5 Big Leader Mistakes
MBA2U - Supporting Your Internal Leadership UniversityFundamentals
of
Performance
Leadership Competency: Organizing and Planning
What This MBA2U Covers
There are five fundamentals that every person in a leadership role needs to develop and maintain. These fundamentals are common mistakes because leaders get overly-focused on how they are perceived by their business partners, over how they and their organization is prepared to perform.
The five fundamentals leaders often fail at are discussed in this segment:
- Failure to take care of yourself.
- Giving useless work.
- Succumbing to blame.
- Failing to recognize performance.
- Being casual about what is important to people.
With this topic we share experiences that are common to the first-time leader and how new leaders tend to dig themselves into a performance pit without doing some things that are actually counter-intuitive.
Leaders who have taken this course are able to immediately correct some of their leadership mis-queues and make positive change.
Frequent Questions
More About MBA2U
What is MBA2U?
What are the leadership competencies you focus on?
- Relationship building
- Problem solving and decision making
- Influence and skillful use of power
- Drive and energy
- Organizing and planning (time management and delegating)
- Communicating
Why so passionate about developing leaders?
- Problems with being a working manager.
- Dealing with vague or inconsistent instructions by upper management.
- Leading one’s peers for the first time.
- Resisting the urge to micro-manage.
- Falling back on what worked in the past as an individual contributor.
Lack of leadership development and training stunts our understanding of what management and leadership ought to be. Often, the first-time leader has unrealistic expectations of what management does, and as a result becomes discouraged, inadequately manages resources and relationships, and has a difficult time transitioning from individual contributor to leader.
Organizations should focus on holistic development of emerging leaders in a way that integrates the view and responsibilities of leadership consistent with the organizational culture, while at the same time providing tools and support enabling success.
When we put together leadership development programs we follow a pattern of education integrated with practical development.
We like to organize internal programs to help people develop within their frame of responsibilities and future opportunities. We look at business competencies and leading competencies and customize a long-term program that is sustainable within the organization itself. We pattern our ideas after Nike, the Marine Corps, and GE.
Can I watch an entire presentation?
Our Difference
How are you different?
Leadership is a people art. That means we’ve got to bring a realness to the things we talk about that will help people learn how to work with people better. Leadership isn’t hierarchical – it is multi-perspective (up, down, in, out, across, and side-to-side).
We don’t teach the typical surface concepts of leadership. We dig deep and work to help our clients understand how their leadership affects the lives of the people they lead. For example, have you ever thought about the overused word of “empowerment?” So often leaders throw that word around and think they are doing good. However, if a leader says they are empowering someone, but don’t give them the two key elements of empowerment (authority and resources) then all they’ve done is employed the word empowerment as a therapeutic fiction. That technique always backfires when people ultimately discover the truth, and they always do.
Where do your ideas come from?
For over 30 years I have been involved in the process of leading people and organizations, developing strategies, and worrying about how future leaders should be developed.
From the football field to the Marines, from the high-speed action of Nike to the intense complexities of the high-tech startup world, and from Vice President to Entrepreneur, I’ve covered a lot of ground and have seen how leadership makes a difference.
I’ve seen organizations who promote their people into leadership responsibilities without giving them any framework for success. In those cases, the leader is miserable, his or her people are miserable, and the production of the group falls to a stand-still. The results are always catastrophic.
On the other hand, I’ve seen great organizations such as Nike, who invest heavily in the development and support of their leadership talent. While in the Marines I spent almost a third of my 13 years in some sort of school or training, that is an organization that believes in developing people. While at Nike, I noticed the first thing they did for their new managers was to send them to a week-long course called Basic People Management skills. These were profound examples and are modeled heavily in our programs.
Leaders need opportunity to discuss, share, and study leadership in a safe environment, to be able to ask questions, and to dig deep within themselves to discover their capabilities and potential.
If you are genuinely interested in leading people, then you’ll want to get to know us. Our goal is to advance the art of leadership. We believe leadership is both a learned skill and an acquired art. To be good at leadership requires constant study, practice, self-evaluation, and an eagerness to learn from others.
What is the difference between an MBA2U session and a workshop?
The workshop extends the session by an hour and focuses on applying the concepts of the MBA2U session in your business context. Our facilitator creates an experience-action engagement for workshop participants, which helps them to immediately implement the principles introduced.
Are these short segments effective?
Yes!
Here’s the deal – you are super busy. We live in the “Twitter” generation. We transfer powerful information in short segments and our content makes a difference. People can use what we teach immediately. While we are not quite as brief as a tweet, compared to our competitors, it’s pretty close.
We pattern our delivery from what we learned of a good meetup. Deliver value quickly, use short segments, and people stay engaged.
Prices and Logistics
What are your prices?
Workshops are a flat fee of $950, plus $35 per attendee.