When should you be Determined versus Flexible?

Folklore contains numerous sayings underpinning the idea that leadership needs to be firm, decisive and above all, resolute.

The myth goes that changing your mind is a sign of weakness and it leads to vacillation when you and a team are working to a set of objectives.

However, how valid is that model?

As any structured leadership training will confirm, much work needs to be done by way of analysis prior to an important decision being made. Decisions that are made in haste are frequently repented at leisure. Yet once all the analysis has been completed, sometimes a leader needs to make a decision and do everything in their power to help ensure that it proves to be the correct one.

It is true that leaders who suffer from constant crises of confidence will be inclined to keep changing their mind and that encourages others around them to wonder whether there is a firm hand on the tiller.

There is though, a significant danger in taking the ‘strong determined leadership’ stereotype too far.

One of the key attributes of a successful leader is also the ability to recognise that, in spite of all attempts to prevent it happening, a wrong decision has been made. This can sometimes be painful to accept and perhaps result in some personal reputation damage but it is essential to have the courage to recognise that a bad decision has been made and to take steps to correct it with the minimum impact possible on whatever the enterprise is.

Leaders who lack this attribute can become guilty of fixation and egoism to the extent that they are incapable of recognizing that they are leading things in the wrong direction. That’s sometimes best more plainly described as pig-headedness.

Sometimes a bad decision cannot be corrected by injecting more resource or more energy in to make it right. It simply has to be either reversed or a radically different decision made to replace it.

Being able to critically self-evaluate your own decisions and identify those that are not working out is a prime characteristic of mature leadership.

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Stakeholder Management - Stars Institute of Learning and Development

Leadership is often discussed in the context of things such as providing a role model for other people in the team, delegation, effective decision making, dealing with performance issues and so on.  

In all these areas there is an implication of lateral or downwards leadership in the context of what is normally the traditional pyramidal shape to team structure.

However much this team structure is being questioned in favour of a matrix management models, the reality of life is that it still continues to be by far the commonest collective enterprise structure around.

Yet what is sometimes overlooked is that the effective leader also typically has a relationship with stakeholders.  Sometimes they may be the people who are sponsoring or expecting to get some benefit out of the activity concerned and who expect to have a strategic controlling interest as a result.

In other cases the relationship may be rather more conventional and simpler, being upwards to an immediate boss or two.

What this means is that an aboriginal and Torres islander leadership development programme may need to examine some of the techniques available for effective upwards leadership.  

To take just one example, typically the stakeholders, sponsors or steering group associated with any sort of activity will expect to be kept fully informed by the activity leader.  That includes being made aware of the key metrics associated with the activity and any actions being taken to address issues.  Needless to say, they will also expect to be kept fully aware of progress against plan.

Little is more likely to undermine the confidence of the stakeholders in an activity than when they have to go looking for information about what is going on as opposed to having it presented to them in a cohesive and timely fashion.

So, exemplary leadership skills are not just about being a centre of visible excellence for other people in your immediate team.  It also involves the need to manage a public relations and executive management communication strategy on behalf of the team as well. 

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How Do You Identify What’s Important?

Almost every individual occasionally has conflicting demands for their attention and need to prioritise where they spend their time as a result.

This, of course, isn’t easy!     

Even in our private lives, trying to juggle our time can be a major challenge and in a professional environment it can be 10 times harder.

There are a number of techniques that can be used to try and help identify which of the demands on your attention are in fact those that are critically important and which can be at least temporarily deferred to second-priority status.  In leadership development programmes this is called, technically, an impact assessment.  It is all about trying to identify those things where you have the greatest risks or the greatest opportunities and which you should attend to first of all.

Space doesn’t permit a quick run through of the technique but if you do find yourself needing to sort things out, here are a few dangers you may need to guard against. 

1.    The “He who shouts loudest” syndrome.  All of us may be subconsciously inclined to give priority to someone who is making a lot of noise about their particular issue.  It may not, in reality, be that important.

2.    Your pet subjects or friends.  Giving priority to an activity because it is one you are particularly interested in above all others or because you like the person concerned, might not be an objective decision.

3.    Brownie points.  Try to avoid assuming something should be given top priority simply because it is the one that offers you the most scope for personal positive publicity.

4.    Easy-peasy.  We are all vulnerable to subconsciously parking the difficult challenges and dealing with the easy ones.

Don’t risk making decisions that you will subsequently regret based upon some of the above influences.  Instead, get yourself on a leadership development course and learn some of the techniques associated with identifying priorities.   

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Youth Leadership Development and Training - What Motivates People To Give 100%?

It is possibly stating the obvious to suggest that different things motivate different people.
For example, there is a widespread perception that money or some other form of material reward is the prime motivator for many people in terms of giving 100% effort rather than something less.

It sometimes surprises people to know that numerous studies have shown that this belief is significantly mistaken. In fact, some of the most motivated people around who are always willing to go that little bit extra are not those who will necessarily receive any sort of material benefit from doing so.

You only have to consider the example of charity workers and the phenomenal hours and effort they put in, often for no monetary reward whatsoever, to see the truth of that statement.

In fact, as many indigenous leadership programmes seek to show, the strongest and most compelling motivation often comes from inside the person. To put it another way, bundles of cash and morale-boosting speeches often aren’t quite as effective as some may think.

What is usually important in getting people to stretch themselves that bit further and to start to fulfil their full potential is to get their comprehension of a set of objectives and their emotional commitment to the importance of achieving them. In the case of most people, once they understand why something is being done and emotionally commit to its validity, then their self-motivation will be far stronger than anything possible as a result of financial incentives.

This inevitably says something about the importance of effective communication at leadership level. If a leader is unable to clearly encapsulate and articulate why something needs to be done and what is needed of an individual to help achieve it, then they are unlikely to ever get the best out of the people they are working with.

That’s why many leadership development programs place great emphasis on inter-personal skills and associated communication.

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How do You Deal with somebody who is Disruptive?

It’s perhaps every leader’s nightmare – an associate or somebody in the team who is proving to be disruptive in one way or another.

In fact, this can even occasionally be encountered on things such as training and development courses.

Disruption can come in many shapes and forms. In some cases it may appear to be directed at attempting to undermine the leader or presenter by constantly suggesting, with little justification, that he or she is mistaken. In other instances it might be an intentional disconnecting from the session or enterprise and a refusal to play a contributory and participatory role in it.  

Perhaps the first thing to try and do is to ascertain the probable motivations behind the disruption. That can be far from easy but if the person is involved in something that is outside their normal routine, are they there because they wish to be or because someone else has told them they must? If it’s the latter, that can cause resentment.

In other situations the motivation may simply be a misguided sense of intellectual challenge.  That often manifests itself in attempts to ask consistently difficult and pointed questions of the leader. This can often be a symptom that the individual concerned feels frustrated with their role in life or in the specific activity underway.

Of course, no indigenous leadership program can provide a single answer as to how to deal with this. Each individual situation will have its own unique parameters that need to be assessed.

The best thing to do is to try to get the person to engage productively in the session and confrontation or recrimination should be avoided at all costs.  Public squabbling usually serves no purpose other than to make others feel uncomfortable.

If the position cannot be handled subtly within the team or session, it may be necessary to take the individual quietly and discreetly to one side during the coffee break and have a heart-to-heart with them to ascertain quite what’s going on and what can be done about it.

Under no circumstances should the problem simply be ignored though, as a poor attitude and team spirit can become infectious if it is not dealt with quickly and effectively.

For, more related articles, kindly visit Youth Leadership Development Website.

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TOP TIPS for Keeping People’s Attention!

If you are running any form of seminar, lecture, workshop, training course or youth leadership development program, keeping the attention of your audience can sometimes be a challenge.


Even if the attendees are attending voluntarily, there are some aspects of human psychology you need to be aware of if you are to avoid people potentially mentally ‘switching off’ and disengaging.

•    If you are presenting something, try not to talk for more than 20 minutes without some sort of break to give people a change from needing to listen to just one voice.

•    Try to throw the session opened to questions, comments or group exercises at least once every 30 minutes.  This can help avoid people mentally dozing off.

•    It is an extremely good idea to stop for some sort of physical out-of-the-room break every 45-60 minutes.  Try to get people on their feet and moving around for a coffee or something else, even if only for 5 minutes before the session re-starts. It gets the blood oxygen flowing.

•    Try to speak spontaneously rather than reading verbatim from prepared notes. 

•    Make sure you use plenty of visual or other aids.  Looking at somebody’s face and listening to them speak for extended periods can be extremely tiring.  Projections, flip charts, and other graphical aidsall help stimulate people’s visual interest.

•    Ask the odd spontaneous question.  This isn’t meant to intimidate people and your questions should be open without a right or wrong answer.  It is an old technique but if delegates suspect they may be engaged with a question at any time it can be effective in keeping their adrenaline levels up.

•    Keep plenty of fresh air circulating.

•    Share the podium and avoid ‘grandstanding’.  A change of face, voice and delivery style can help freshen up a session and stop attendees becoming stale.

These are all basic tips but can be very useful in helping to keep your youth leadership development program or other sessions on course and delegates firing on all cylinders! 

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What’s stopping you Achieving Your Full Potential?

One of the commonest things encountered by people working in developing human potential is individuals who have low self-esteem.

This can be manifest in a number of different ways but one of the commonest is a tendency to view potential outcomes with an unrealistic degree of pessimism or to engage in self-deprecation with an associated “can’t do” mentality.

Why is this so regularly encountered, particularly in programmes designed to assist in Aboriginal and Torres Islander leadership development?

Well, there is no one single answer because these problems can arise in people due to a number of different causes, though what is often found is that they have their origin back in childhood, adolescence or teenage years.

Just a sample of some the things that can introduce such self-inflicted negativism about your capabilities include:

1.    Body image problems

2.  Parental and/or social conditioning encouraging you to “recognise your place” in the world

3.    Failing to see your own strengths and to deploy them accordingly

4.    Being forced to participate in activities based upon somebody else’s terms of reference rather than your own

5.   Having tried and failed in the past, leading to assumptions that failure is an inevitable outcome of your activities

6.    A media culture that portrays beauty and universal high achievement as being the norm for all, which creates feelings of inferiority.

7.    Personal relationship challenges and failures

8.    Etc.

The difficulty is that we live in a prevailing culture which glorifies competition and achievement.  On a day-to-day basis, we are all conditioned by the electronic environment surrounding us into believing that success in all things is constantly achievable for large numbers of people who society sees as ‘winning material’.

Some people are able to see through the fallacy of such views and they refuse to allow themselves to be constrained by them.

Other individuals seem to find that more challenging but they can be helped to throw off the oppressive weight of these constraints with appropriate coaching. The difference such development can make to individuals with low self-esteem can be phenomenal. 

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