How to conduct a mid-year review

Now as June is well on the way, it's time to consider our mid-year reviews. Our teams will work at their best when we keep them on track to fulfill their goals and drive our dream performance.

Where to start, I find the best way to do this is to take the members goals and run a quick SWOT over the ideas. Which goals are on track, which ones have fallen by the way-side.
Rate each goal, is this looking to be complete in a strong and successful manner?, Check each goal to see if there are any weaknesses showing through, is the content up to standard, is this goal going to make it by the end of the year. Take a look at each goal  have new opportunities presented themselves - maybe to stretch this goal. Are there any threats to any of the goals. What would be the impact  if this goal is not met?

Now that  you have an appreciation of the team member and where they sit with this goal, it's time to set some quiet time with the member and work through it. Be sure to give your member some time and advise them that you wish go through their goals.

Arrange a quiet place and make sure there will be no interruption. Firstly ask the member how they think their overall performance is going.  Be sure to carefully listen and DO NOT interrupt. Now ask the member the go through each goal and critically assess their own performance, ask what's going well and what are you struggling with? Again be sure to listen carefully and again Do NOT interrupt.

Now it's time to stop and way up your own appreciation and what your team member has said. Be sure to identify all the areas that you agree the goals are on track, be sure to praise any great work that has been done to date. If there are any areas that are behind, quickly asses these and choose only three that have the potential for the best gain and suggest these are lagging and one or two things that may bring them back on track. ask some questions to ensure your team member is clear what you are proposing.

As the team leaders it is up to us to lead by taking a careful and measured approach to evaluating our mid-year performance of our team members we can ensure our team is producing great work and achieving the goals for the year.

Improving your skills as a leader

If you've followed my journey you will see the year is well and truly on the way with our first priorities to get our team sorted out with their goals and development. This shouldn't stop now, if things are going to plan we should spend a some time doing a quick SWAT and determining what is it that I as the leader of this team need to do to develop and improve my leadership skills.

I try to set myself a goal each quarter to read one good book about leadership. If you concentrate on the content and look for ways it could apply to your workplace and your team, there are always tricks and tips you can see to apply yourself and improve some aspect of your leadership. I've read a couple of John Maxwell books and always come away with some ideas to apply to my team.


This book is not too long yet still filled with some solid content. I found when I read the book some ideas jumped straight out at me, yet I was very surprised that later on when I reflected on some things that had not gone particularly well, some words of wisdom came back to me for consideration on how I might handle the situation better next time.

Sometimes we are so caught up in doing what we need to do on a daily basis we stop making the time to develop some aspect of ourself that we can apply into the future.

It is very important we as the leaders of the team ensure that not only is the team blossoming  but also that we are moving to a better state within our own capabilities and skills. As we move forward with our team we all benefit and our team is better postioned to an even greater job into the future.

Cross training to strengthen your team

As the year gets well and truly underway, now is the time to look at how you can strengthen your team.

Take a few moments and look at all the tasks your team has to complete over the year, write these down in a list leaving three lines between each entry.

Next take a look at all your team members and match a name against each entry as the main person to complete this task. From here work through the list again and find a backup person to each task. Finally work through the list again looking for alternate backup people who could do this task.

The important step now is to look through each of your backup people and rate them on their capability to do their backup task, anyone who score less than seven out of ten you need to highlight.

Analyse your list and look for the area you just identified as a weakness in the depth of your teams capabilities. Consider the impact to your team if the principal person got sick or left your team.

Now it's time to earn your money, talk to each member you have identified and come up with an action plan to get them cross-trained to a higher level of competency. Some members will resist while some will see it as an opportunity to grow. Its your job to ensure that by half-way through the year you have covered all these gaps.

As the year progresses look to exercise your backup people from time to time to ensure they keep their skills up to an acceptable level. Be sure to provide feedback as each one of these backup people go through their paces and make sure they know why they are doing this.

By ensuring our teams are balanced with a good level of cross-skilling our team will develop a better appreciation of the other team members and what they do, but also you will have a far greater team with depths of skillful people to call on.

Time for some Team Maintenance

When is the last time you spent some serious time on your team members. As the leaders of our teams it's important we take some time out of our schedule to look at team maintenance.

So what is team maintenance? Team maintenance, just like other forms of maintenance - it is looking over our team with a fine-tooth comb and applying any maintenance fixes now before we have any breakdowns.

Lets analyse each member of our team and give them a rating on:

performances, such as output and creativity,

behaviours, such as team cohesiveness, happy disposition, involvement, and motivation.

What we need to look for are any marked signals of improvement or falling standards.

By looking to see how our team members are performing and behaving we can spot any changes, once changes are identified we need to drill in and consider what is/was the cause and effect.

As good leaders with this early analyse we can spot these changes up and we can take decisive action to address any issue to bring our team back on track.

With some regions in the world starting to see signs of recovery, now is an important time to ensure our teams are happy and motivated. If we fail to take action we risk our team members walking out the door as opportunities arise.

Keeping your goals on track

So September has just rolled in, time to go back and study this years' goals.
What I like about doing this as the third quarter closes, is we can get a really good idea how our run-rate is going and yet we still have three months to redress any areas that slipped away.

So lets get to work, firstly take a trip down memory lane and revise your mission statement - what is it that I'm to do!

Now take each goal and analyse your progress are you on-target ahead or sadly in arrears. Put those that are on target or ahead aside and lets look at those that are amiss.

Pull this goal apart one bit at a time, try to find out why it is in such a state, were some of our assumptions wrong? was expected support sadly missing? Did we push it aside as it was a bit to tough?

Once you have a list of deficiencies, now address each one with an action plan, how can you drum up the support you need, how can you get some more sales/prospects in front of you. These actions plans are what's going to get you back on track to accomplish your years plan. Make them detailed, put dates on them for a finish!

Reviewing your yearly plan is a job every good leader must do, not only does it help you keep track of your goals it gives momentum to get in and correct things before the end of the year.

Chart your leadership career path

As a Leader we are always thinking about how to improve our team, through maintaining the morale, offering challenging work, looking for opportunities to grow your team members. But have you stopped to take a look at your own path. You need to take control and through careful planning achieve your career goals too. As you grow you become more valuable and your career opportunities will blossom.

This may sound a little corny but you need to come up with a plan so you always know what the next step is and what you should be doing to get there. Here's a simple three step plan to get you started.

Step One. What's my current situation? Sometimes this is hard to gauge. Sit down and pretend you met a guy at the bar and you hit it off. At the end of the night he says " Hey I'm really glad we met I'd like you to come and work for my company"! with that he gives you his business card and says send me you CV by the end of the week I'm sure we have an opening for you". Get over the shock and sit down and write you CV. Be sure to be honest and draft away.

Step two. What's the future for me? Again this is tough but lots of people just wander through life and have no real goal they are aspiring towards. Well how do we start this one? This time pretend you're at a different bar and you meet someone who is a prospective partner. Tell me about yourself and where you'll be in five and ten years time? By stepping back from today and focusing on an interim and a long term goal it will help to clarify the "End Point" for our exercise.

Step three. Stand up your CV against your interim and long term goal, take note of the Delta areas. Maybe some of the following questions might fall out at you.

Should I look for work experience in another function, industry to round out my skills?

Should I attend some retraining or upskilling of my professional qualifications?

Should I transfer - even at a lower rate - to get into the area I want to be in?

Should I find a mentor to provide some advice from a different perspective?

There maybe lots of other questions and areas you need to focus on to get onto or turbo charge your path to your goals.

Some tips to help you along the way.
Every job you ever have is an opportunity for you to increase the value of your work for yourself and your boss, as you add more value your worth will skyrocket alongside.
Take calculated risks - this will ensure your you expand your knowledge and skills and demonstrates your ability to move outside your defined role.
Beware of becoming stale, regularly monitor your progress, if you stay too long you risk losing momentum and falling behind.
Take responsibility for your career path - no one cares as much as you so you should be vigilant to ensure you are always moving in the right direction.

While we are always looking to do the best for our team we also have to include time to do the best for ourselves. As the leaders its important that we are moving forward so we can also move our teams along on our journey.

Maintaining your team through Inclusiveness

Have you considered how you maintain your team. We have discussed before about the various leadership traits and particularly how to maintain your team morale.
I was travelling again recently and in this workplace the people seems totally polarised, they were either very enthusiastic or were in a state of doom and gloom.

This got me thinking, what has happened or how is it that workers from the same organisation seems to have such vastly different opinions about the workplace and what was going on.

On further investigation I think I stumbled onto what had happened. One section of the workplace were sent off for a series of team building activities - that for all intents and purpose sounded very successful. These members came back to the workplace suitably revved up and ready to get stuck into another tough year.

The other group of people simply got to hear all about what a wonderful activity the first team enjoyed. The second team, then developed an 'us and them' attitude almost to the point of resentment.

Interestingly the management team didn't offer the second team any way of joining the first team or providing an alternative activity.

Consider the writings of every leadership pro in history and they will all tell you that one of "Man's" basic requirements after Food Shelter, warmth etc is to feel included in the group.

I look forward to visiting this team next year and see if there is any long term effect.

As leaders it is important that we find a mechanism to embrace inclusiveness into our dealings with our teams. By not taking a view to ensure all members are included we run the risk of our team running at less than optimal. The pay off for us, is when we are inclusive, our members will feel a better sense of belonging, and more willing to go the extra mile to make the team a winner.

Practical Project Management for Leaders

As the leaders of our teams it is important for us to carefully plan out our projects to ensure the start on time and are successfully completed.

Many of us are used to managing a to-do list, prioritising the events and working our way through the list. Project management is quite similar, with a few small changes. Lets go through the basic steps.

Project management requires us to look at the overall project and break it down into all its major steps. Once you have these steps look to see if there is an obvious sequence to complete these. If there is a path then arrange these in this order.

Take these tasks and examine them one at a time. Look at each step within each of these major tasks, and insert any interrim tasks to make each of these major tasks complete. This will leave you with list of all the small steps you need to manage to get your project completed.

Next task is to now look at each one of these tasks and assign a time for the task. If you don't know then find someone who knows how to do the task and ask them for an estimate of the time required.

Now lets look at this list, we should have a list of every task and an estimate of the time it will take. Between each major task insert some time as a buffer, this will give you some breathing space for those inevitable little dramas.

Next take your list and add two further columns, one for personal resources required. Can this task be done by one personal or are several required. Does this task need someone with special skills. This column is going to help us identify who will be doing the task. The next column is a space for you to list out all the materials you need to get this task done.

Common errors people tend to under-estimate are:

Preparation time
Materials shortages
Skilled personnel.

Re-examine you list, have you got all the steps, have you identified all the skills, materials and resource for the job. Are there any obvious bottle-necks? What can you do to clear the way?

With some time spent in the planning stage your project management will lead to a successful project and this will ensure your team comes out on top.

Lifting Team Performance at Mid Year

As it's mid-way through the year and many of us have had to commit to goals raising our team's performance. Do you have a plan how you're going to achieve this? Try this simple approach and see how it works for your team and its ability to meeting the new and higher goals.

Step one stand back from the team and identify who your best performers are. Now also categorise those members you consider average and those who are weakest. We will work with these three groups to derive our improvement goals.

Step two identify the four top jobs that need the most performance improvement. Look at each of these jobs and develop four questions you can ask to develop a good understanding of how each person does this series of tasks.

At this stage you should have developed a matrix with four job tasks, and corresponding four questions for each task to gauge the performance, skill, knowledge and actions that each member takes to complete these tasks.

Armed with these questions spend some time with your top performers and ask them your questions.

Take these responses and your own ideas and draft a plan how any mid-year corrections need to be applied.

Schedule time with each of your team members, spend some time to understand how they see their performance to date. Does their view match yours? maybe some options need to be placed on the table. Be sure each of your team members know they are on-track, ahead or behind. Also be sure to plant the tasks you want to see completed by the end of the year.

With candid feedback your team will continue to understand where they are heading and will know what is required of them to get the team to the finish line.

Delivering Criticism

In my last post we discussed dispute resolution. Moving on from this, is a short discussion on delivering criticism. Through criticism we give our team members an opportunity to further develop and improve. However the art of delivering criticism is an area where many of us struggle to deliver in the most appropriate manner.

Leaders who resolve incidents require a method to criticise in an ingrained and diplomatic way addressing the problem. This must be delivered so the recipient does not feel that it is antagonistic, insulting, attacking or punitive, because if this is the case we will have failed as leaders to these team members.

How can you know if your criticism is is being effective? Well in the medium to long term you will see this in observing the positive results. Your team members make fewer mistakes and any negative behaviours vanish from their attitude.

Criticising our team members can be difficult and uncomfortable, but it is an inevitable result of leading a team to producing great results.

Look to balance the importance of the message, with the importance of delivering the criticism in a way that does not undermine the feedback, but encourages its acceptance and generates motivation to achieve the correction.

Resist rash and impulsive demeaning attacks. Be sure to approach the criticism in a thoughtful and not a reactive manner. This way those observing can see you have considered the options and are not shooting from the hip.

Start with a positive statement, then layer in how things may have been improved, and finish with an affirming statement that blends the good idea moving to a great idea with the adjustments.

Some ideas to consider:
Get the facts straight.
Timing - when should it be delivered.
Don't criticise in public.
Use open-ended questions to establish all the information.
Control the situation.
Don't criticise the person - rather focus on the action.
Don't use You or I to much.
Tackle the main points - don't sweat the small stuff.

A tough subject to get right, but one that done properly will ensure your team continues to develop to the point of excellence and beyond.

How to Arbitrate a Dispute

As leaders we have to deal with our teams, and invariably every so often there is areas of conflict and disputes that need to be resolved. No one enjoys resolving disputes but when you adopt a common process and treat members fairly, they will come to appreciate you for maintaining the teams harmony.

When we need to arbitrate a dispute, it is usually through a two-phased approach that we can achieve a good level of result for all involved.

Phase one requires a clarification focused phase, followed by a resolution phase, by ensuring you complete phase one before tackling phase two you will gather all the appropriate information and not "jump the Gun".

In phase one you need to discuss separately with each party to:

Develop a clear understanding of the differences each party holds,

Gain mutual acceptance that all parties have legitimate positions, though not necessarily agreeable.

In phase two you need to help move the parties toward an agreeable common understanding:

Encourage movement toward integrating the differing positions to find common ground,

Ensuring each party is contributing and no-one is giving more than the other.

By breaking down disputes so each party can develop an understanding of the other parties view we can bring the groups together and the dispute will die into a common understanding from the given original standing.
It is important as leaders to keep on top of dispute and resolve in a timely manner so that it does not get out of control and damage the groups output and cohesion.

Leadership's vital Attributes

All great leaders have several typical attributes that they have developed along their leadership journey. I like to refer to them as the four A's of great leadership. These common factors are: Appearance, Attitude, Aggressiveness and Action.

Appearance is vital many people sum up their business partners, clients and friends on the first impression. Take a look at most great leaders and in their own way you will see they have the appearance of looking good and importantly looking as they are in control.

Attitude, have you got the right attitude, focusing in on the outcome and working steadily until you get there. Do you spread your attitude to your team to stay positive and keep working through all the issues to get the product and service just right.

Aggressiveness, are you ready to move forward as soon as you can see some advantage, with this type of aggressiveness you can seize the moment and maximize your output.

Action, of all the leadership traits taking action is the one that gets you the best value, people around you can see your action and will want to follow you to be part of the action.

Although it seems simple if you can maintain and improve your four A's of leadership, you will find that your team members will be keen to improve their efforts and be part of the winning combination.

Leaders develop Followers

As a leader is it critical you have followers. A leader with no followers is unable to harness the power of teamwork to amplify their ideas and elevate the cause.

Maybe its time for you to take stock, for some cultures this is hard to do as we have been brought up to be modest about our own ideas and achievements yet lavish in the praise we dish out to those around us.

But lets see through this for a moment, have you sat down and taken a personal inventory of your strengths as a leader? Have you critically looked at the members of your team and worked out why they continue to follow you. Sure, some are forced too because the work hierarchy have placed them under you, but when you look carefully you will see the other members around who follow your lead.

Take each of these people and consider what it is that you bring to the table to keep them in your team. Perhaps its your abilities in planning, delegation, decision making, technical competence, communication just as a small sample list. One of the most sort after skills is a leaders ability to deal with people, you hear of it time and time again, we wish we had a leader who could deal with the people in the team to keep their focus and lead them through tough times while continually developing them to meet tomorrow's challenges.

By taking stock of your great leadership abilities it allows you some observations, firstly you have a list of skills that others see in you, and also it gives you some ideas on areas for improvement.

With luck this simple exercise will show you some of your strengths as a leader that you can be proud of!

So how can we work further on this? your strengths are areas you should identify to develop in the people around you. If you are strong in these areas then chances are you have a great skill that you can share to develop in your followers. By giving freely of your skills, you will further strengthen and develop these relationships as your team members will quickly see there is something extra in it for them - learning a valuable skill from their leader.

How to improve your priority setting

Priority setting is a skill needed by all leaders, choosing a course of action and then ensuring each task gets done in the order and way you want is critical for your
success, you can only do this by setting the right priority for each of these tasks.

So much to do; so little time in which to do it. Finite resources; infinite needs. People to see, places to go, things to do. No time to say hello, good-bye, I'm late for a very important meeting. Sound familiar? That's life. Everyone has more to do than they can. Organizations have more opportunities than they have the resources to address. The higher up you go in the organization, the more you have to do and the less time you have to do it. Nobody can do it all. It's critical you have to set priorities to survive and prosper.


Be clear about your goals and objectives. What exactly is it you need to accomplish? Use your annual plan and the team strategic plan to understand the mission-critical things that must happen.

Using your goals, separate what you need to do into mission-critical, important to get done, nice to do if time permits, and not central to our goals we are striving to achieve. When faced with choices or multiple things to do, apply the scale and always choose the highest level.

Write down the pros and cons for each option. Check what effect each would have both on the short and long term. Are there cost differences? Is one resource more efficient than the other? Is one apt to be more successful than the other? Think about the interaction of both short- and long-term goals.

Sometimes what you decide to do today will hurt you or the organization later. When making either a short-term or long-term choice, stop and ask what effect this might have on the other.

Be time sensitive. Taking time to plan and set priorities actually frees up more time later. If you just go diving into things hoping that you can get it done on time and find you can't you may wind up in a bad situation. Often you here the cry failing to plan is like planning to fail.

Avoiding making choices often leads to more choices later on, to correct issues that should have been considered up front. Avoiding making choices actually makes life more difficult, as your always in uncharted waters, once a direction is set and you have a priority you know where you're headed.

Be effective rather than busy. Watch out for the activity trap. Effective managers spend about half their time working on one or two key priorities — priorities they described in their own terms, not in terms of what the business/organizational plan said. Further, they made no attempt to work as much on small but related issues that tend to add up to lots of activity. So rather than consuming themselves and others on 97 seemingly urgent and related smaller activities, they always returned to the few issues that would gain the most mileage long term.

Get help from others. When faced with multiple good things to do, pass them by your mentor or a few trusted others around you for their opinion. You don't have to do what they say but having other perspectives is always better than having only your opinion. What tasks can you easily outsource, to you team members or even outside. Perhaps outsourcing some tasks can free up crucial skills.

Setting and operating on priorities isn't a reflective task. Most of life's choices have to be made on the spot, without all of the data. Nobody is ever right all the time under that kind of pressure. Perfectionists have a problem with this. Wait as long as you can and then shoot your best shot.

Take care not to be guided by just what you like and what you don't like. That method of selecting priorities will not be successful over time. Use data, intuition and even feelings, but not feelings alone.

Be sensitive to the time of others. Generally, the higher up you go or the higher up the person you are interacting with is, the less time you and he/she have. Be time efficient with others. Use as little of their time as possible. Get to it and get done with it. Give them an opportunity to open new avenues for discussion or to continue, but if they don't, say your good-byes and leave.

Hopefully this has given you some ideas on how to improve setting priorities for your team. By improving this area our leadership will also improve as we can more effectively get the right tasks done in the best time.

Leaders and their Self-Transformation

Take a look through history and name any great leader you like, one of the traits your find as you explore their life will be their ability to transform themselves as they learnt new aspects and put them to action within their leadership roles.

By taking a look at our life, our skills, our knowledge, we need to assess where we want to improve and build our own transformation. You may decide that there are many things you want to improve in your life, and that's fine then take a look and choose the topic that will give you the best bang for your buck. Work on this area and then move on to the next.

The seeds of failure show us some areas that we can examine, to look at the reasons for the poor result and take stock of what could have helped us put in a better result next time. We must continually improve your knowledge base and behavioral assets, so that the same error is not made again.

The attitude of continual learning is a characteristic we often see associated with the great leaders throughout history, and it should be one we aspire too.

You must develop a way to identify the content for your self-transformation, your training and coaching is paramount to your long-term success. Maintaining a positive action plan will see your self-transformation slowly develop along with leadership skills.

Improving your judgement

Have you ever stopped to consider your ability at making judgements? Perhaps today is the day to take some time and consider your ability to make great judgement calls.

Learning to make smart judgement calls takes most of us years of personal development to get to an acceptable state. Our judgement calls are grounded by our honesty and our integrity.

So how do we speed up the process and get better earlier at make these judgement calls? A few times I've talked about developing some close relationships with some mentors. You mentors are the best people who can objectively look at your judgement calls and give you honest advice, why some were great calls and some less than perfect.

Firstly we need to be in the right frame of mind to accept the advice of our mentors - remember why you chose them? their skills in a variety of different areas, their honesty with you, their desire to help you achieve and so on. Then we need to think through why did I make the judgement I did? Did I consider the issues my mentor highlighted to me? We need to connect the dots. Why were some calls better than others? Was it my mood, the stress I was under at the time, were there any preferences I held.

Take some personal time to reflect on how your judgement calls are made.

Next take some quality time to think through a series of these calls, weigh up the advice from your mentors and see if you can develop your own personal strategy how to make more great judgement calls and see if you can isolate the factors that affect you and cause you to make poor calls.

Only through dedicated time directed at improving your judgement calls will you develop your ideas and methods at making better judgement calls and leading your team to more success. Take a break today and make a start at improving this important skill.

Take your Leadership to the next level

As Leaders we encourage our teams to continually improve their skills and knowledge in the workplace. We do this because we know that as they improve, they will draw the team after them and slowly their improvement will lift the team as a whole. When was the last time you took a step back and considered what actions you should be taking to improve your own leadership skills? The following is a quick list of simple steps you can take every day to steadily improve your leadership.

Develop an insatiable curiosity about everything you touch. Do you know everything about the materials in your workplace? Are there new and improved materials? Are there new and better ways to handle these materials? What about your team members, do you know what makes each one of them tick, why are they working in your team? What their hopes and aspirations? By developing your curiosity you will spark new insights from your team and the surrounds.

Learn and practice creative thinking, have you considered learning about DeBono and his many ideas to creativity? If you don't want to go down the formal path, have you allocated time to daydream and consider what possibilities exist for your team and its tasks? Creative thinking may open some new doors to help you stay ahead of the competition.

Gather some like forces and partners, you can't know everything about everything so find people who have complementary skills they can catapult your team further ahead.

Adopt a culture of allowing your team members to take responsibility and accept any failures as learning experiences, maybe your learning for not setting the goals clearly or maybe learning by your team members in a better way for handling a situation. This will only work if you are open and honest with the team and accept mistakes as part of the learning and growing process.

While on the topic of being honest and open with your team members don't confuse respect with fear or distance, you need the lines of communication open and receptive to candid discussion, If your team members talk to you through fear - odds on you will only get to hear what they think you want to hear or disasters that have gone so far they are not able to be corrected.

Be sure to look for positive behaviours every day, when you openly encourage your team for doing the great things they will respond by trying to do this more often.

Find an opportunity to give a member of your team some enthusiastic feedback, as this will promote their feeling of being uplifted and help them maintain their confidence.

If we can maintain our edge, slowly improving our leadership, our team will grow and be more productive and promote a happier environment. Do you think you can take these steps to move yourself forward?

Eight steps to improving your team's performance

As it's early in the year and many of us have had to commit to goals raising our team's performance. Do you have a plan how you're going to achieve this? Try this simple approach and see how it works for your team and its ability to meeting the new and higher goals.

Step one stand back from the team and identify who your best performers are. Now also categorise those members you consider average and those who are weakest. We will work with these three groups to derive our improvement goals.

Step two identify the four top jobs that need the most performance improvement. Look at each of these jobs and develop four questions you can ask to develop a good understanding of how each person does this series of tasks.

At this stage you should have developed a matrix with four job tasks, and corersponding four questions for each task to gauge the performance, skill, knowledge, attitude and actions that each member takes to complete these tasks.

Step three Armed with these questions spend some time with your top performers and ask them your questions. After you have visited each of your top preformers, look through their answers and group them around common themes. I expect you will get quite a few similarities in their responses. You now have a good reference for what your best workers do to achieve their goals.

Step four talk with your average and poorer performers and gain their insight on how they do these same tasks. Again I'm sure you will get plenty of answers and odds-on some will be quite similar.

Step five analyse the two sets of responses and identify the gaps. It is critical to not jump to a solution at this stage and just look at the data your team has given you.

Step six identify the four biggest gaps between the groups of performers.

Step seven now you have the gaps, group these if possible. Work out a plan to bridge the gaps, some will need formal training, some will need mentoring, some may just need to be shown the big picture. Arrange pee rworkshops where your best performers can share their winning ways with the rest of the team. Next tackle and gaps you can personally address and lastly look to the formal training. Given the current market conditions, this could be a tough ask, so see what you can address within the team.

Step eight work out a mechanism to guage the improvement in your teams performance. Be sure to test this in a short-term and also for the longer term, this will show you the effectiveness of your performance improvement actions.

Give it a try and see how your team responds.

Networking your way to success

As the leader of your team it's important you have other people from outside who you can turn to and bounce ideas off. How do you find such springboards? Networking is the answer and while many of us dread to do it, it can payoff handsomely and improve our leadership immensely.

Some people seem very natural at networking while most of us find it quite intimidating. take some time to consider the benefits and you will see that this is a skill you must develop.

Establishing a professional set set of acquaintances involves a complex set of variables. You want to meet the amount of positive attention without seeming to be over the top. Consider these ides and see if it can help you along in networking to find your group.

Make your first minute count. It is less important in how you dress as to how you express yourself. In this case the non-verbal signs will be adding more than what you say, ensure your facial expressions, posture and willingness to launch into a conversation all convey a positive attitude and delight in meeting the other person.

Start with a pleasant greeting and an outstretched hand and confidently introducing yourself. This maybe a bit scary the first few times you do this - however the more you try it out and maintain the positive action the more likely you are of success, and if turns out this person ignores you - so what?, at the worst you have wasted 30 seconds.

To get your self into the right frame of mind, consider your ideas as you begin the conversation:
What can I learn from this person?
Am I making this person comfortable so they'll chat with me? and
Am I demonstrating enthusiasm for the chance to know them?
Once you have the conversation happening maintain a positive stance by standing on both feet pointing to the person talking. Look at them directly while talking to them and continue to communicate in warm and genuine manner.

Give it a try and see how you go. If you're new to this then set yourself a modest goal of finding two or three new contacts each week and see how it works out.

The strength you gain from having a strong network of professional contacts will stand you in good stead for many years and as you develop your relationships with them they will be happy to help you improve in your leadership.

How do you find networking? Is it a labour or love? Why not share your results and tell me what works best for you.

Step up to the job like the Sports Stars

Do you step up to your job as leader like a sports star? It's a big week in sports as I sit here watching Nadal and Federer slugging it out, and waiting for the superbowl to start just 12 hours later. I paused to think, do we take our role as a leader like our sports stars? Do we come out with a strategic plan but are quick to change to a tactical one if things are going against us?

Like the sports stars we should have done our homework and understand our strengths and weaknesses and those of our opponents. We have mappped out our strategy on how we want to achieve our goals this year. We know what is in reserve that we can use, should the need arise.

Mentally we hopefully are prepared to take some shots to the body and come back out on the offensive.

Are we ready to make the calls that need to be made? Are we taking the risk? Are we watching for the opposition to intercept our play? Are we directing our team and resources to get the maximum angle.

By looking outside our normal sphere, sometimes we can take lessons from those around us to improve our leadership and our ultimate goals.

How are you going stepping up to the line and leading from the front? Let me know how your results panned out?