What is the Number One Insight to More Effective Leadership?

As a lifelong student of Dale Carnegie I have been truly blessed with the number of opportunities I have been given to learn the truths of great leadership. Like any great craftsman I never stop learning. Each week I am with more than two dozen leaders who are facing a variety of leadership challenges and are intently focused on; precisely identifying their most critical challenge, de-constructing it, and rehearsing how to improve the skill they most need to develop at that moment.

My current project; interviewing Canada’s Top 40 Talent Developers to learn each of their insights gleaned from years of work, research, and study has given me a whole new encyclopedia of knowledge for which I am grateful and eager to pass along.

It has also reinforced lessons I learned from my father Kevin D. Crone – Monday Morning Mentor, and from the decades of practical research Dale Carnegie undertook to refine his 30 principles of leadership. He spent 50 years in the field, learning, doing, adjusting, testing, hypothesizing and then testing his new hypothesis.

Recently I had the opportunity to interview Karen Brill the chief coach for The Responsive Group, and prior to that, the head of talent development at Rivera.

She is in the middle of a fascinating journey with her teams that care for our elderly and frail. She underscored a critical lesson for me. A lesson that is so obvious you would think every leader would know it. Yet not knowing it has been identified in study after study as the key reason for executive failure.

Guess what it is? – Know yourself first. Then manage yourself because you are the only person you can with certainty change. Self-awareness is the key to great leadership and not having it is the single biggest cause of executive failures.

First you must recognize your own feelings as they happen and be able to separate yourself from them so you can figure out what is causing them. Second you must be in charge of your emotions so you can act with your reasoned intent in mind rather than your feelings

Only then can you act with empathy and see the emotions of others. This is empathy – Recognizing emotions in others – the fundamental “people skill;” and the key to fostering, self confidence, and engagement in others. This ability to be genuinely interested in others is the cornerstone of everything we learned from Dale Carnegie.

Karen Brill underscored this for me, approaching it from the lessons of Daniel Goleman and his principles of EQ, Emotional Intelligence.

She found the same answer through a different lens and is using this lesson as a cornerstone of maximizing the empathy her front line staff feel for; our parents, our grandparents our aunts and uncles, for those that have made their contribution to their world and now most need our care.

As she says “You can’t show empathy if you don’t have empathy.” And if you don’t have empathy you cannot lead.

To hear her journey in her own words click here, I guarantee her words will resonate for you and remind you of the path we all need to follow if we want to effectively lead others.

If you would like to hear the Insights of Canada’s top leaders in Talent Development click here and every two weeks we will send you their insights in their own words.

If you are looking for a plan to better engage and grow your team call me at 905 826 7300 x 328 and we can chat.

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Best Success!

Kevin R. Crone, President, Dale Carnegie Training®

Founder of Accelerated Talent Development, Performance and Profits.

Contact me at 905-826-7300 x 328 or krcrone@dalecarnegie.ca