Free Smart & Fast e-Course

1. Leader 360

2. Self-leadership

3. Leadership Attributes

4. Leading Peers

5. Leading a Team

6. Project Leader

7. Managerial Leadership

8. Entrepreneurial Leader

9. Leading Change

10. Leading Innovation

Vadim Kotelnikov

Inventor of Business e-Coach

Founder of Leader360

Author of Smart Leader • 12 Leadership Roles • Entrepreneurial Leadership

Co-founder of Innompics • Cimcoin • eRaritet

Leader 360 ►

The Essence of Leadership

Leadership is about creating powerful human currents – including your own – moving enthusiastically in a right direction. As a leader, you must envision the future, passionately believe that you can make a difference, and inspire people to achieve more than they may ever have dreamed possible.

Lead Yourself

To make real changes and lead others, you have to lead yourself first. This is actually your greatest challenge and one of the most important things you’ll ever do as a leader. If you lead yourself well, then you will earn the right to lead others.

Lead Your Peers

How to get things done when you are not the boss and telling others what to do is ineffective? Lead laterally, help people around you achieve more and shine. Invite colleagues to work with you to solve problems creatively, and achieve a common goal. Focus on improving the process for finding solutions and working together.

Lead Your Boss

As organizations decentralize, virtually any company can benefit from more upward leadership. Leading-up is about leading your boss, helping your supervisor to see the right goal and find the right path before it is too late.

Lead Your Subordinates

Lead by example and help your people develop into leaders themselves. Empower, inspire and energize them. Be a coach for your people. Don't assume you know it all. Seek ideas from all team members. Ask questions and solicit suggestions. Be empathic and compassionate, and people will choose you to lead them.

Self-Leadership ►

Vision and Stretch Goals

Self-leadership is an extensive set of strategies focused on the behaviors, thoughts, and feelings that you use to exert influence over yourself.

To lead yourself, create an inspiring vision and set goals for your life. You vision will lead you. Set stretch goals, and your goals will stretch you.

Creative Visualization

Visualization is the first step to bringing a dream to life. See yourself the way you want to be. Imagine a life that is exactly as you want it. What would you do each day? With whom would you do it?

Use your imagination to create a clear image, idea or feeling sense of your goal. When you see your goal in your mind, you engage the power of your subconscious mind that will help you build winning habits and bring your dream to life.

Take Action

Now, take initiative and start moving towards your goals. Challenge assumptions, champion change, take risk and experiment. And remember, there is no failure, only feedback. Ask learning SWOT questions and restart wiser. Fail small to succeed big.

Continuous Learning

The two key ingredients of achievement are preparation and an opportunity. In today's rapidly changing World, knowledge becomes obsolete and new opportunities emerge very fast. So the key to success is not what you know, but how fast you can learn. Learn continuously, for if you stop learning, you stop creating history and become history. Be a lifelong learner, and be passionate about it.

Leaderships Attributes ►

Leaders Attributes Defined

Leadership attributes are the inner or personal qualities that constitute effective leadership. These attributes include a large array of characteristics such as values, character, habits, traits, competencies, motives, style, behaviors, and skills.

Three Categories of Leadership Attributes (The ARE-KNOW-DO Model)

• Who leaders ARE: character and personality, values, motives, abilities, traits, commitment, honesty, courage, imagination.

• What leaders KNOW: competencies (knowing yourself and others, leadership theory, professional knowledge) and skills (people skills, leadership skills, professional skills)

• What leaders DO: habits, behaviors, styles, leading by example.

Key Elements of Leadership Attributes

Most of the leadership attributes cluster into four overarching categories of what you need to be, know, and do:

1. Demonstrate personal character;

2. Set directions;

3. Mobilize individual commitment;

4. Engender organizational capability.

Pitfalls of the Leadership Attributes Model

Though leadership attributes models, in particular the ARE-DO-KNOW approach, received enormous attention in the past, they have a number of pitfalls. In particular, they reduce leadership improvement to development of leader's attributes only. Results are not emphasized.

Leading Peers ►

Top 10 Tips for Leading Your Peers

1. Let people feel that they are able to make a difference and give them some measures of control over where the group is going.

2. Don’t criticize, don’t blame others for problems. Separate the person from the problem. Blame joint methods, not people.

3. Ask for advice. Explain the purpose of your question and invite your colleagues to participate in the thinking and contribute their thoughts. Make sure your colleagues get credit for helping aim your group’s efforts and creating a joint proposal.

4. Contribute your thoughts and ideas in a way that encourages others to join in the thinking. Ask your colleagues to challenge your thinking and improve on your idea.

5. Don’t advocate one idea. Focus on the desired outcome and look for the best ideas from whatever source.

6. Emphasize benefits of the new behavior or method. Make it attractive if you want to change the way your group works. Design an interesting, active, empowering, and remarkable role for each person that he or she will want to play.

7. Use emotional pictures – a picture may be worth a thousand of words.

8. Encourage your colleagues to invent plans for implementing an idea. Give everyone a hand in shaping the change. Everyone should feel sufficient ownership of the new practice to want it to succeed and to try to make a new method work.

9. Lead by example, model the desired behavior – it is often the best way to explain an idea and to influence others’ behavior.

10. If your colleagues don’t react the way you want them to, acknowledge good reason for their behavior, assume that you are doing something wrong, and improve your contribution accordingly to get the desired result.

Leading a Team ►

1. Provide purpose. Everything starts with vision. You cannot have a real team without one because people will not find the desire to achieve the common goal. The team members will work together only if they can see what they're working toward.

2. Build a star team, not a team of stars. Teach people to cooperate to make a team a winning team, and thus all of them winners. Establish shared values and an environment oriented to trust, joint creativity, and cohesive team effort.

3. Establish shared ownership for the results. Start with yourself – share your own individual results with the team. Shared responsibility is better achieved if the reward system has a significant element that is dependent on the overall outcome.

4. Develop team members to fullest potential. Bring out the best in your people. Lead by setting a good example. Train, coach and provide effective feedback.

5. Make the work interesting and engaging. Create enjoyable work environment. Encourage entrepreneurial creativity, risk-taking, and continuous improvement.

6. Develop a self-managing team. Be a superleader who shows team leaders how to lead themselves. Don't give direct commands or instructions, use questions and coaching instead. Empower people, trust them, rely on their judgment..

7. Motivate and inspire team members. Be enthusiastic, inspire and energize people. Set stretch goals. Recognize and celebrate team and team member accomplishments and exceptional performance

8. Lead and facilitate constructive communication. Communicate in a truthful and believable way. Encourage open communication and improvement suggestions.

9. Monitor, but don't micromanage. Help keep the team focused and on track. Communicate team status, task accomplishment, and direction.

Project Leader ►

Creating and Leading a High-Performing Team

Project management provides a foundation for the art of leadership. The best project managers are also outstanding leaders.

Creating a high-performing team takes commitment on the part of the project leader to lead both the project management and team processes. You need to be a good facilitator, helping the team work through the steps of these processes.

While developing your team and mastering teamwork, you'll need to hold regular team meetings so that team members can monitor progress and solve problems as they arise. You may also want to focus on your team skills, such as: Holding effective meetings; motivating and communicating; providing constructive feedback; resolving conflicts; making team decisions; and recognizing accomplishments and celebrating success.

Evolving Entrepreneurial Role of the Project Manager

Today project leaders have to go beyond the traditional project delivery practices and master the business systems approach. This new system requires thinking of the project as a business enterprise and managing the project as a business venture. Thus you have to consider not only the success of the project itself but also the success of the project outcome. You need to understand how your organization creates value for its major stakeholders – shareholders, customers, and the business team, and also take responsibility for delivering that value.

The new role of a project leader requires an ultimate knowledge of the strategy the project is supporting. The entrepreneurial approach to project management essentially expands two dimensions of the project management process – time and boundaries. Considering the project outcome and its lifecycle expands time beyond the traditional horizon of project completion. Project boundaries are also expanded.

Managerial Leadership ►

Top 10 Tips for Managerial Leadership

1. Provide a purpose that arouses your team’s spirit and enthusiasm and also creates a values fit for your talented people with your mission.

2. Create and communicate an inspiring vision that motivates people to build a bridge to an ardently desired future and heads all them in the same direction.

3. Focus on results. Clarify and stress what results you expect from people rather than how they should get there.

4. Lead by example; practice what you preach, ‘get your hands dirty’ and share risks and the joy with your people.

5. Stretch people’s ability; set stretch goals that inspire people to stretch themselves and promise a great feeling of achievement.

6. Help your people grow and shine; develop them through coaching and training; give constructive feedback that inspires people to act; be open to their ideas.

7. Use team approach; help your people come out with creative solutions; facilitate cooperation and systemic innovation by cross-functional teams; encourage informal and virtual teams.

8. Delegate authority; encourage group decision; avoid close supervision, do not dictate – have faith in the creativity of your people.

9. Communicate openly and honestly; tell your people what you think; have common touch with your people; win their trust.

10. Develop an effective incentive program that motivates people, inspires staff loyalty, raises morale and increases profits. Synergize the three greatest incentives: empower people to do the thing they enjoy doing; use various forms of recognition of people's contributions; provide financial and non-financial rewards.

Entrepreneurial Leader ►

Entrepreneurial Leadership Defined

In the increasingly turbulent and competitive environment business firms face today, a new type of "entrepreneurial" leader distinct from other behavioral forms of managerial leadership is required. Entrepreneurial leadership is leadership that is based on the attitude that the leader is self-employed. Leaders of this type:

• take initiative and act as if they are playing a critical role in the organization rather than a mostly important one and energize their people,

• demonstrate entrepreneurial creativity, search continuously for new opportunities and pursue them,

• take risk, venture into new areas and provide strategic direction and inspiration to their people,

• take responsibility for the failures of their team, learn from these failures and use them as a step to ultimate success and strategic achievement.

Entrepreneurial leadership involves instilling the confidence to think, behave and act with entrepreneurship in the interests of fully realizing the intended purpose of the organization to the beneficial growth of all stakeholders involved.

Key Benefits

Entrepreneurial leadership is not a position, it is a process. The entrepreneurial leader takes responsibility to assist the organization in creating such conditions so that, instead of being controlled, the entrepreneurial organization generates its own order and responds creatively to the environment. This role is not only more productive for the organization, it is liberating for the leader as well. By helping to unleash the creative potential of their organizations, entrepreneurial leaders are unleashing their own.

Leading Change ►

Leadership Perpetuum Mobile:

Change creates leaders, leaders create change.

Lead Change

Successful change requires leadership. When change fails to occur as planned, the cause is often to be found at a deeper level, rooted in the inappropriate behavior, beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions of would-be leaders.

Leadership is all about the process of change: how to stay ahead of it, master it, benefit from the opportunities it brings. The best leaders strike first by taking the offensive against economic cycles, market trends, and competitors. They discover the most effective ways for achieving significant change.

Leading, Not Managing

The amount of change in organizations has grown tremendously over the past decades, and the rate of change will only accelerate in the years to come. No wonder change, and leadership through change, are foremost concerns of CEOs today.

Twenty-first century business change must overcome overmanaged and underled cultures. Because management deals mostly with the status quo and leadership deals mostly with change, organizations have to become much more skilled at creating leaders.

Yes, managing change is important. Competent management is required to keep change efforts on track. But for most organizations, the much bigger challenge is leading change. Only leadership can blast through the many sources of corporate inertia and resistance to change. Only leadership can motivate new actions needed to alter behavior in any significant way. Only leadership can change the organizational culture in order to get change to stick.

Leading Innovation and Growth ►

Leading the Jazz of Innovation: Top 10 Tips

1. Provide strategic alignment. Create an inspiring vision and launch a crusade. Link the innovation strategy with corporate vision, goals, objectives, and strategy.

2. Define the innovation process publicly. Help people understand how they fit into the system as a whole. Document your innovation process explicitly via maps and charts.

3. Establish a creative chaos environment to inspire creativity and trigger accidental discoveries. Find the right balance between order and chaos.

4. Challenge assumptions. Think outside-the-box. Ask searching questions "Why?" and "What If?" to identify hidden problems and opportunities. Brainstorm every day.

5. Cross-pollinate ideas. Establish diverse cross-functional innovation teams. Encourage comments and ideas. Inspire advocates and critics. Change hats to evaluate ideas.

6. Stimulate and reward idea generation. People want to know their ideas make a difference. Recognition encourages people to participate and make contributions.

7. Experiment to pursue opportunities, acquire new skills, learn from feedback and discover new opportunities. Create prototypes to visualize and test your ideas, inspire new ideas.

8. Allow freedom to fail. Failure provides a great learning opportunity and should be viewed as very lifeblood of success. Learn from failures, regroup, and start again more intelligently.

9. Measure the progress to take a corrective action and accelerate the pace of ideas to implementation.

10. Make business fun to make people excited about what they are doing, working as a team, and tackling new challenges.

Be the best! Achieve impossible!

If you stop learning, you stop creating history and become history.

Vadim Kotelnikov

Inventor of Business e-Coach

Founder of Leader360

Author of Smart Leader • 12 Leadership Roles • Entrepreneurial Leadership

Co-founder of Innompics • Cimcoin • eRaritet