Appreciate the Power of Silence

Our society has become increasingly noisy and we are flooded we information where ever we go. This happens to many of our leaders which works under these "noise".

These noises can come in many forms. It can be literal noise made from too many conversations as well as distractions around us. These noises decrease our efficiency as we are unable to focus on the task at hand. It also increases stress to our leaders to sieve our the main points from the irrelevant ones.

Silence is the way to create the discipline and form in a chaotic environment. When there are over flowing environment, create this power of silence. It sets things in place as well as a peaceful mind for the leader. Leader must appreciate and and use the power of silence to get things done.

However, this must first be practiced by the leader himself. Leader must have the self discipline to keep their actions and thoughts in this "silent" mode. He can refrain from talking as well as discipline his thoughts.

When taking over the noise, leader will have to enforce the silence. The delivery of such power may come across as rude or crude, but it is greatly dependent on the leader's influence to get it. When it is achieved, information can be pass down efficiently and accurately. Less noise will be created for further clarification due to the noise without efficient silence.

As leaders, make full use of how silence can help you in getting things done. Talk less, Do more. Remember, effective delivery of instructions will lead to effective doing to get things done.

Challenges ~ The Stimulus for Improvements

Leadership is a on going process which requires constant improvements. Leaders do not stop and believe that they have nothing to improve on. When they do so, they stagnate and stoop to lead. Leaders also do not wait for things to happen, which means waiting for opportunities to come to them. They either create or go out and find such opportunities. The level of difficulty of each tasks also grows, to stretch and dvelop themselves.

Why is Challenges so Important?
Leaders can lead effectively because of the fact that they have the ability and skills to lead their followers. If their followers and themselves have the same level of competance, there will be no room for leadership to take place. That is why challenges are important to create the avenue and experience for leaders to stretch themselves which gathers followers. Such experiences are important to form the basis of leadership which is to lead by example. That is doing at least at the minimal level, but more often way beyond what your followers will be doing.

How to find such challenges?
Firstly is to actively search for them. Opportunities are for those who are prepared. Those who wait for things to happen will find themselves either not finding them, or missing the skills needed for the job. Be proactive and prepare yourself sufficiently for it.
Secondly, if all fails, one can always initiate projects and ideas and get people to buy into your ideas. thats when challenges you deem possible actually spins off and take flight.

How to overcome the challenges?
Challenges by nature will be tough and hard. It is mean to push you off your comfort zone and let you improve yourself. Stay positive in the journey and go in with an open mind. This is when your brain will be in the best state to absorb and learn. This expands your attitude towards the challenge and more often will you succeed in overcoming them. When the going gets tough, the tough gets going.

Leading is about making yourself better in order to allow better learning and leading of your followers. It is important to keep learning by finding these stimulus for improvements. When you lose the passion to be challenged, you lose the ability to lead in the end.

Leadership Style - Develop your own style

There is a spectrum of leadership style out there. It can be categorized into two main category, one is purpose, the other one is level of aggression.

For purpose, this includes servant leadership, which touches on why you actually want to lead. The other type is based on aggression level, from the minimal, laissez faire leadership (means not doing anything), to total control, dictatorship and the spectrum in between it. All of these leadership styles have their pros and cons and I believe as leaders, it is important to have a mixture of it to make us truly effective.

Mixture of Leadership Styles
One sole leadership style will have weaknesses and it may not be able to be applied in every situation out there. When new at leadership, it is good to develop a leadership style that is close to your personality style. For introverts, they may choose servant leadership or leadership of less assertiveness. It will help to strengthen who you are as a leader.

However, as you proceed on with leading, you will find that there are flaws in just having one. For above example, they will find themselves hard to get things done when they need to be straightforward with their followers.

Therefore, once comfortable with dominant leadership style, explore the other side which complements your weaknesses. It will be uncomfortable and may clash with our personality, but just push on as habits take time to develop. Remember, leadership is developed.

Balancing between Leadership Style
After gaining comfortable with leadership style, be flexible with the approach to things. Try balancing between giving assertion and not, and you might find yourself becoming a more effective leader, who knows how to get things done, with the human factor still taken care of. Sometimes an alternative leadership style may just bring about an unique result.

End State
After learning more styles and able to balancing it, you will then create a leadership style that is unique to you. Mixture of everything and getting the best out of the generic leadership style. This will help to maximise your charactor and shape how people look at you in a different light.

This journey of finding your leadership style is never ending. Take in mind that leadership styles is dependent on the situation. Some are just better than others in a situation, but not quite so in the other. Look for opportunities to explore other side of you to make your leadership style more comprehensive.

A Belief - What a Leader Truely Needs

Ever heard of "tough time don't last, tough men do"? Ever wondered, behind every of this tough men, what actually pulls them to complete those tough time. Leaders are figures that spearheads movements. They have a vision to begin with and have a strong belief to bring them through the darkness.

Its all in the mind. Nothing physical.

Leading is a simple tough. If you believe in something, you will do it. If you don't, you lack the conviction and will not follow through. At the toughest times, with the strongest belief, your body may fail before your mind allow them to. People have pushed through darkest time, with just their minds. The tiniest and smallest man in the group may actually lead a group of big strong guys with a stronger determination.

Train your mind.

Have a purpose
Before begin  anything, make sure you have a strong rationale and purpose in doing that particular activity This give you a sense of motivation .

Have the end in mind
In the toughest time, set your mind at the end goal and continually reminding yourself why you are doing all this.

The in built mechanism to push on through fatigue and stress requires years of progressive practice and challenges to stimulate those changes. Be easy on your progress. The journey to this skill takes time and normally painful most of the time. Stay positive while believing more in yourself.

The darkest night always ends when the sun rises. Believe it and it will happen.

Respect ~ Earn it!

There are many a times which we can spot a leader from afar. Some unique leaders just have the magical powers to influence and command respect from his followers. Respect is not an entitlement to leaders, it has to be earned with hard work and genuine intention. What separate those leaders from the rest are as follows.

Strong Belief
Influential leaders always have a set of beliefs that they held close to them. They will always have the commitment and dedication to their believes. They do not compromise other things. This consistency that they held demands a certain social expectations or standards on their followers. These beliefs are alRways backed with strong rationale and purpose. Their followers buy in to their ideas and follow as what their leader always does. Weak leaders display to be easy with their values and thoughts and be "pushed around". Followers may not be comfortable in following them. Bad leaders are those who do not walk the talk and have swaying attitude. Followers lose faith in them.

Genuine Interactions
Respectable leaders also show their leadership at all times. A simple litmus test is are you the same when in position and when not in position. If you are, then you are genuine who you are. If you are not, then you should think about what is causing the change. Followers can feel and sense if you are genuine or purely going through the motion of interacting. Never doubt their ability to feel.

These two things are what commonly seen in leaders who earn their respect through their genuine commitments in their beliefs.

Fundamentals of Leadership - Self and Communal Leadership

Leadership takes place in many forms and are applicable in vastly different scenarios. But what culminates the role of a leader is to lead himself (self leadership) and to lead others (communal leadership).

Self Leadership
Before leading others, a leader have to manage himself well enough. This is when self leadership is essential. Leader has to make sure he is able to control his T-E-A. Thoughts, Emotions and Actions. Thoughts form emotions. And emotions will translate into actions.

One of the important skills that leader has to master is reflecting. Reflecting allows people to process their thoughts. By analysing all different possibilities, leaders are able to turn negative thoughts into positive ones. This change in mindset and attitude sparks a special chain of reaction. Leader feels better (emotion) and behave in a manner that benefits all (actions). At any point of time, when a leader is able to control TEA, he has mastered the art of self-leadership. This is when he is able to lead others as TEA has very much a big impact on his people.

Communal Leadership
When able to lead oneself, a leader must then learn the role of leadership in leading others. At this point of time, leadership branches itself into many different forms- dictatorship, welfare, servant leadership etc. There is no right or wrong leadership as all has its usefulness at different times. But what is more important is the leader must know is how to develop his people.

Leader has to inspire his people to do their best. Leader has to help his people to take on a bigger role. A misconception is for a leader to take on all roles and lead a team. That will only serve to tire the leader, while the people fails to develop themselves. A leader is considered successful using  a simple litmus test. When a leader is brought out of the entire team, is the team able to function with similar efficiency?

Some might say that there is two conclusion to the litmus test, one is the leader does not even play any role in the team (which is possible), or two the leader has successfully develop and trusted his team to do the job. This two conclusion are valid and it is up to the people to judge.

Managing oneself and impacting others are the key fundamentals of leading. Being easily affected within oneself will prove to be damaging to the team in future. Failure to lead a team and develop them will undermine the true purpose of leadership which is to inspire the next batch to pass it forward.

The Power of Self-reflection

To all my readers, Happy Chinese New Year in advance! As a year comes to a close, its good to explore an important skill that all leaders should know and should practice. This skill is called reflection. And more importantly, knowing the power of self-reflection.

Many leaders do not practice this skill as they do not find it important to review the things that they have done. They will in the end are unable to learn as much from an experience.

The process of reflection requires people to think back of the entire event and let all emotions and feelings flood their minds. This can be painful to relive the moments of failure, separation and hardship, but is definitely necessary for the person to overcome such moments. This is similar to the other end of the spectrum of happiness and joy. As they go through such moments, draw learning points from it. What is good, what is bad, what can be done instead?

Why is this process important? By going through the process, it brings a closure to an event. Be it success or failure, it allows a person to generate as much learning points. Only by being convince that everything is over, people will then look forward to the next thing. They will not be trap by previous failure or success, which is important for progression for a leader.

Furthermore, it is more important to this on your own. This art of reflection can be done with a friend or a mentor. However, they cannot be with you all the times and sometimes it is good to solve your own problem.

Effective Communication

To complete up the cycle, the main role of a leader happens when the leader is with the team. In order to perform a duty successfully, leader must muster the role of command and control.

Command means to give instructions to get a certain objective completed. Control means to ensure that your group perform to their best performance or follow instructions. Command and control is fundamental to all leaders and this will require effective communication.

Communication is a broad topic and requires many years of practice before one actually masters it. But there are many different methods to ensure that it is the most effective.

Context
When a leader initiate a conversation, the leader must know the background of his listener. It includes age (junior or senior), gender, religious and other things. It requires different tone and usage of words for different target audience. One can be friendly to a junior when asking about his problems. One can be more assuring when talking to girls, while more straight forward to guys.

Purpose
Leader has to take note of the outcome of the conversation. Sometimes it is for feedback, sometimes to convey an instruction, sometimes merely a casual talk. Do not just talk without purpose. Ask yourself this question "then?" to expand your conservation. Do not let the conversation hanging there and require other people to ask you "then?" or "so?"

With a context and purpose, the conversation will be meaningful and also engaging.

With this two parts, next thing to take note will be a good delivery. There are different skills to involve to truly deliver a message.

Volume
A loud volume can create attention. However, a soft delivery can also do the same thing. When you want your audience to really pay attention, soft delivery might get them to strain their ears to focus. Normally, a mixture of both creates the attention as you vary your volume.

Hand Gestures
Using hand gestures to bring and stress important point can be useful to a leader. But this requires practice to ensure that hand gestures bring out the confidence from the leader. Weak hand gestures can reveal the lack of confidence in the leader.

Repetition
Using similar words repeatedly to reinforce the idea. This drives a common message to their heads.

Participation
Asking questions, or asking them to say a certain thing out. This will get them engage as well as reinforcing the message.

Last but not least, this skill of effective communication must be practiced and tried out to really understand. Standing at a side listening to good leaders can be a chance to learn, but that merely teach u the skill, but not equipping you with the skill. Be daring and try out. Vary the group size to try new style. Vary the background of audience as well. It will be whole new experience.

And would like to thank all the people who have been supporting this blog. Do feel free to comment on the post about the content or any future content which you all would like to see.

Planning and Facilitation of ELC Activity

I shall be exploring the planning and facilitation of an ELC activity. ELC (Experiencial learning cycle) is a model used to let participants experience a particular value via doing some activity. These activities always serves to bring out a particular value or purpose. The activities can be conducted to one person or to large groups, but the way of conducting may differ from number of participants.

Planning of ELC Activity
The first step will always derive an objective of the game. This objective is normally the value which you want the participants to learn at the end of the activity.

The second step is to choose a game/activity. It can be typical games like turn over a new leaf, entanglement. Choose a game which you are comfortable in explaining and conducting.

Third step is the important step. I called it the omission theory. To bring out the learning point in step one, I would normally removed some abilities of the participants. For example, not able to talk brings out the importance of communication. Close their eyes to bring out the fear for unknown and trust to other people.

Apart from omission, planners can make use of the enhance theory. This time round, instead of removing abilities, you enhanced their abilities. By making them not talk, is to enhance their listening skills. By adding more leaders to talk, create confusion.

At the planning stage, enhancing or omitting must be clearly done to bring out the particular value. However, the game will only be successful if it is carried out properly.

Facilitation of ELC Activity
There are many other variables that may affect the outcome of the games like participants, environment, space constraint. A facilitator of the activity has to be aware and make adjustments to the game to make it exciting for the participants. Effort has to be directed to the end goal.

These adjustments can create better effect (up to facilitator style and ability):
Time Limits
Time limits can be set to create a goal and end point to the game. It can also create competition within groups. However, time limits cannot be used when the participants do not know the game well or have just started the game.

Changing of rules
Certain participants might be creative and tweak the rules that you might have given as they perceived it differently. This may result in the end goal not met. Thus, changing or adding rules will serve to counter their actions.

Infusion of Stress Level
This is to create stress for activity which test on resilience and on stress management. This includes questioning and scolding. Eg Why is there such a problem? What are you doing now?

Giving Hints
When they are first planning for the game, do give hints to direct them to a better outcome. So that they will be able to fully experience the game.

Be part of them
Go into the game and get them involved. This is recommended when the participants are passive.

The points part of ELC activity is to be exciting and purposeful. This will make it a successful one.

Preparation and Planning

Fail to plan, plan to fail. Sounds familiar right? This quote is actually very applicable. However, plans can be categorised as a good plan and a bad plan. So fail to plan a good plan, plan to fail. Plan a bad plan, plan to fail harder, fail to plan, definite failure (unless you are very good on the spot). I shall explore on how to prepare and plan for an event.

Planning (Objectives)
Planning of an event requires two things - objectives (long term) and details (short term). Many peoples plunged into planning immediately without thinking of an objective. Objective is a guide and source of purpose of an activity. Many tried to derive an objective after planning their activities which either make their objective a forced one, or making it a vague one. So, always start planning by thinking of an objective.

The objective should be the end goal that you want to achieve out of the activity. It should be something achievable and realistic. It should sound like "To allow the participants to (do something) to achieve (value) via (method)". Personally, I disagree of having objectives of having fun and bonding as most kinds of activities do actually promote them. Think deeper into this objective and then derive an activity to target the particular outcome.

Planning (Details)
After that, the details of the event comes in. A detailed plan include the run through of events, logistics list, venue layout. Things to include as well, contingencies plan (wet weather). These details serves to add as much information as possible. A rough gauge of a good plan is a person (that is totally not involved) can follow the plan at ease to carry out the activities. Foresee some of the problems which may arise and make modification to it to prevent any problems on the actual day.

If there are previous documentations (AAR) that are done, do refer to them and address all the problems met previously to allow a better running of events. But do consider the validity of the points as it might not be applicable in some cases.

Preparation (Logistics)
When a plan is ready, then it is time to do preparation. Prepare all the physical items (logistics) and sort them. In big scale events, logistics can be sorted in a room, or a logistics table. Logistics should be labelled and sorted into minor activities (preferably with boxes and rubber bands). To facilitate the actual carry out, do visualize how to dispatch the logistics in the fastest manner. For example, there are worksheets for 100 persons and you have 10 groups. It is possible to bundle them in sets of 10 and pass it to each group when they arrive. The pre preparation is to save time for actual carrying out of events.

Preparation (Mental)
After all the tedious work of planning, go through all plans and logistics once more and reassure that the everything is prepared. This is to mental prepare yourself for the event and gain confidence from it.

Planning is the tedious portion of the entire event. As the actual event might end before you know it. but it is better than being caught unprepared. Sometimes, things may not flow according to plan, which will then require impromptu skills to handle them

A good plan is one that takes note of the past, present and future.

P-A-R-T Leadership Framework

This is my first post for this leadership blog. I aim to explore many different areas of leadership and to summarise the things that are important to a leader. To start off, I would like to introduce the PART Leadership Framework. This leadership framework is the most fundamental and is the skeleton of what a leader should do.

Preparation and Planning Leaders have to prepare and plan before taking any team. Prepare in terms of physical items and plan in terms of thinking through the entire process. Proper preparation and planning will give sufficient thought for the activity. A leader will then seem to be more confident by being prepared. Details of how to plan will be shared in future posts.

Action via Effective Communication This step involves the leader meeting their team. As a leader, they must know their roles of being both a leader as well as a team player (aka servant leadership). As a leader, they have to communicate their ideas and spread instructions to their team in a clear manner. Effective communication will also be shared in future posts. After all the instructions, they have be part of the team and take action together with their team. This is called serving by being with the team.

Reflection After leading a team, a leader have to take time to reflect and think through of the entire process. Some may called it after action review. Leader has to sieve out learning points. What went right, what went wrong and what can be done? These learning points are essential for the leaders to grow. Many leaders oversee this important step as they think of the immediate ending of an event is really the end. In fact, only after thinking through and gain as much learning point from an event will then an event truly ends. At this stage, be critical to correct mistake and be humble to accept the good points.

Try Again This step is to apply all learning points and use them in the next try. Include all this in the new cycle and consider them in the planning stage. This step is important as it allows a continuous cycle for leaders to seek self improvement. '

The PART model is a simplified model, but covers all essential part of self leadership. The area of action via communication requires a more indept knowledge to truly perform it properly.

A leader can only lead others if they know how to lead themselves.