Rick Conlow - Superstar Leadership: A 31-Day Plan to Motivate People, Communicate Positively, and Get Everyone On Your Side

Superstar Leadership

A 31 - DAY PLAN TO MOTIVATE PEOPLE, COMMUNICATE POSITIVELY, AND GET EVERYONE ON YOUR SIDE

RICK CONLOW AND DOUG WATSABAUGH

Copyright 2013 by Rick Conlow and Doug Watsabaugh

All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher, The Career Press.

SUPERSTAR LEADERSHIP
EDITED BY JODI BRANDON
TYPESET BY EILEEN MUNSON
Printed in the U.S.A.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Conlow, Rick.

Superstar leadership : a 31-day plan to motivate people, communicate positively, and get everyone on your side / by Rick Conlow and Doug Watsabaugh.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-60163-265-4 -- ISBN 978-1-60163-528-0 (ebook) 1. Supervision of employees. 2. Personnel management. 3. Leadership. I. Watsabaugh, Doug, 1951- II. Title.

HF5549.12.C667 2013

658.4092--dc23

2012049266

We dedicate this book to
our families who support us,
all the great managers
we have worked with over the years
who have become students of the game,
and all managers
who are fighting the good fight
by doing business
with integrity and a caring attitude.

Although CEOs can be worth millions to their companies, their strategies and tactics are often of little practical use to the manager in a manufacturing plant, technology department, restaurant, hospital, or car dealership. Superstar Leadership fills in that gap.

Most leadership books today focus on what the CEOs or executives of big companies do. Business executives are real hot stuff. In a company of 32,000 employees or 200 employees, there is only one president. What about the rest of the managers? What do they do of value? Can we learn from them? What practical advice or strategies will help them do a better job? Too often, everyone gets excited about the success of a CEO at a Fortune 500 company because he increased the value of the companys stock and retired and wrote a book. Now, hes on the speaking tour.

CEOs arent the best to learn from, anyway, because they live in a different world than other managers. For the most part, they are insulated from their customers and employees. Besides, we have seen too many of them cater to the analysts on Wall Street, become involved in shady business practices, and end up on the front-page news in a scandal or in a federal court being prosecuted. Too many underperform and are overpaid. Their driving motivations are greed, self-aggrandizement, ego fulfillment, political connections, and their pocketbooks. They can destroy a company, like what happened at Enron. Of course, these are examples of the bad bosses. To be fair, there are many good CEOs.

This isnt a book that summarizes years of statistical research or surveys results. You will see references to industry research throughout the book to support the Leadership strategies. The practices within Superstar Leadership are based on 40 combined years of management experience in addition to our 15 years together spent as business consultants. WCW Partners is our performance-improvement consulting business that has mentored managers from a variety of businesses worldwide to achieve record-breaking performance. The advice you find within these pages isnt based on surveys or anecdotes. It is based on sound research and time-proven strategies that we have seen work again and again.

Superstar Leadership is a personal leadership guide and workshop in one, aimed at supervisors and managers who dont always have the resources available to top executives but collectively make a greater impact on their organizations bottom line. It is written for the non-CEO manager, although many CEOs could benefit from it. However, you dont have to be the CEO or on the cover of Time magazine to be a Superstar leader.

The Superstar Leadership Model provides a developmental process that helps managers take a critical look at their management approach and competencies, build on strengths, shore up weak areas, and become more effective bosses immediately.

There are nine interrelated strategies and corresponding competencies that have proven successful in a variety of companies and are ripe with real-life examples from our years of experience as leadership consultants inside and outside organizations. After adopting the Superstar Leadership strategies, an 80-year-old company in Canada improved sales to existing customers 75 percent in just one year. Another business put the concepts to work to achieve 20- to 30-percent improvement a year, every year, over five years.

Someone once said, If you want your people to be better, you have to be better. And though this book speaks to managers, it is employee-centered, with two defining questions:

1. What do employees need from you, the boss, to succeed?

2. What is it like to be supervised by you?

Too many managers have read books and attended seminars, only to shelve the book and binder, and continue to do the same things. In this day and age, with the information and research available, its inexcusable to be a bad or mediocre boss.

Superstar Leadership strategies are adaptable to every personality and work style, and will fit perfectly to help managers who tackle todays toughest problems. These include bigger goals, absenteeism, turnover, labor shortages, budget cuts, expense controls, distribution shortages, quality problems, improving competition, worldwide competition, government interference, price pressures, strikes, and continuously new technological applications. And they have no time to waste.

Here are four ways to use Superstar Leadership:

1. After reading the Introduction, circle the topic areas of most interest and read them. We recommend you also read , which cover execution. Knowledge is not power; applied knowledge is power.

2. Read the book at your leisure as you would any book you read and apply the applications at work.

3. Use the book as a structured, 31-day improvement plan. Read one topic a day and act on the material each day. Within that time period, you can literally revolutionize the performance of your work team.

4. Use the book as a resource when you are confronted with challenges on the job. We have written the book so the skills are broken down into bite-size pieces that you can always reference when you need to.

In all cases, apply what you learn, and use it to become a better boss or even a Superstar Leader. The differences are daily consistency and passion. You will reap the benefits of positive improvements in your behavior and attitudes. Your employees will achieve increased performance because of your changes and example. Employees and colleagues will notice the difference in your approach and demeanor. Your company will experience the superior results.