LET THE ‘DAFFODILS’ BLOSSOM
The daffodil is considered one of the most beautiful flowers in the world but this particular ‘daffodil’ that I plan to introduce to you is a different, unique and yet a very positive kind of flower.
A flower that will help you and your team to blossom into the most impactful and efficient Executives, Managers and Leaders for the future.
This particular flower is basically the confluence of all the alphabets of the DAFFODIL and I wish to share each one of them with the intention that all of you, my esteemed readers may feel the fragrance of its every petal and help you become a better manager or leader and even help you to help your subordinates to improve for the better.
‘D’ of the daffodil represents one of the most fundamental qualities for success and it is the attitude of DARING.
Through my various journeys of conducting Leadership and Managerial as well as Self-excellence
Trainings for various organisations around the world I have seen and come to believe that many of their employees have a great positive attitude and respect as well as deep knowledge regarding their subject or area of work but what they lack albeit in different degrees is the attitude of ‘DARING’ which simply stands for the attitude of ‘courage’ especially in situations where they have to confront tough and difficult situations as well as even tough and difficult ‘people’ like external customers, immediate bosses and people at the Senior Management too.
The attitude of being daring or courageous is most helpful when it comes to making tough decisions. Also in situations where expectations from seniors and bosses are very high many leaders go through emotions of nervousness and stress but those who have the fortitude and daring awaken within them emotions of self-confidence and boldness.
They think more about the positive than the negative and this by itself makes them execute the toughest of tasks with high success despite the burden of expectations. The basic and fundamental attitude of being daring to face any situation leads them to their final success ‘A’ of the daffodil is about being ‘AMBITIOUS’.
Ambition is about having the attitude of creating and setting a Personal as well as a Professional Target or Goal in life.
Most of us keep these goals in our minds but people who are truly passionate about their ambitions not only have these targets in their thoughts and minds but they make the sincere effort of ‘writing and noting down their ambitions into their diary or notebook’.
There are some who in fact have created a proper and structured Power-point slides presentation about their ‘Ambitions’ as that inspires them to start working on achieving those targets and goals. We must remember that to ignite the emotions of Motivation and PASSION within us it is important to set our ‘AMBITION’ in the right direction.
The two ‘Fs’ of this beautiful flower represents qualities such as Failure Management along with Freedom.
Let us begin with Freedom. What freedom am I talking about? I am mainly referring to how important it is for Managers and Team Leaders to ‘give’ or ‘provide’ freedom to their subordinates especially after they been delegated responsibilities or tasks to be done.
The moment a manager, after empowering his subordinates with critical, semicritical or non-critical responsibilities begins to keep checking on them and keeps seeking ‘status reports’ too frequently, the subordinate simultaneously begins to feel his ‘freedom’ to work is getting restricted. The constant ‘intrusion’ by his superior though innocuous and unintentional can curtail the subordinate’s freedom to perform his tasks with self-confidence and self-motivation. In fact the more his freedom to perform his tasks is curtailed the more are the possibilities that he might either completely fail or make errors in his work.
The other ‘F’ is not just failure but how to manage failure. There are so many times I have seen when the boss has started shouting and blaming his team for not achieving the targets or budgets rather than sitting with the team and understanding the reasons for the failure. There is this one term or more appropriately an activity which every manager or leader must learn and then activate in times of failure or crisis and this term is known as RCA which means ROOT-CAUSEAnalysis.
Failure Management is most importantly about looking at failure as a case study to know how future failures can be averted. Rather than crying over the spilt milk isn’t it better that we learnt to keep the glass a bit far away from the edge of the table and ensure that it doesn’t spill again? Milk ‘spilling’’ upon the floor is only a very simple metaphor for the much more critical and colossal ‘Spills’ or Failures’ that may affect us and even our businesses.
‘Failure Management is a much required attitude for a leader or manager than just ‘blaming’ or getting stressed by them.
There are more petals of this daffodil which we can and surely will explore in the next column. Until then I am quite sure that you will feel the fragrance of this particular flower although there are some more petals waiting to offer their fragrance next Saturday!