Leadership: An Essential Skill

Today I came across video on motivation. In the work place it is crucial as a manager to keep you team motivated. We all go trough times where we slack off or just have no motivation to do anything what so ever. This short video shows you in four steps on how to keep your team motivated. The first step is to create a contract with your workers. This contract will be no more than a page and consist of the guidelines and aspirations you expect from each employee at work. Next step is to have short frequent meetings that re-vist the contract and expectations. Studies have shown the farther and farther apart meetings are people tend to get off track and lose motivation. The third step is to have each employee stand up every week and say what they have accomplished. This makes everyone feel that they are important and increases motivation. The final step is to create a line of sight, meaning making sure the employees can see the impact of the end goal and what they are accomplishing. This

I always enjoy watching videos by Simon Sinek. He is a smart guy and I always learn a lot from his talks. This video is on how to begin your presentations. I thought that this would be helpful because sometimes its tough or awkward to get right into a presentation. One great idea Simon mentions right off the bat is start with your end goal. Your end goal is usually to make sure everyone learns something new. The audience cannot predict what you are going to say or do so the structure of your presentation is very important. Simon suggests starting your presentation is a story or an analogy that practices what you will talk about. Starting with a story makes your presentation interesting and easy to talk about. Simon also says in his talk to build a rationale arrangement for your presentation this way you can suck people into the conversation. There are a few other points Simon mentions in the video too but I hope this helps!

There are many ways to define leadership. If I were to define leadership I would say it is when an individual takes charge of a group when no one else will. This may be more of an example but this is what I think of when I am defining leadership. I came across a great article in Business News Daily that listed 11 quotes defining leadership. The quotes were all very different and were from various types of people ranging from CEOs to authors and to founders of business'. What I found interesting was that the majority of the quotes all had a common goal of bettering their team and environment and making sure everyone succeeds. I definitely agree with this. I think leader wants to be apart of something bigger than themselves and looks out for others, which is their team. This is a great little article and below I have added the link. http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/3647-leadership-definition.html

As I was searching for a new leadership video to post on my blog I stumbled across this video: 7 Body Language Habits for Effective Leaders. I thought that this would be a good transition into our internships this summer. At our jobs sites we need to look and act professional and to do that we need to work on our body language. We can't just slouch back in our seats at work like we are hanging out and watching TV. Body language plays a huge part in our leadership skills and nearly 80%-90% on how people perceive us. The first habit to be an effective leader is your posture, you don't want to shrink back and look small, sit and stand upright like you are interested. The next habit is your spacital awareness. You don't want to sit or stand right on top of someone. Give people their space but don't sit or stand so far away that you have to yell just to talk to someone. Next is eye contact, I think that we have all learned about this many times, but eye contact is key, it l

We will go through many interviews in our life. Some students now are currently going through interviews to get an internship for the summer. I thought this Ted talk by Anna Post fit well and we can always improve on our interview skills. Interviews are nerve-racking, especially your very first one, you don't know what to expect. Anna Post says " think of it like a one on one regular conversation." Anna throughout this video talks about six key way to help improve your interview skills and really make it count. First, Anna says to prepare. Prepare what you are going to say, learn about the company, and then repeat what you are going to say before you go to the interview, practice with a friend. Next, dress up, dress appropriately to visit. Don't be afraid to the call the office and ask what the dress code is like. Then, be on time. This is super important, don't be afraid to time it out and drive there before hand to see how long it takes you to get there. I typi

I have been lacking on posting lately but I found a short little Ted talk on success. The school year is quickly coming to an end I thought it would give some people motivation to finish up strong! Richard St. John went around for 7 years and interviewed 500 successful people from CEOs to car designers. Richard narrowed all 500 interviews down to 8 categories of success: serving, passion, work, focus, persistence, ideas, getting good at something, and pushing yourself. He shortly explains why these 8 things lead to success and I think it was super helpful. Overall it is a great short video and hope you enjoy.  

This goes along with my last post in a way... When you don't have good time management skills stress starts to kick in and you freak out and don't know what to do and you just make everything worse for yourself. I read a good article on mindtools.com that gives you 3 great ways to tackle stress and give you some relief. Before you tackle stress you need to identify the causes of stress and what their impacts are on you. Then you can you can use these 3 approaches to help deal with stress; action-oriented approach, emotion-oriented approach, and acceptance-oriented approach. Managing your time plays a huge part in the action-oriented approach. If you do not manage your time the amount of work you have can cause you to have a whole lot of stress. Things like creating a to-list or not playing on your phone can help you manage your time better and cause less stress in your life. Its better if you take action and try to get your work done earlier so you have less stress on your pl

I recently just took a quiz on MindTools.com called "How Good Is Your Time Management?" Time management plays a huge role when you first enter college and especially when you get into the work place. You need to be able to balance all your work so you are able to get it all complete by the date it is due. For me personally I know I tend to have a tough time with this so I took this little quiz to see if my results were accurate with my thoughts. Results:  40,   You're good at some things, but there's room for improvement elsewhere. I  believe for the most part that this is correct. Some days I tend to be good at time management and I get a head start on work to get it done early. This is a huge stress reliever and I do not panic later on. Other times I am not so good at time management and I am backed up doing other work as well in order to get everything done in time. This was a fun little quiz and everyone should see how well their time management is!