Excellence in Leadership

1. Introduction: Are you a leader? Are you considering a role in leadership and management? Or are you wanting to learn more about the skills it takes to be an excellent leader. Being a leader gives you a huge opportunity to help others be successful, to satisfy your own career aspirations. And above all, to make a difference in the workplace. Leadership can make or break a team. You will that to guide your team. Stay them in the right direction, and coach team members to get the best out of themselves. That can be quite the responsibility are merely one person. And bad leadership can easily result in stress or burnout by taking on too much or dealing with challenges in the wrong way. In contrast, though, leadership can be amazing with the right skills and know-how, you can thrive as a leader and become a well-respected member of your workplace. Delivering excellence in leadership can be quite a daunting task. But this course is designed to help you build and draw upon existing qualities to help you become an excellent leader. No matter the workplace, whatever the area or industry you work in. The fundamental skills required to be an excellent leader, never change. We'll be covering a range of topics including perfecting your communication, influencing your team right through to dealing with difficult people and conflict in the workplace. By the end of today's course, you will have a better understanding of what it takes to be a leader. Have developed skills to lead confidently and have a deeper knowledge on how to get the most out of your team. To begin, let's consider whether leadership is the right role for you. 2. Is leadership for you: Is leadership for you? Before I start this course, I always ask a key question. Do you enjoy being a leader? Often there is a misconception that the best way to move forward in our career paths is to go further up the hierarchy. To become a team leader, a project manager, a people manager, and so forth. The idea that we are all born leaders and capable of managing people effectively is not particularly true. Leadership in the workplace is more than merely delegating tasks or being the person in charge. Being an effective leader consists of many roles beyond the general day-to-day tasks, which require a wide variety of skills and emotional intelligence, such as managing conflict in the workplace, dealing with difficult employees, looking after your employees, well-being, communicating effectively with colleagues, influencing your team, and even assessing resources and identifying improvements. And by no means that only the elite capable of effective leadership. Rather, my point is to really think about if these qualities or something you feel new naturally, et cetera, whether you even enjoy it. Being a leader can be a very challenging yet rewarding position. But if you don't enjoy the responsibilities of being a leader, it can feel an endlessly stressful role to be in. I truly believe we all have certain qualities which are valuable ineffective leadership. This course can help you to improve those quantities to grow as a leader. However, some of us Excel further in other areas and just have different desires. For example, wishing to work independently with your own agenda. It's worth taking the time to consider whether being a leader in the workplace is something that you are passionate about. That said, many key elements of this course are beneficial in any role, both business and personally. The takeaways will help you become a much more assertive person in your day-to-day communications and better understand the people around you. Whilst you may not feel as structured leadership role is for you, learning effective leadership will certainly help to guide you in any role. 3. Communicating as a leader: Communicating as a leader, communicating effectively is the single most important quality to have as a leader if you aren't communicating very well with your team. And by that, I don't mean the amount of times you talk to your team, Then they will have difficulty in understanding what is expected of them. Besides, there is a great phrase I heard recently. None of us is as smart as all of us. The best starting point when communicating as a leader is to ensure you are listening effectively. A good listener is attentive and engaged in the moment. Think about the last time you really felt listened to. It felt good, right? Adopting and listening approach with your team where they truly feel heard will do wonders for your team. It helps them to feel understood and reduces the urge to become aggressive in their own communication just to get their point across. There are very often two mistakes leaders can make when listening. Listening to confirm and listening to defend. Listening to confirm is often a very arrogant form of listening. It's the concept that whomever you are listening to is going to tell you something that you already know. You may have been on the receiving end of this form of listening before. And let me tell you if you haven't, it can fail infuriating. It can also result in missing out key parts of information just by simply assuming that you know, everything that is being said already. Defensive listening is where you are adopting the opposing position immediately. It's the if you don't see things the way I do, then I will not agree with you type of discussion, which I'm sure we've all had at some point. By listening defensively in leadership, you are closing yourself off to new ideas. There may be some aspects of the discussion which are useful. However, much like listening to confirm, assuming that you know best can put you at risk of missing out on those opportunities. As a leader, it's best to adopt or listening to discover approach by listening openly and not choosing an opposition before the discussion has even finished. You can easily discover something new. Keep yourself open to new opportunities and ideas and have a greater impact on your team, leaving them feeling valued and well-respected. What's more? You can also give voice to those quieter, more passive members in your team. Those who are often the last to have their ideas heard. And that's not because they aren't creative and innovative ideas. It can often be simply that this person doesn't have the loudest voice. By lending your listening skills, you can amplify the voices of your entire team. 4. Adopting Assertive Communication: Adopting assertive communication. Fundamentally, being assertive in business allows you to build good, healthy relationships with your peers without jeopardizing your role as a leader. On a personal level, assertive communication will also positively impact your mental health, allowing you to use your voice and feel respected for doing so. Oftentimes, passive or passive aggressive behavior contributes to poor mental health. Since communicators struggle with feeling pressured by their peers, which in turn has a negative impact on their self-worth. Being assertive doesn't necessarily mean you will get what you want, but it can help you to achieve and otherwise difficult compromise. Communicating assertively will leave you feeling confident that you handle the situation well without allowing emotions to take control of the discussion and leave others involved feeling respected. Let's take a look at how we can start to adopt an assertive approach in leadership. Value yourself and others equally. First and foremost, you should always remember that it is the people who make an organization. You should recognize yourself and your colleagues as valued members of the team. And remember that each of you deserves to be respected. It is important to establish your boundaries. Know exactly how you want to be treated, know what your core beliefs are and what you stand for. This self-belief is important in order to communicate assertively with others. Being able to respect yourself means you will treat others in the same way. Be open to criticism. Having respect for yourself doesn't mean you are almighty. You should accept that everyone including you can be wrong at times or can make mistakes. And you should be open to criticism from your peers. Being able to accept both positive and negative criticism in a gracious manner can often be tough. But it is the mark of a great assertive leader. That said, you certainly don't have to agree with the criticism to somewhat keep the peace. But you should practice techniques on how to respond to negative feedback without becoming defensive or angry. You must learn to see past your emotional response to criticism and embrace it as a way to mature and develop. Learn how to say no. And assertive communicators should not hesitate to say no for fear of upsetting others. Unfortunately, being assertive doesn't mean you can keep everyone happy all the time. But in assertive, leader will know when it is right to say no. Having self-respect means you should understand your own limits. When something will cause too much pressure, upset your workload or becomes unmanageable. Learning to say no, we'll gain you more respect than ultimately burning yourself out. Remember, assertive leaders are great problem-solvers. So when the needs do arise, try to find a win-win situation for all. Listen to others. It may seem like an easy task to begin with. But truly listening to others in a communication can sometimes be a difficult skill to achieve. Remember that just like you, other people have a voice and also want it to be heard. Though their opinion may differ from yours. Though you may feel their opinion is the correct one. Consider how their communication style may change if you do not respect their voice. Assertive communication breeds assertive communication. If you interrupt others or disrespect their thoughts, the conversation balanced tips, and your peer may fail. An aggressive communication style is needed in order to take back some control. On the other hand, should you interrupt or ignore those with less confidence. They may well get back into passive or passive aggressive styles. To feel more comfortable with you taking control of the conversation. It's important to keep it balanced between yourself and your peers. And assertive communicator will listen when spoken to, rather than a certain aggressive dominance into the conversation. Be confident when communicating. Being assertive requires you to be confident. A lack of confidence can often lead to being indecisive, which in turn gives a lack of clarity to those you are communicating to. A good leader is clear and concise and what they wish to achieve. 5. Communicating in the 21st century: Communicating. In the 21st century, communication with your colleagues expands much further than face-to-face these days. We have the ability to connect via email, video calls, and instant messengers with team collaborations, venturing out to the boardroom and into the world of online project management tools. But what does this have to do with the way that we communicate? Well, effective communication is all about ensuring that you put your point across the way it is intended. The written word can often come across more cost than if it were altered allowed. And that's something worth remembering at all times. Most businesses start to adopt a remote working style and sharing your communication style is reflected in your written word has never been more crucial. My point is, it's always worth thinking about the measures you are using it to communicate with your colleagues. It can have a bigger impact than you think. 6. Dealing with difficult behaviours: Dealing with difficult behaviors. Let's face it, sometimes people can be difficult. As a leader. There is nothing worse than not getting on well with members of your team. And the impacts on both your team and you can be huge. Working with difficult people can come in many forms. Whether they display aggressive behavior, have annoying habits, or even just people who have different agendas or beliefs to your own. As a leader, it is your responsibility to assertively manage those difficulties in the correct way to ensure harmony in your team and cause less stress for you in the long run. Oftentimes difficult people don't set out to be difficult. In contrast, I've found most people are blissfully unaware that they're even being difficult. In many instances, the disconnection is commonly a result of fluid communication. As we've discussed just now, with effective communication, there is never a one size fits all method to communication. Ask yourself this, are you contributing to making things difficult by failing to communicate effectively? Are you yourself guilty of some difficult habits? Of course, it's hard to work that out for yourself. After all, we've just mentioned, most people don't even know that they're being difficult. So how will you ever know? I found one of the easiest solutions before exploring further methods to dealing with difficult behavior is to merely have an open discussion with your team member to discover if there is anything that you could be doing better in order to avoid difficult dealings. Of course, it's much easier said than done to openly ask someone, am i difficult? And as a leader or manager, you'll likely be met with a resounding no by your team who might worry about upsetting you. Later in this course, we'll cover how to give and receive feedback with your team. So it's worth taking some tips here to find out how to suddenly pose this question and receive honest feedback. In short, try to avoid leading questions and offer open questions such as these, which can help you to steer the conversation and avoid going off topic. Is there anything that you would like to see change in the way I communicate with you? Are you having difficulties understanding what I'm asking of you? Do you feel less than two? Do you feel I understand you? Difficult people usually find other people difficult to deal with. It's a great indicator as to who is usually the root cause of the problem. For example, if you find you're having difficulties with several members of your team, it might be worth taking a step back and asking yourself if you indeed are the root cause. After all, it's so much easier to make changes to yourself than attempt to change other people. All you need to do is work out a better and more effective method to communicate yourself clearly. So once you've identified the source of the difficulty, how do you deal with it? First of all, you need to assess the impact that they are having on both your team and you individually. Are they creating a toxic workplace? Or is there in competence effecting the deliverables of other team members? Or is it simply that you don't click with them as well as others in your team. Taking the latter, if you're finding it difficult to merely build a rapport with your team member as well as you'd have with the others. It's possibly not that they're being a difficult person at all. I regularly see mismatches between employees and their leaders purely because they have different values. For example, I often hear my employee is being difficult and refusing to work overtime to help get the project finished. And perhaps that may have happened in your team previously. These types of scenarios are always requiring a little bit more delicacy. Keep in mind that your team members all have a life outside of work. Whilst working few extra hours in an evening may not be a challenge for you. They could easily cause external issues for others. Be kind and courteous with your team, and you'll reap the rewards and build the rapport that you need to avoid differences causing too much agro. It's very common for these difficulties to arise on knowingly when your team members display or rather don't display passive behavior. Consistent passive behavior in the workplace is quite often due to a lack of confidence. Those struggling to speak up for themselves, to disagree or to offer up an opinion on certain things. Usually have a sense of I'll just get on with it. It's a trait that's hard to identify. But left unmanaged can result in team members feeling unheard, disrespected and under-performing in their roles. Remember. A great leader gives older team the chance for their voice to be heard. Be sure to keep an eye out for members of your team who might need a little confidence boost every now and then. Passive aggressive or aggressive behaviors in the workplace are easier to acknowledge. Take the example of a shared ticketing system where you delegate tickets out to each of your team members. You may find one of your team members constantly on assigning themselves from a vast amount of tickets you assigned. A common display of passive aggressive behavior. Aggressive behavior in the workplace comes in the forms of interruption, being patronising or belittling someone's opinion. For example, announcing that they will be dealing with a specific type of incoming tickets since they are the best person to do so. Or taking tickets off their colleagues when they simply ask for a little help in dealing with it. It might come as a surprise that these types of behaviors are also a result of having a lack of confidence. Whilst in the aggressive phase, it certainly feels as though your team members are behaving with confidence. It usually is because they feel unheard. And this is the only effective way they have found communicate their opinions. They might also think this helps them to get what they want quicker, which is usually the case. Dealing with the behavior boils down to both a communicating positively and openly with your team so that they feel they are able to voice their opinions in an unobtrusive environment and be nipping any dominant TO passive aggressive displays in the bud. Immediately. Have quiet discussions with your team members to explain why you failed. The behavior was unnecessary and how it resulted in making things difficult for you to manage. This is the ideal way to communicate assertively. Negativity is largely overlooked as a difficult behavior. Yet it's certainly worth addressing as it's one of the most common difficulties we as leaders can face in the workplace. Of course, as a team, not everyone is going to be extremely positive in every situation, every day. But I'm sure we've all experienced someone at 1 or another showing extreme negativity. If you're unsure what negative behavior looks like, it can be displayed by consistent objections and meetings. Someone always finding a reason not to move forward with an idea. Regularly saying that won't work, or simply just saying every opportunity or idea is a bad one. You may have heard the phrase is glass half empty and glass half full. And that's exactly how I describe consistent negativity in the workplace. The glass half empty folk. Negativity is the necessity. And that's precisely why working in a team on certain projects is helpful. You can gauge opinions from all members and understand the risks which may be involved. But having a team member who is consistently negative can easily put a dampener on your whole team's morale. Thinking back to the passive behavior we discussed earlier, encouraging someone with low confidence to speak up and voice their opinions can be doubly difficult. If you have another team member always shooting them down at every opportunity. If this sounds like a common behavior and your team try to formalize your meetings and ideas sharing so that you can control exactly when team members can share their opinions. And easy way of formalizing is to use a methods such as this one to give opportunities for mind mapping the positive outcomes and the negative ones, or even just the risks. In doing such a simple exercise. It can give someone who you feel displays consistent negative behavior, the chance to focus on positive options to in life when we come across difficult people, it's usually an easy option to distance ourselves from them. In the workplace. Difficult people aren't quite so easy to distance ourselves from. So it's incredibly important to take steps in order to quell a difficulty before it has an influence on other members of your team. Or indeed yourself. 7. Having confidence in yourself: Having confidence in yourself and your abilities. Confidence is a key quality that makes an excellent leader. A lot of the time, confidence in leadership can be misconstrued as feeling powerful. Being the scary boss who tells people what to do. Actually. That's not what we mean by being a confident leader. As a leader, being confident in yourself and your abilities. It's not always about knowing everything or telling people what they should be doing. In reality. Having confidence in oneself is all about understanding your own strengths and weaknesses. Accepting that you might not always know best, that's a great quality to have as a leader. Being humble. Have you ever heard the phrase, It takes a village to raise a child, will also rings true in business. Think about why you have a team. Why do you need a team to achieve the end goals and your business? Teams are diverse. Each member has their own strengths and weaknesses, their own areas of expertise and qualities which are beneficial. And when you bring them altogether, you can create a powerful network to help achieve your end goal. As a leader, it's your responsibility to understand the qualities and your team. And understand who might be best to deal with certain areas of your project. That takes confidence. Take for example, a team of software developers with you as their leader. Perhaps you have a basic understanding of certain programming languages, or maybe you don't have any understanding at all. Your role as a leader is to be confident in understanding who will be a good fit for certain work. Being confident in your abilities to delegate tasks appropriately. And finally, being humble. Accepting that sometimes you might not know best and may need to seek advice from other members in your team who do. Imposter syndrome can also damage your confidence. Feeling like you don't deserve to be in the role you are in, or feeling like you are just faking it all. It can result in low confidence and the need to seek approval from others in everything you do. Tom Hanks is once quoted in an interview as saying, no matter what we've done, there comes a point where you think, how did I get here? When are they going to discover that I am in fact a fraud and take everything away from me. And that's a perfect example of imposter syndrome. It's actually much more common than you might think in leadership roles. It's very typical to feel like you don't know what you're doing sometimes. That's why it's so important to be in tune with your strengths and weaknesses as a leader. Identifying what makes you a strong leader will give you the confidence and understanding exactly why you're in this role. Confidence creates success in proving your thinking. Exploring beyond your comfort zone, and removing your own self-doubt is vital to leading your team successfully. Remember, your team looks to you for guidance. They don't expect that you know the answers to everything, but they expect that you will be able to guide them as a team to work things out together. 8. Influencing your team: Influencing your team. Think back to the previous failures in your life, who you have looked up to. Be that in business or personally? Do you feel they influenced and shaped you during your career, schooling, or perhaps even your childhood. Of course. What made you feel influenced by them. It probably has a great deal to do with their values and qualities. Things you might strive to emulate yourself. To be an effective leader. You need to understand your own values and strive to use them in order to influence your own team. Remember that your actions have an impact on the rest of your team. As a leader, your colleagues will look up to you for influence, seek guidance and support from your knowledge, and crucially build respect for you. What are your values as a leader? Well, each one of us will have different values. Your values drive your choices in life. They determine your actions as a leader, your capacity to inspire others. Consider this list of values, which do you feel are most important to you? Which words stand out to you as important in the workplace? Tried to choose up to five. Honesty, trust, authenticity, kindness, independence, teamwork, passion, respect, integrity, loyalty, creativity, compassion, courage, community. Efficiency, dignity, family, responsibility, optimism. Now that you have an idea of your core values, you can start to develop more meaning behind them. Think about the words you selected. Why did you choose those specifically? For example, I value respect very highly as a leader, it's important that we all treat others the way we ourselves would like to be treated. As a leader. It's important that my team all share a mutual respect for one another. It helps create harmony in the workplace and keeps all my team members confident to approach one another for help and support. Doubly. So it's important that I show respect as their leader. In order to gain mutual respect from them. It helps to keep compensations open and drive success from the team. Not only do your values influence the people you lead, they can also influence others in the workplace. Understanding how you operate with your team in an emotional capacity will influence the way other departments interview candidates or even customers. See you. I was once lucky enough to work in a team with an excellent, respectful manager who strive to ensure we all had respect to one another's beliefs. I took great pride in explaining this to customers. It often aligned with their own values in business, which helped brilliantly and building customer relationships. 9. Build your leadership visibility: Building your leadership visibility. Not only can influencing your team help them, it can also help you with your long-term career prospects. Taking the time to establish yourself as a well-respected leader with well aligned values will influence the way you are seen by outsiders to leading a team to success, receiving excellent references from your colleagues and being able to communicate at all levels. We'll see you go far in the world of business leadership. You are the most valuable asset you can invest in. So make sure you do that authentically. 10. Building talent in your workforce: Building talent and your workforce. An aspect of leadership that is often overlooked is the ability to build talent within your workforce. Talent is ever-growing. Think about how you got to your current role as a leader. Did you start there or did you work your way further up? Chances are it's the latter. And you manage this by building on your skills, building a better understanding of your area of expertise, and getting crucial on-the-job learning. That's why it's important to harness the future potential of your current workforce too. As a leader, it's such a rewarding opportunity to watch someone flourished under your guidance. That building talent isn't just about delivering great performance reviews. It's about encompassing your employee's goals, helping target areas for improvement and developing their skills. Helping to build talent can be rewarding for both parties to. It can help support your employees career aspirations and move them forward to the next level. But also transform their capacity to produce. Why wouldn't you want to help upscale and build upon your teams talent? It serves you well as a leader. You'll encourage learning in the workplace. Keep your team happy and feeling creative. And what's more. You'll also improve their loyalty. Why would you leave a company who are dedicated to helping you achieve your own goals, not just those of the companies. So how do you build talent? You should strive to act as a mentor for your team, offering high level support and advice based on your wisdom and previous experience. Mentoring your team will go a long way with understanding their specific needs and personal goals. Do you know what each of your team members end goals are? Today it's common for people to have more than 20 jobs in their lifetime. It's much different to the days where you had a job for life or you rarely moved on from your acquired role. And that's thanks to the improved opportunities available to us all. We each have easier access to education beyond the school age. There are night classes and Open University options, and many online courses, just like the one you are listening to you today. It's exciting and invigorating to have an employer who supports those further education opportunities. It helps motivate and gives a sense of recognition. By offering one-to-one mentoring for your team. You can offer suggestions based on your past experience or help with researching the best path to take. In order to achieve those goals. It's quite common in business to feel threatened by the offering of what we call career coaching. What happens if you put all of your efforts into developing a person's skills and talent, and then they leave that position. Of course, it's a possibility. However, there's also a risk of employees leaving as they don't feel fulfilled in their roles. The odds are probably much higher for that to. Upskilling your workforce quite often means that you have better opportunities to hire internally. Your team can navigate themselves into other roles in the company. Which brings us onto recruiting new team members. Bringing in new team members to an already well established team is never going to be easy. When you're recruiting. You should always keep this question in mind. How does this person align with our team's values? You may find the most skilled and talented professional in the world. But if they don't align with your core values and those of your team, you could very quickly fine things becoming difficult to manage. It's a far cry from ensuring you all share the same interests or your personalities are all very similar. But making sure that a new recruit will be content with the way in which your team is established is a real importance. 11. Setting goals in your team: Setting goals and your team. Improving Team focused on the right things requires great leadership. The best way to drive that behavior and achieve the performance you would desire is by setting goals. How else would you expect to lead a team to success without having predetermined milestones to work towards. Goals are important. They help improve focus and get teams motivated to work on the right things at the right time. Goal setting also helps you as a leader to direct your team in the right way. It's important to understand what we mean by a goal. Goals should be the markers for success. They might be financial goals, operational, or project-based schools. There what we as leaders used to analyse things such as occupancy and performance. By working towards specific goals, you can gain foresight into setting future goals. For example, whether you require more resources or whether further training is needed. Smart goals is a method used quite widely and it's easy to remember the core principles. Its acronym stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. These are the key criteria is required for successful goal-setting. Specific. What will be accomplished? What actions will you take? When do you want to do this? And why is this a goal? Measurable? What data will measure the goal? How much, how well? How can you measure progress? And no, if you successfully met your goal, achievable, is the goal achievable? Do you have the necessary skills and resources? If not, can you obtain them? What is the motivation for this goal? Is the amount of effort required on par with what the goal will achieve? Relevance? How does the goal aligned with broader goals? Why is the result important? Why am I setting this goal now? Is it aligned with the overall objectives? Time-bound? What is the timeframe for accomplishing this goal? What's the deadline? Does it realistic? By considering the criteria for your goals beforehand, the leadership of your team becomes more concrete. You fully understand the concept of each goal and have assessed how you intend to go about achieving it. Meaning you're well on the way to sending your team in the right direction. In many circumstances, it might be beneficial to include your team and the initial scope of your goal planning. I always encourage planning meetings with my team to give opportunities to feed back. It helps everyone to feel involved and gifts the chance to raise concerns before the goals are set. Meaning everyone is working from the same page. If your goals are most often project-based, it may also be worthwhile exploring project management methodologies. There are various methodologies that different suitability depending on your projects. And adopting such workflows can help further your goals successes. 12. Micromanaging: Micro managing. One of the many aspects of being a great leader is trust. Developing a mutual trust with your team means you don't have to watch over everything they do. A term called micro managing. Micro managing is suddenly all too common in the workplace. It's a dangerous concept to adopt. But often we don't know when we're micro-managing. There's a fine line between supervising and leading a team and micro-managing every aspect of their performance. Being overbearing can be a huge de-motivated for your team. It's great to be involved in the day-to-day days. But becoming overzealous can make people feel and trusted and in turn cause a lack of creativity. It's hard to think for yourself when someone is watching everything you do. Try to stay close to your team's performance through reports and analytics, having regular catch ups, or setting regular milestone moments to review how things are going. Those are all excellent options and what makes a great leader try to avoid being over-involved in every task. If you feel that certain people in your team may struggle, you should offer your help rather than jumping straight in on announced. By doing so, you encourage autonomy in the workplace. Help your team to feel needed and above all, respect the work they produce. 13. Giving & receiving feedback: Giving and receiving feedback. As a leader, giving and receiving feedback does not come naturally to everyone. Feedback quite often feels like criticism. And as such, it can be seen as a challenge. But being able to give and accept feedback is such a valuable asset to have as a leader. It helps enhance performance. Stairs in the right direction, and continually develop both services and our team. Let's start by focusing on giving feedback. As a leader, you are highly responsible for your team's performance. A big part of achieving that successful performance relies on being able to give effective feedback to your team. The only way you will improve is to understand what aspects are going well and which parts need refining. The key part to giving feedback is to understand that it's not a personal attack on someone. It's a process to help your team performed better. Be sensitive in how you provide feedback. There's no one-size-fits-all. Whilst some members of your team may be perfectly happy receiving an e-mail with pointers for improvement. Others may benefit more from an open discussion or having a private chat with you, especially if they lack confidence in coming forward with new ideas already. When providing feedback. Try to be structured in your approach. One of the easiest methods I've found for giving better structured feedback is to organize regular review meetings. It's very common to have meetings or presentations when new ideas are shared and you're asked to provide your thoughts immediately. In my personal opinion, off the cuff feedback can be very difficult. You risk missing out on vital points or having a knee-jerk reaction to something before giving it much thought. When in a leadership role. I've always practiced having follow-up meetings sometime after our initial discussions. Be that a couple of days after or even just an hour later. It can really help give you the break. You need to gather your thoughts and take some time to consider the points raised properly. It also means you have the opportunity to better structure your feedback. You can avoid those knee-jerk reactions which can often upset those involved. Feel like an attack. You can prepare what you would like to say in a more delicate tone. I always encourage open feedback sessions with my teams to, it's important for everyone to have their own voice. You may have heard of the constructive criticism sandwich before. It's a very easy tool to adopt. If you're not quite that confident in giving feedback assertively. It consists of three points. The top of the sandwich, the filling, and the bottom of the sandwich. Start with a positive. Whilst you're not intending to mitigate what's to come. The criticism. You want to start off on a positive to keep whomever you're providing feedback to from feeling instantly criticized. It could be as simple as thanking them for their idea, recalling previous projects which have worked well with their suggestions. Or even just explaining how you appreciate the time and effort that they've put in. It gives them a sense of recognition. After all, just because the result isn't satisfactory to you. It doesn't mean they haven't spent some good time on the concept. The filling. Next you move towards delivering your critique. Think carefully about your approach, but don't beat around the bush with how you deliver feedback. There's no need to prolong what you need to say purely because you feel guilty about how it is received. Feedback is constructive. And by giving recognition at the start, it helps to stop your negative feedback being felt as a personal attack. Finally, we follow up with a positive. This could be by pointing them in the right direction, giving support and guidance as a mental, or just simply providing motivation to continue with the ideas or the project that they're working on. Remind them that you value their work. The sandwich concept works very well. However, be sure not to overuse it. Else. It can become very insincere and robotic. It's all about providing balanced feedback, showing your team that you are on their side and you have their best interests at play. Receiving feedback. As leaders. We should welcome receiving feedback from our coworkers, our team, and our own leaders. Feedback helps you to grow as an individual and become a stronger leader for your team. Of course, despite your own knowledge on how to give constructive feedback, you can't control the weight or the people delivered to you. That means it can often be off the cuff or feel very negative. In these cases. It's always wise to take some time to digest the feedback you're receiving before responding. It avoids any instant confrontation. Instead, consider using these questions to get a deeper understanding on the feedback you've just received. Support and guidance. Can I obtain to make improvements? What can I do better next time? Are there any training opportunities for me to better improve my work? Performance feedback is very important. And just remember, we're probably all a little nervous to deliver feedback. So don't take things. So personally. 14. Review: I hope you've found this course useful in helping you develop into a successful leader. By adopting the skills we've covered, you will inevitably build a stronger team and develop closer ties with them as individuals. The road to achieving excellence and leadership is certainly not an easy one. But if you can spend some time improving the way you communicate with your team, you'll ultimately find things become much easier and clearer for you. As a follow up, I'd highly recommend taking a look at the other courses in my business suite, including mastering assertive communication, communicating your vision and values, and Agile project management. Each of these courses explores many of the topics we've covered in today's course in much further detail.