The Music of Day-to-Day Leadership
If you want to be a better leader, choose better words.
Power of words:
People determine if you are positive or negative, backward-looking or forward-focused, follower or leader, weak or powerful by the language you use.
Yes, behaviors establish your reputation. But…
Language is the music of your day-to-day leadership.
Dark notes:
- Negative language makes you a negative leader. Monitor your conversations for a day to see how many dark notes you use.
- Complaining doesn’t make you a leader. It makes you a complainer, even if you don’t want to admit it.
- Problem-centric conversations create stress and stagnation. Solution-centric conversations make us sing.
Improve your language – expand your leadership.
Bad music starts:
- “I can’t believe ….” Unmet expectations are prime opportunities to complain. But complaining doesn’t help us meet expectations.
- “Did you know ….” Juicy morsels about others often become dissonant notes.
- “They totally screwed up ….” Sentences that begin with ‘they’ often conclude with complaints.
- “It’s not fair ….” The search for fairness always ends with complaining.
- “That’s stupid ….” Remember, smart people DO stupid things. “Momma says, ‘Stupid is as stupid does.’” Forest Gump
Stop complaining:
Success is easier when you eliminate ineffective behaviors.
Being a positive leader might feel daunting. No worries. Just stop being so negative. (I confess that it’s not enough to just stop complaining, but it’s a great start.)
I’ve added a Stop Complaining Activity to the original five projects I posted yesterday.
No complaining lunch:
Invite a colleague to a No Complaining Lunch. During lunch only positive language is allowed. The first person to complain buys lunch. If no one complains, buy your own lunch.
To avoid arguments over, “Was it a complaint or not,” ask your server to make the final judgement. The word of the server is final. Pay the piper.
What other fun ways can you add to help stop complaining?
Accountability is critical as a leader. Finding someone (not normally an employee) to be your accountability partner is a critical component to growing as a leader. Often we are in a vacuum and it can be difficult to find someone to provide input that is not tainted in some way. Thank you sir for your post.
Thanks Walt. I’m with you. If you want to stop complaining, get a partner to help. We get further when we go with someone.
Oh I love this one! Leadership is music, words are notes! It will stick in my mind very easily. Thank you, thank you! 🙂
Thanks you Daniel. Best wishes.
Life is not fair, I so like to use that with young one that don’t understand yet. Had a employee who was struggling. I told him he needed to learn to role with the punches. He said “but capt they are hitting for all sides”. I laughed and said “then duck”.
I sang the The Rolling Stones to my son at a very early age “You can’t always get what you want” and it was funny to hear him sing it back to my younger daughter when he was around 10.
Dan,
Home run on the “leadership is music” sometimes we just get out of tune!
So what is the tune up? Perhaps as you mention “stop complaining”, no one ever said “life is fair”, my father would look at us and say “show me where life is fair”? We would get the message that the road in life is tough, toe the line and be prepared for life’s curve balls, they come from every angle! So if we don’t have something nice to say, better to say nothing. 🙂
Good music has notes, but also rests, pauses, crescendos, and tempo. How do these fit with the day to day music of leadership?
Duane, I’m no Dan, I equate the notes as our words, the rests are our listening, our pauses as our thinking, our crescendos as our tone of our discussions during the day, and our Tempo is the pace we set to get things accomplished.
Does this make sense?
Well done sir and none of us are Dan but that was good.
Walt, Thank you, I met Dan 12 years ago and I can tell you he is a special person, I’m glad to call him a friend.