Lessons in Leadership: How to Create a Hero Culture at Work

How do we ensure employee and customer retention? How do we motivate and inspire others during times of often constant change? How do we take business to the next level through the relationships we are building? And how do we shift from a problem-driven environment to one that is fueled by empowerment and team synergy?

Today’s society is hungry for people who can inspire, guide and help them feel good about themselves; they are looking for Heroes! And when we can bring this Hero image into the business environment we can create a culture that produces some amazing changes in how people are doing business!

The Hero paradigm, based on teaching competencies that enable people to see past problems to possibilities and past problem people to their potential, is founded on the premise that everyone is a leader (Hero), and everyone leads from where he stands. It is about taking responsibility, setting the standards that others follow, and acknowledging what others are doing right.

Leadership is always about guiding and making others powerful. This culture is also about how to shift old, unproductive beliefs to productive ones to create outcomes and reach goals. It’s about developing inner strength, getting rid of limiting, self inflicted rules that sabotage success, and moving forward with purpose and a set of specific skills to achieve desired results.

This leadership template examines what “rules” we need to break that have limited our abilities to effectively lead, focuses on a leader attitude/mentality, and covers several specific areas.

Go 5 Why’s Deep: Don’t stop with the first right answer, it’s usually the easy answer, but most of the time not the real answer. When we start acknowledging what someone is doing right, preferably in front of others, we start to create an environment for growth and development.

• Speak the same language: Any time we are communicating with anyone, we will build rapport/relationships more effectively, and usually quicker, when we are communicating with them based on how they want to get the information (i.e. quick and to the point, lots of detail, slower, with a friendly preface)
   
• Use Emotional Intelligence: The ability to monitor one’s own and other’s feelings to discriminate among them, and use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions, sets us apart simply by understanding and being able to use EI.
   
• Keep people safe: No matter what the situation if we haven’t created an environment that allows for error, for asking something more than once or communicating a mistake, then we will not get an environment of growth and expansion.
   
• Help people save face: It’s imperative that everyone retains dignity, it’s one of the cornerstones of working effectively with others
   
• Hero Vision: We need to stop focusing on what we don’t want, and see past or through the issues and problems to the potential and possibility. Only when we focus on what we want can we actively start to come up with new answers, new resolution and get past judgment
   
• Empathetic Listing: We must follow Covey’s mandate of listening first to understand, then be understood, and we do that through listening to understand the emotion. Not trying to fix or answer, just acknowledging, is often all someone needs