The Las Vegas Rescue Mission was the site of our July service event. Joining the Aegis Learning team was Dave Newton, Renee Newton, Cari Zobrist, Teresa Lattin and Robert Rippee.
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Congratulations to the awesome group of leaders from Carnival Cruise Lines for completing Leadership IMPACT.
Tremendous enthusiasm, spirit and a great heart for leadership. Well done Carnival Cruise Lines. Well done.
Recently, a 2015 “Forbes” article (Horoszowski,M. 29 March, 2015. Forbes.com) resurfaced on various social media sights, highlighting the benefits of volunteering. Despite its age, the message still rings true. Reading this article got me thinking about how volunteering can also expand our leadership skills, and may provide us with a real-life laboratory to test out new skills and competencies in order to hen transfer them back to the workplace.
We all know that a critical leadership skill is time management; if you cannot manage yourself, then you surely cannot lead others. So if “volunteering makes you feel like you have more time” then I’m in! (and from personal experience, as counterintuitive as it sounds, this is true!) ….so how is it possible to pack in more than 24 hours in a day and still manage to balance all the demands of career / family / self-care and now volunteering? The answer is by appearing to be in control and not allowing stress to take over your life. Also if you are working for a cause that is truly your passion, then it is not “stressful” rather it is truly a joy.
So find your passion. Whatever that may be; volunteer with your kid’s PTA. Volunteer at the local soup kitchen; take the kids and have them serve the homeless on a holiday. Join a Church committee on whatever topic is of interest. Spend time at the local animal shelter. Become active in your professional association and mentor a promising protégée or teach a class. Hold a FUNraiser and walk or run for ___(insert your favorite charity here) ____ . Whatever your area of interest, these groups welcome new volunteers; and if you are already part of a non-profit or charity organization, then get more involved by joining the leadership team. Whatever it is, find your passion. You may say “I don’t have time to volunteer” that’s true, none of us do; however, time management is as simple as managing priorities; we make time for those things that are a priority.
Practice leadership skills that you may not have an opportunity to apply in the workplace. Maybe you are an independent contributor and do not have any direct reports or no longer manage a process. First, you need to reassess your value and realize that you are more important than you may realize. Take on some new responsibilities in a volunteer capacity; but be careful, you may even learn a new skill set along the way. Even if you’ve never been a “supervisor,” you may find yourself in a “leadership” role and have to be the boss for the first time ever. An interesting dynamic with volunteers is that like you, no one is compensated to be there, and your leadership skills may really be put to the test.
Volunteers working together all share the same core “cause” or passion in common, whatever that is; keep the strategic goal in focus. This is similar to the workplace, the primary difference being the paycheck and individual’s motivation. In a volunteer setting, there is a high degree of certainty that everyone is there because they want to help, rather than to earn a wage. Everyone is working together towards the same ultimate goal and leadership can and should use that to “rally the troops” when necessary. Keep in mind that volunteer leadership is driven by communication, influence, and relationships, not power and fear. Try this same approach in the workplace; it works!
Still not convinced? Some other great reasons to volunteer are to use this setting as a “proving ground” even if just to yourself, to practice and perfect your leadership skills; for example, challenge yourself to speak in public, or work on a project that will teach you a new skill set; what have you got to lose?. Then those skills are transferrable to the workplace. And at the same time you are giving back to the community, expanding your network (i.e. influence) meeting net people, our and might just enjoy yourself.
(And by the way, it looks great on a resume)
As chief learning officer for Aegis Learning, Linda Florence is an advocate for continued education and quality professional growth.
Linda is a talented facilitator and coach and passionate about the causes she support locally and nationally.
Do little things matter? Do style and format matter? Does the packaging affect the quality of a product? Does grammar matter?
The easy answer to those is yes, yes, they do.
Little things matter but they never will trump the overall delivery of a project, product or service. Think for a moment about proposal for a system change that will have a million-dollar positive impact on the organization, make people’s life easier and help you deliver much better service to your customer. The core content of this proposal is solid. The numbers are right.
But, there is a typo on page 4. The wrong form of the word there is used. There are really no interesting graphics to appeal to visual people. The paragraphs are too long and ramble. The style makes the proposal hard to look at and read. Nothing interesting or sexy or appealing in this document.
Will that have an impact? Absolutely it will. Intuitively, this strikes many of you as wrong but unfortunately, style, details and presentation quality matter. It explains why neatly packaged name brands consistently outsell the same product sold generically.
Effective leaders need to strike a balance between overall effectiveness and attention to quality. When this balance is out of whack, there are two possible outcomes. If effectiveness trumps quality, poorly appearing items will appear and adversely impact the image of the organization. If there is overemphasis on quality, opportunities and market share will be lost. This balance is not a nice neat little 50/50 split either. It depends on the nature of your product or service, core values and corporate culture.
For a leader to have a quality focus, you must engage in a couple of key strategies. Firstly, you must clearly articulate your expectations. Tell your team what you expect and what you will clearly kick back to them as unacceptable. Provide them with examples of high quality and examples of poor quality. Provide them with templates of documents and standards that you view as quality work.
The second strategy becomes a matter of great judgment for leaders. A quality focused leader must not be afraid to return a piece of work to its author or architect when it does not meet the stated standard of quality. Far too many leaders “clean up” or edit projects prior to final delivery rather that have the originator make the changes. Unfortunately, that sends the message poor work is fine, because the leader will always fix it up. It will also condition your team members to continue to supply you with inferior quality work.
Where this becomes a matter of judgment and challenge is when quality abuts a deadline. I would love to produce more quality but the deadline is this afternoon. Many times, this creates a significant compromise in the quality of work.
To validate your judgment, you need to know your organization’s values. Is there more emphasis placed on speed or quality. Where is there higher impact, a missed deadline or poor quality? You must make this decision. You may also have to have a courageous conversation and tell someone a deadline will be missed because the quality was not acceptable. Certainly, not an easy conversation, but a necessary conversation none the less.
One final note about quality. As you model both your tolerance for quality and quality of your own efforts, your team will follow that example.
Tim Schneider is the founder of Aegis Learning and has been working with teams and leaders for 25 years. He generates results, impact and his sole focus is your success.
He is the author of The Ten Competencies of Outstanding Leadership and Beyond Engagement and a widely sought speaker, training facilitator and individual development coach.
There are certainly more important relationships than your training and organizational development provider. Your doctor. Your dentist. Your tax professional to name a few.
But don’t undervalue the need to perform due diligence and pick a solid training and organizational development provider. These are people that you are trusting with your most valued asset, your team. Slick graphics and a cool website rarely tell a story of true effectiveness. Some of the best organizational development people in the world have very small footprints on social media, the internet and would never be considered flashy but their value is unsurpassed.
Polly Walker lead the Aegis Cares effort to gather socks and underwear for the Las Vegas Rescue Mission. These core essentials and very meaningful to the homeless population in Nevada and we were thrilled to be able to help.
Special thanks to Ameriprise Insurance, the Boulder City Rotary Club and John Chase for their donations to this great cause.
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This is a great time to pause and say:
Thank you to our incredible customers. Thank you to the Aegis Learning team. Thank you to our prior participants that stayed connected with us. Thank you to our vendor partners.
We are incredibly grateful for the support and continued trust in us to provide the training, coaching and other professional development that you have come to expect in the last 25 years.
Tim Schneider
Aegis Learning
One of our commitments to you, our customers and friends, is to continually provide you with useable and easy to access learning content.
To that end, we have just finished adding the following tools to the resource tab of www.discoveraegis.com:
Video Library
Newsletter Archive and Library
Inspiration Library
Article Library
And the best part of all these great follow-up and refresher tools?
They are FREE. No registration required. Nothing. Just use and enjoy. And new content is being added every week.
Two other quick points of note include an invitation to read Polly Walker’s great piece on optimism and look for three articles from Teresa Lowry in the following weeks. Upon conclusion of our Healthy Workplace series, Matt Zobrist will take a turn in front of the camera with an awesome series about mentoring.
Thank you for your continued support and have a great week.
Tim Schneider
Aegis Learning