Leadership – Communication Leaders
Published April 6, 2012 | 
Baseball is life… the rest is just details!
Leadership Lessons of Baseball
Let the coach, coach, and most importantly, refrain from giving your child advice when he or she is playing.
Let’s face it, effective leadership in a small business requires understanding and knowledge about how to communicate effectively with all elements of the organization, including employees, other managers, customers and investors. Each unique group may require a completely different communication and leadership style. Business leaders have to be able to adapt their style and methods based on the specific group they are communicating with at the time. Needless to say, effective leadership communication skills are an extremely important aspect of any leader’s portfolio of both skills and experience.
Communication is both verbal and nonverbal with verbal communication the most obvious form of communication. However, most business leaders don’t know and understand what research has shown, and that is people pay much less attention to the words that are said with much more attention focus on the actions and nonverbal signals and cues that go together with those words.
You should understand that nonverbal cues include body posture, facial expressions, use of hand motions and even eye movements. It’s simply your body language, leaders should always strive to carefully matchup their nonverbal signals and cues to their words. 
Trust me that when you do so, you instantly become more believable and thereby more effective.
Listening is an incredibly important ability and integral aspect of communication. Your active listening should remain a constant goal, and as the leader, focus on both the verbal and nonverbal language of whoever is speaking. Now, focused active listening entails concentration only on the speaker and blocking out or ignoring any outside interruptions or distractions, including your very own wandering thoughts or possible responses. As an active listener, you should also avoid needless interruptions, giving the speaker time to finish, show you are listening by simply doing things including nodding and smiling, and even reflect or paraphrase back to verify your understanding.
Remember the old saying “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it” that rings true for every highly-effective business leader that’s keenly aware of the necessity of effective communication and its impact on the results of their leadership. 
Possessing highly developed and valuable communication skills contribute greatly to your leadership skills because it enables one to express ideas successfully.
In addition, effective verbal and non-verbal communication makes it easier to establish credibility during message delivery. Your articulation, voice, language, fluency, listening and writing skills, as well as the use of gestures are dynamic forceful elements that serve to enhance your leadership.
This is for you if your business has a lot of “moving parts” or several levels of management. For instance, if a manager tells an employee/team member one thing, you have to be careful not to tell that employee/team member information that may be conflicting. Effective communication allows for management to simply be on the same page, and is unquestionably a winning strategy.
Leadership – Guiding Leaders
Published April 5, 2012 | In baseball and business, you always strive for consistency, not to worrying excessively about the numbers. Dwelling only on statistics makes one shortsighted. The principle is that if you aim for consistency of excellence and precision, the numbers and success will be there at the end.
Leadership Lessons of Baseball
You should always allow your child to set their own goals and play the game for himself/herself, and for the rich life experience the game can deliver. As an extremely vital element of your child’s life, you should be your child’s “safe haven,” by providing him or her “complete and unconditional” support and validation, regardless of how well he or she performs in any game.
As an entrepreneur and business leader, you should establish guiding principles that influence critical decisions you make in both your business and personal life. How you treat your team members and others you interact with will directly reflect the principles you formally or informally establish.
You probably already have some principles that you will continue to build on and improve with time. And, when you begin to understand and recognize the principles you already have, you will begin to observe traits and principles of other leaders, adding the ones you consider most valuable. Your foundation of main beliefs and ethics will speak to what you value, look for and reward. It will help form and align your team.
To help enlighten and increase understanding, let’s look at some of the foundational guiding principles I continue to build on.
Integrity, trust and degree of character always matter most.
Demonstrate value and consequence, rewarding stewardship in action. “Me first” behavior is anathema never to be tolerated.
Maintain a high-level reputation of easiness to do business with at all times, and own any issues until successful resolution is achieved.
Every team member is a “Champion,” informed and committed.
Processes, decisions, and activities should be as close to team members and clientele as possible.
Keep EVERYTHING as simple as possible, and simplification is dynamic and never stops.
Maintain a strong penchant-for-action and processes that drive results. You empower yourself, so do something and improve, do something and improve… succeed.
Insist on a business environment of no surprises. Every team member knows exactly where they stand at all times.
Be straightforward, plain-spoken and honest… always.
Execute the plan and processes perfectly… always.
Always lead the rest… the precise and correct way.
You want to build a value system and a guide for engagement and execution that is foundational, empowering, aspiring to greatness, and operational.
Think of your Guiding Principles as the guardrails for your team to operate within. Once they fully understand them, they should be able to operate with independence on the majority of situations they encounter, and you prepare them for. 
For occasions when they aren’t sure on the course of action to take, then consult your guiding principles. The answer is there, and you can trust them to make the right decision, if they use the tried and tested foundational principles.
Effective leaders take a key step towards excellence by allowing their employees to set goals. Of course, those goals certainly need to align with the goals of the organization. But your businesses team members are much more process-oriented and committed to the achievement of goals and objectives they have a role in establishing.
Leadership – Positive Role Model Leaders
Published April 4, 2012 | Like baseball, business gives everyone a chance to do extremely well, and not just be as good as someone else may be, but better than someone else. This is the nature of man, and the name of the game in both baseball and business.
Leadership Lessons of Baseball
Be a positive role model by always displaying good sportsmanship to coaches, officials, opponents, your child’s teammates and their parents.
It is important to understand that leaders have to lead by example, which is a key ingredient to the creation of the positive atmosphere required to encourage others including team members to give their 110 percent effort and put together the best team possible. It should go without saying, that a team is only a team if team members “act like a team.” Otherwise you have just gathered a bunch of individuals doing their own individual thing for themselves.
The main point is that more than ever, it is vitally necessary that leaders demonstrate directly, by way of their actions and behavior, significantly encouraging ways that can easily and clearly demonstrate their passions, beliefs and essential requirements in creating a genuine environment of team-based collaboration and teamwork.
The true leader should always realize that through all of his or her actions, to maintain the focused mind-set that the whole is always better than the sum of the parts.
It is essential that because of this, truly effective leaders create an environment where members of the team are willing to bind together in their interactions.
The crucially important real-world example emerges from the simple act of giving of yourself to the team so that people know by observation that you are with them, not only in words but also in action.
Highly-effective leaders always set real examples that others both can and will follow. Consequently, leading by example is imperative for highly-successful teams. It is also essential that leaders, through their actions each day, model the sought-after emotions of “team ownership and commitment” to the business organization while taking on a high-level of personal accountability for decisions. In other words and simply put, to be most effective, leaders must perform to the same level and way that they ask employees/team members to perform.
To be a great leader you need to clearly understand that your actions and responses to situations have an enormous and direct impact on the performance of those that are aware and paying attention to your conduct. So, in order to get others significantly engaged in following their leadership, and provide motivation for the team members and their resulting engagement, effective leaders are able to develop and implement creative processes and practices that help lead and effectively encourage others to feel the high-level of passion required for what they do and what they believe in.
Every effective business leader is a positive role model. It is crucial to clearly understand that if you fail to act in the manner which you’d like your employees to conduct themselves, they won’t.
Leadership – In Touch Leaders
Published April 3, 2012 | In both baseball and life, every day is a new opportunity. You can both build and expand on the successes enjoyed yesterday, or put the past failures behind, learn from them, and simply start over again. That’s the way life is, and with a brand new game every day, that’s the way of baseball… baseball imitating life, imitating baseball.
Leadership Lessons of Baseball
Attend games whenever you can because your attendance is always critical to everything your child does, but if you can’t attend, then you should specifically ask your child about their experience, not whether the game was won or lost, or even what the score was. Don’t worry, as they will let you know, after you inquire more importantly to the experience.
To Keep in Touch with Team Members, Leaders must Remember
Leaders must be close enough to touch them, and this doesn’t mean nearby or nearness, this means they must be close expressively and emotionally. A great way to achieve and maintain this “touch,” is when you communicate with someone whether or not you began the communication “thread,” be sure and save a note about what was said, how their life was going, and any other important facts you want to be able to recall. This way you can call to mind or evoke the information the next time you meet with them.
Leaders must touch their hearts and minds, as it would be an enormous blunder if a leader’s main or only focus is simply on a team member’s production or work issues. When a leader can successfully connect with a member’s heart, and then mind, that member will be essentially fundamentally motivated to be more productive through greater effort for the organization, purely because the organization values them.
Leaders must encourage them to touch the hearts and minds of other team members, since there’s not enough time in the day for leaders, nor do they have the energy required to invest in all of the team members. Those who are being invested should always be encouraged to take that investment and energy and pass it on or project it onto other team members. This allows a leader’s investment to be both spread exponentially, and experience synergistic results.
Great leaders make it a point to completely understand what’s going on throughout the workplace. They walk around and attend meetings, listening all the while, and are in touch with all their team members to deeply understand how EVERYTHING is going.
Leadership – Supportive Leaders
Published April 2, 2012 | Baseball is one of only a few fields of a man’s effort where he can succeed three times out of ten and be considered accomplished and highly-successful, the other is business.
Leadership Lessons of Baseball
If you have kids like mine, they play sports and participate in all types of athletic activities.
I’ve either played or been deeply involved in sports of all kinds for most of my life, from a high-school athlete to martial arts, to fitness training, to Little League baseball. It’s quite safe to say that I’m a huge proponent of kids playing sports.
Baseball in particular teaches us lessons that can be directly applied, and serve as a great guide for being an effective leader in both business and life. Let me show you why…
Be supportive of your child by giving encouragement and showing an interest in his or her team.
Supportive Leadership has become extremely powerful in today’s economy where relationships have become a force in business success from employee to consumer relations, and is founded on the principle that leaders can positively influence and motivate followers to support a common goal of successful results. Understand that this leadership style does not believe in issuing followers a series of directives, orders or commands. 
Rather, realizing their importance in motivating employees/team members supportive leaders want to build and encourage focused relationships with each team member, create a trusting and genuinely authentic bond that makes each individual feel like they are appreciated and highly-valued.
Accordingly, supportive leadership, by way of sustaining the positive relationships with team members who in turn strive with their best and most effective efforts, not only continues supporting the business leader, but in turn, their support will successfully accomplish the leader’s and team goals.
Remember, that as the leader of your business, you need to give frequent support through encouragement and genuine interest in your employees, which in turn serves to motivate them and directly boost their performance.