David Chinsky & Associates

July 2009

The Leadership Fit® Newsletter is written and emailed monthly to leaders seeking the

clarity, confidence, effectiveness and vitality

necessary for achieving their highest level of leadership fitness™.

To learn more about our Institute for Leadership Fitness™, including dates for our upcoming programs in Ann Arbor, MI, Washington, D.C., and Phoenix, AZ, please visit

www.theleadershipfit.com/institute

IN THIS ISSUE

Unchoking the Leadership Pipeline

Embracing the Hidden Strength of Positive Emotions

One More Thing - The Best Advice I Ever Got

Unchoking the

Leadership Pipeline

Leaders often hold back when it comes to delegating important work to others. In so doing, they can choke the leadership pipeline within their organizations.

Among the more popular barriers to delegation are:

• "I can do it better and quicker myself."

• "It takes too long to explain."

• "I can't give away important tasks."

• "There's no one I can trust."

• "It takes too much effort to follow up."

• "There's no time to delegate."

• "I never get back what I want."

• "I'll lose control."

• "I won't know what's going on."

Our teams often have more capacity than we think. While we may be "protecting them from too much work", many times our teams are looking for more challenge and/or an opportunity to work on more important projects.

Proper delegation contributes to the development of internal talent by providing that "stretch assignment" that allows someone to go from 80% ready to 100% ready.

By always going back to our same "short list" of "go to" people whenever we have a project to assign, we limit our opportunity to lengthen that list, and miss an opportunity to accelerate the development of others on our team.

What projects are you working on right now that can be delegated?

Embracing the Hidden

Strength of Positive Emotions

Each month, we review a book selected to both engage and challenge leaders as they seek to make a difference in their organizations.

Our pick this month is Positivity by Barbara Fredrickson. As one of the pioneers of positive psychology, Fredrickson offers groundbreaking research on how to embrace the hidden strength of positive emotions.

Early in the book, readers are invited to take a positivity self-test to calculate their own positivity ratio. Fredrickson and her collaborators have found that a 3-to-1 ratio of positive emotions to negative emotions is the tipping point for realizing the benefits of practicing positivity. As it turns out, 80% of Americans fall short of this ideal positivity ratio.

While positivity is contagious, and has been linked to higher-quality connections in the workplace, it also is very fragile. In the book, Fredrickson suggests a number of tools to help defuse negativity and increase positivity.

To calculate your own positivity ratio, visit www.positivityratio.com.

For our current reading list, please click here.

One More Thing

Fortune magazine produced a wonderful series featuring the best advice people like Tiger Woods ever received in their life. For Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, it was to "hire a coach." He at first resisted the idea since he had been CEO of several successful firms. After John Dorr, the VC behind Google, insisted Schmidt meet with a coach, it proved to be the best advice Schmidt ever received. Take 60 seconds to read the role of Schmidt's coach and consider the potential benefits to you of working with a professionally certified and credentialed coach.