Introduction

• Definition of leadership
• Leadership
  • Leadership and effectiveness
  • Leadership qualities
  • Leadership functions

Characteristics

• Introduction
  • Identifying the leader
  • Trust
  • Integrity
  • Respect
  • Foresight
  • Mutual attraction
  • Relationships
  • Support
  • Empowerment
  • Credibility
  • Winner mentality
  • Leadership expansion
• Influence
  • Introduction
  • Position
  • Leadership styles for learning
  • Who?
  • How?
  • Personal traits
  • Selling
• Confidence
  • Introduction
  • Development part 1
  • Development part 2
• Personality traits
  • Personality - general
  • Personality - action
  • Myers Briggs Type Indicator
  • Myers Briggs Type Indicator uses
  • FIRO B
  • OPQ
  • Pathology
  • Style spider
  • Style spider - choices
  • Leadership styles - adverse behaviour
• Motivation
  • Introduction
  • Douglas McGregor X and Y theory
  • Abraham Maslow
  • Frederick Herzberg
  • Key problems
  • People part 1
  • People part 2
• Be positive
  • Issues and action
  • Be clever
  • When in trouble
  • Project management
  • Change management
  • Communication
  • Self discipline
  • Change
  • Attitude

Strategy

• Long term
  • Long term investment
  • Direction and vision
  • Communication
• Strategy
  • Introduction
  • Selecting
  • Recording
  • Developing
  • The schedule plan
  • Overview
  • Part of leadership
• The vision
  • Introduction
  • Preparing
  • Personalities
  • General
  • Practicality
  • Stakeholders
• Change
  • Progress
  • Problems of change
  • Freeze to freedom

Personal development

• Introduction
  • Proactivity
  • Proactive behaviour
  • Personal direction
  • Personal direction - generating ideas
  • Skill development
  • Delegation
  • Values
• Time management
  • Prioritise
  • Prioritise - basics
  • Timing
• Problem solving
  • SWOT analysis
  • Forces
  • The problem
  • Insight
  • Insight development
  • Problem solving basics part 1
  • Problem solving basics part 2
• The three C's
  • Introduction
  • Action focus part 1
  • Action focus part 2
• The emerging leader
  • Emerging leaders
  • The boss
• Training
  • Introduction
  • Selection
  • Opportunity
  • Follow the leader
  • Follow the leader - adverse behaviour
  • Chess the middle game
  • Standards

General

• Communication
  • Open questions
  • Meetings
  • Agenda
• At the top
  • Letting go
  • Continuity
  • Top of the ladder
  • Loneliness at the top part 1
  • Loneliness at the top part 2
  • The Top team
• Structure
• Life transitions
• Balance
• Open questions
• Business
  • CEO
  • Chairman
  • Mergers and acquisitions
• Leaders and managers

Balance

Life and work

Are you happy in your work? Are you happy in your life? Is the balance right and if not how can you correct it?

People work to get money to fuel the good things in their lives. How far will you push your career to achieve financial independence at the expense of your home life?

If you feel that your working life is well within your energy capacity you are probably doing OK. If you feel that you have little more to give over a long period then the strains will show in a variety of ways, for example, increased stress or loss of temper etc.

Once you get to the point that your energy reserves are extremely low the reward you will get for the effort involved will be minimal.
When was the last time that you gave your self time for a hobby where you could relax mentally and perhaps physically?

There are a few key areas to consider.

• Mental health
• Physical fitness
• Relationships in terms of emotions and communications with colleagues and friends.
• Spiritual side. What do you really want out of life?

In order to understand the balance of your life and work you will need to take a closer look at your own situation.
Consideration of the following areas will be useful.

• Work
• Relationships
• Spiritual
• Fun
• Mental
• Health
• Money
• Family

Review and action

Being able to monitor and then control the balance of your life requires the generation of choice.
Once you have choice you then need to make the correct one that allows you to improve your life / work balance.

There are many reasons why choice is reduced.
For example,

The inability to say ‘no’ can be a major problem. Many people suffer from this and it is usually caused by a desire to please.
This is covered in more detail in ‘The Complete Time management package’.
Others may be waylaid by drive for perfection and recognition.

What hats do you wear?

A good leader will have reviewed their own balance and will have a good sense of their life and work goals.
Each person wears many hats during their career and personal life including boss, friend, father, coach, confidante etc.

What are your top priorities?

If you consider all of the roles you may play you might find that one or two of these have much more significance than others.
These may guide where you would like your life / work balance to be.
If you monitor where you spend your time, using these hats, you will have a good ideas where your current priorities appear to be.

Goals and actions

If your priorities are not right you will need to take action.
For this you will need to create change.

For each of your ‘hats’ create some goals. These are targets that you would like to achieve at a small distance in the future.
Once you have these goals you must generate some actions that will achieve them.

Monitor

Implement the actions and monitor against criteria for success.

In order to help you focus on the goals make sure that you give yourself plenty of time to action them by freeing up time in your diary.

Urgent and important

Be careful that you understand the difference.

‘Urgent’ tasks are deadline based. This is usually independent of yourself and is often driven by others. The sooner the task needs completion the more urgent it is. This has no relation to importance. It is a simple matter to rank any jobs that you have in terms of their deadlines.

The ‘importance’ of a job drives how much ‘time’ you want to spend on it. Notice that this is independent of ‘urgency’ and is what you want to do not what you actually spend on it. For any task the quality of your output will often relate to the time you spend on it. Again, it is a simple matter to rank the importance of the same tasks, for example, ‘high’ ‘medium’ or ‘low’ or a simple numerical ranking.

These are discussed in more detail in ‘The Complete Time management package’.
This package also discusses many other techniques for the efficient management of your time which is critical for any leader.
Being proactive is one of the key attributes of a leader and good time management reflects this.

If you realise that your life / work balance isn’t right you may need to make quite large changes, for example, changing jobs or moving house.

You might wish to review some of the choices you have made in your career and personal life and ask yourself some searching questions.
If you had more than one choice in a situation why did you choose the one you did?
Could there have been a better incentive to choose more wisely?
If you can better understand where your goals should be it will give you much more confidence to make the correct choice.