“It’s easier to fool people than it is to convince them they’ve been fooled.” – Mark Twain
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Category: Leadership
The leadership category on Jay Wren’s website (jaywren.com) focuses on practical insights and strategies for effective leadership, particularly within a corporate or organizational context. It emphasizes the development of “authentic leaders” who prioritize self-awareness, honesty, and humility, fostering trust and success.
Key themes within this category include:
Authentic Leadership: Building trust through self-awareness, honesty, and humility.
Leadership Development: Providing actionable steps for companies to hire, train, and grow leaders, including principles of responsibility, authority, and accountability.
Creating Future Leaders: Highlighting the importance of internal leadership development for long-term growth, morale, loyalty, and engagement.
Measurable Success: Emphasizing that effective leadership is not just a concept but can be measured by results, with a focus on proactive training and mentorship.
In essence, Jay Wren’s leadership category offers guidance for individuals and organizations seeking to cultivate strong, ethical, and effective leaders who contribute to overall success.
Promoting Your Business with Politics or Religion
Unless your business is politics or religion, using politics or religion to promote your business is a bad idea. ~ Jay Wren
What happens is that brand identity conflicts with deeply ingrained beliefs that inflame emotions and sway decisions.
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Traits of Great Teachers?
What makes a teacher great? Here are traits that you should consider if you want to become a great teacher.
Communication
A great teacher can communicate clearly and effectively with their students, colleagues, and parents. They can explain complex concepts in simple ways, listen actively to feedback and questions, and use various modes of communication to suit different situations.
Adaptability
A great teacher can adapt to changing circumstances, such as new curriculum standards, diverse student needs, or unexpected challenges. They can modify their teaching methods and strategies to fit different learning styles, goals, and contexts.
Empathy
A great teacher can empathize with their students and understand their feelings, perspectives, and experiences. They can create a safe and supportive learning environment where students feel valued, respected, and cared for. They can also show compassion and kindness to their students and help them overcome difficulties.
Knowledge
A great teacher has a deep and broad knowledge of their subject matter and pedagogy. They are well-versed in the content, skills, and standards that they teach, and they keep up to date with the latest research and developments in their field. They are also lifelong learners who seek to improve their own knowledge and skills through professional development, collaboration, and reflection.
Passion
A great teacher has a passion for their subject matter and for teaching itself. They are enthusiastic, energetic, and motivated to share their love of learning with their students. They inspire curiosity, interest, and excitement in their students, and they demonstrate their own passion through their actions and words.
Creativity
A great teacher can use creativity to design engaging and effective lessons, activities, and assessments that cater to different student needs, interests, and abilities. They can also encourage creativity in their students by providing them with opportunities to explore, discover, and express themselves.
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Sweet Lies
With the Internet, the truth is right there, for everyone. At the same time, politicians and political influencers, more than ever, have normalized lying and people believe them. Why? Because a sweet lie is so delicious.
Why do we lie to ourselves?
We may lie to ourselves to avoid painful truths, to boost our confidence, to persist in our goals, to create a favorable impression, or to support our beliefs.
Lying to ourselves can reduce stress and enhance our self esteem. It can make us feel safe in our beliefs. However, lying to ourselves distorts reality and impaires our judgment. Therefore, it is important to be aware of our willingness to see the world in a light that just makes us comfortable.
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No Excuses
Authenticity and self-honesty are critical to success. You can’t solve a problem until you admit that that you have a problem. However much it may hurt, the first step to bouncing back from a mistake is to be honest, with absolutely no excuses, that you made a mistake
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How the Best Leaders Manage in a Crisis
Difficult managers use crisis as a management tool. Everything is serious. Everything is urgent. They shake everybody up.
Creating a Positive Workplace
Focusing on a negative can distract people from the positive side of doing their job.
It’s Not about Fruitcake
I love fruitcake. Like everything else, fruitcake has people who love it and people who do not. Nearly two million fruitcakes are sold each year. I doubt that many people eat an entire fruitcake, since most fruitcakes have a very dense texture and are about a foot in diameter and four inches high less that plug missing in the middle. However, I think that given a week, I could eat an entire fruitcake.
I read an article online the other day that was very critical of fruitcakes. Fruitcakes seem to have a public polarity rarely seen outside of politics. It baffles me how people can be so serious about fruitcakes. On the other hand, these people must feel baffled about how much I love fruitcakes.
What caught my attention is how negative this person was about fruitcakes. The author put a negative opinion out there. I felt on the defensive. The negativity was polarizing. Moreover, the subject of the article was not about fruitcakes. The article was promoting a company’s product by drawing a negative contrast between their products and other products.
They drew my attention away from their products and focused my attention on defending fruitcakes! They didn’t sell me on their products. Instead, their negativity cluttered my mind and I lost interest in their products.
Quotes on Hiring Great People
Hiring the Best People and Empowering Them to Excel: How do great leaders build great companies? Here are some of the things great leaders say.
Lee Iacocca – Automobile Executive
“I hire people brighter than me, and I get out of their way.”
Bill Gates – Co-Founder Microsoft
“The competition to hire the best will increase in the years ahead. Companies that give extra flexibility to their employees will have the edge in this area.”
Steve Jobs – Co-Founder, Apple
“I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to 1. Given that, you’re well advised to go after the cream of the cream. A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players.”
Jim Collins – Business Consultant, Author
- “Great vision without great people is irrelevant.”
- “The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you’ve made a hiring mistake. The best people don’t need to be managed. Guided, taught, led–yes. But not tightly managed.”
Edwin Booz – Consultant, Founder Booz Allen & Hamilton
“Often the best solution to a management problem is the right person.”
Brian Tracy – Chairman and CEO of Brian Tracy International
“As a business owner or manager, you know that hiring the wrong person is the most costly mistake you can make.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Author, Scientist, Philosopher
“A great person attracts great people and knows how to hold them together.”
Theodore Roosevelt – President, United States of America
“The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.”
Malcolm Forbes – Publisher, Forbes Magazine
“Never hire someone who knows less than you do about what he’s hired to do.”
David Ogilvy – Advertising Executive
“Hire people who are better than you are, then leave them to get on with it. Look for people who will aim for the remarkable, who will not settle for the routine.”
Akio Morita – Co-Founder Sony
“When I find an employee who turns out to be wrong for a job, I feel it is my fault because I made the decision to hire him.”
Warren Buffett – Chairman & CEO of Berkshire Hathaway
“Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.”
Paul Russell – Paul Russell Consulting, LLC
“Development can help great people be even better–but if I had a dollar to spend, I’d spend 70 cents getting the right person in the door.”
Red Adair – Oil Well Firefighter
“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.”
Robert Bosch – Founder Robert Bosch GmbH
“I don’t pay good wages because I have a lot of money; I have a lot of money because I pay good wages.”
“Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.” – Henry David Thoreau
Leadership Development: A Four-Step Process for Success
Leadership Development: How can companies hire and train people to become leaders? Here are four steps to effective leadership development.
Companies that produce great leaders become greater companies. ~ www.jaywren.com
Leadership Development — Four Steps
Creating future leaders is critical to the long-term growth of a company. An element in succession planning, creating leaders from within increases moral, loyalty, and engagement. Here are four elements to leadership development.
- Hire for Leadership
- Teach Responsibility, Authority, and Accountability
- Continual Training for Leadership
- Increase Responsibility
Hire for Leadership
People in any organizations have specific levels of responsibility. Some of those people will stay in the same job for their entire time with the company.
Other people come into a company as developmental candidates. These people may start in entry-level jobs. However, the company has a plan to move these people into bigger roles. Their responsibilities increase as they master each job.
Teach Responsibility, Authority, and Accountability
For new leaders to become successful, they must know their responsibility, their authority, and their accountability.
Responsibility defines the tasks and activities under a leader’s management. Authority is the power to make decisions and the power to hold team members accountable. Accountability in leadership development creates an understanding of expectations of performance.
Additionally, leaders must use these elements to teach their team members what the leader expects of them. Leaders can use these elements as reminders for team members to stay on task.
Train for Leadership
Leadership is not a mere concept. Companies can measure the success of their leaders based on results. The best companies don’t wait to have a leader fail. These companies have experienced leaders who can teach new leaders how to succeed. An ounce of foresight is worth a pound of hindsight.
These leaders must develop styles and practices that make their team as effective as possible. Training, hands-on management, greater feedback, asking questions that provide useful information are some of the methods companies can teach new leaders.
Increase Responsibility
For leaders to continue to grow, their responsibility must increase. Companies promote new leaders into bigger positions. These positions have a higher pay grade. Additionally, they have the greater responsibility.
However, companies cannot always promote leaders. But they must keep the leaders growing and engaged.
What companies can do is relieve experienced future leaders of bottom rung responsibilities. At the same time, companies can give them responsibilities that will prepare them for greater responsibility.