July 2016 – Melissa Williams-Gurian

27Jul 2016 by melissa No Comments

Are You an Asker or a Teller?

Article

Leaders tend to either "ask" more, or "tell" more. Sometimes they do neither, and keep their opinion to themselves. These differences in personality all have particular strengths, but lean too far in any of these directions, and your problems with connection can occur. One leader leans too strongly to connect, and is experienced as too mushy, with no back bone. Another leader is always telling and taking strong positions, and comes as an arrogant know-it-all. Very quiet leaders may seem either overly pliable, or distant and arrogant. Effective leadership is about balancing these possibilities. People often know where they fall in this description, whether it's that they are very connected and don't express many strong opinions, too distant and extremely opinionated, or some other combination of these traits. Some need to work more on the soft skills of listening, empathy, and story telling; others may need to…

How To Use Your Inner Compass

Article

To make choices we usually need to evaluate the facts, but we must also respond to gut feelings that give us information. Together, these can make up our inner compass. But most of us at one time or another dismiss the gut feelings. We have all sorts of reasons for doing so. We’re scared, or we don’t really want to do the work required of us. (This happens a lot to storybook heroes at the beginning of a journey, right before they accept a challenge and go on a wonderful adventure). Maybe we aren’t willing to give up on a dream in which we’ve invested a lot of effort. We all know this feeling of self-dismissal, and it looks something like this: Inner Feeling: I’ve been tense all week. This feels…

Leaning Into A Mood Can Improve Your Leadership

Article

What mood do leaders need to lean into to get the results we want? I've been thinking about this question lately, after a great family summer trip that involved several different tours—and tour guides. We were a group that ranged widely in age, from children to more elderly family members, so we weren't always easy to please. After a day’s activities, we visitors would talk about our tour leaders—the good, the bad, and the just okay. Who inspired us, and who left us cold? Like tour guides, leaders at work are challenged to inspire and create an environment of learning and growth among a group of people with differing styles and personalities. One thing that was clear about our preferred tour guides was that the mood we sensed from them really set the tone…