delightful holiday card from my friend and colleague bearing an illustration by her son. It was actually a more memorable representation than the one in my fancy notebook, illustrating the unstable and scary place between those worlds. There’s the “skier” whose primary identity (shy person) is on the left. The secondary identity (one who speaks up) is on the right and an arrow crossing the peak of the V pointing from the primary to the secondary. When we’re poised on the top of that mountain, it’s a tenuous place.

I have a fairly successful track record, but there are still times when I find myself terrified when a new challenge comes my way. Part of my success has come from consistently looking for higher bars to vault over.

My recommendation for those of you “on the edge” is to break intimidating tasks into their tiniest fragments. Basically the way to overcome fear boils down to writing a letter, dialing the phone or putting a higher sticker price on your product or service. More often than not, what terrifies me and a lot of other people, is the anticipation before you do something and the fear that comes afterward. Actually doing the thing you are afraid of is often the easy part. Go for it!

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These are the words I most often use from Managing with Aloha when asked why I feel Lōkahi is the Hawaiian value which conveys teamwork best of all.

When we work within a team, that dynamic of needing to join heads and hands with others is the critical component, isn’t it. We aren’t alone, and we need to function by cooperating with others as best as we possibly can. Beyond simple cooperation we need to collaborate, allowing our shared inputs and ideas to become woven and blended; unified. Compromise may happen, but we hope not; we want better than that cooperation of having to give up something. We want to achieve some new creation of dazzling unity where no one had to give up anything. No bright idea dimmed.

On the contrary, our team ended up being stronger than we initially could even imagine was possible. Not only was there room in the effort for everyone to participate, the effort itself took on a kind of magic, and a new creation was revealed. There was a transformation of some kind, and the transformation may have been us! People emerged from their contributions and their shared working efforts feeling victorious, and saying things like, “Amazing; how incredible was that?” and “Who would have thought we would actually pull that off?”

When teams work together best, individuals emerge bigger than they were before: They’ve been lifted up, or have grown in some way. The Lōkahi unity which was achieved did not diminish anyone, or worse, leave them out. On the contrary, it gave them the possibility to explore a potent capacity they weren’t even aware they still could explore. The most successful teams are those which make individuals stronger and more confident in their own abilities: They have witnessed how their contributions served others.

So my question for you today is this: When you begin working with a new team, or with your existing team at the start of a brand new day, are those outcomes I have just described the outcomes you set your sights on? What goal do you have in mind?

This is how I will describe Lōkahi from now on: I will own it in my Kuleana (my personal sense of responsibility), and say, “Lōkahi seeks my harmony with bringing people to creative agreement. It is my value of cooperation, collaboration, and unity.” I am that common thread. I am that defining critical one in the success of each team I engage with. I don’t mean that it is all about me, not at all. I do mean it is about my own behavior, my own contribution, my own initiative, and my own willingness to cooperate with the greater desire to collaborate. Lōkahi teams do not happen without Lōkahi people.

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Maintaining and growing friendships has become increasingly important to me as I age. In fact, VibrantNation.com, a social networking website dedicated exclusively to women 50+, has recently released a study that reveals that we are of the first generation of women in history whose personal networks at midlife and beyond are actually growing over time. The stereotypes of shrinking connectedness and increasing isolation belong to the women of generations past, clearly not the women of my own Boomer cohort.

In fact, I am often pleasantly surprised by the spontaneous level of intimacy with which women 50+ interact upon chance encounter. For instance, by the time we’ve stood together in line at the women’s room at a concert, we may know each others’ marital status, number and issues with various grown children/grandchildren, health problems and solutions, and so on. Similar exchanges are taking place online everyday at Vibrant Nation as well as on other social networking sites such as Facebook, where women 55+ are the fastest-growing segment.

That said, developing on-going relationships is a new skill for many of us–one I am attempting to learn, the way women newly divorced return to the dating world on shaky legs. This is in part because when I was my daughter’s age, I was too busy liberating workplaces to make maintaining and growing personal friendships a priority. In fact, back then, a good friend was considered to be someone who understood when you had to cancel a social lunch for a business meeting.

Ironically, the inspiring interest in friendships amongst our daughters’ generations can be considered an unintended (but happy) consequence of Women’s Lib. Having earned our older Gen X offspring the nickname “The latchkey generation” is not the part of my generation’s legacy of which I’m proudest. Given how often we were still at work when they came home from school, they turned to one another and the notion of social peer packs was born.

Gen Y, their younger siblings, have taken this even further. They showed us the way to integrate friendship fully into their lives, mostly through the gift of technology, which keeps them connected all the time. Now the friendship equation is reversed: social friends help each other figure out how to make money. For example, my daughter is laying plans to rep her friends’ artistic abilities to ad agencies–a win/win scenario for a generation who, by and large, value their friendships above traditional workplace ambition.

Happily, it is not too late for the women of my generation. committed to making up for lost time, to reach out to others for non-business reasons. We can take a page from our grown daughters to use social networking to keep us connected–and when we do, to remember to put friendships first, professional advancement second.

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