How to Use Leverage to Multiply Your Efforts

A lever, a device that has the power to multiply the effectiveness of your input allowing you to achieve extraordinary results through ordinary effort.

A Leverage Manager can use different levers for great results:

Caring:

Caring generates its own energy since it’s closely related to meaning. The question is, how much do you care about you work and your company?  The more you care the greater the results you can generate.

Confidence:

Confidence has the power to generate passion which provides the opportunity that would otherwise seem impossible. Confidence is a leverage for success.

Ideas:

Every business starts with an idea and every idea can be improved. Businesses come and go since only the best ideas survive in the market. The trick is to identify the 80/20 ideas

Decisions:

Only decisive people succeed, the indecisive ones never do.  As a Leverage Manager focus on taking crucial decisions and delegate the trivial ones.

Trust:

The only way to become a great manager is if you have the trust of your boss and you trust your own team members.  Trust is an absolute prerequisite of efficiency.

People:

If you want to attract the best customers surround yourself with the best people (staff)

How to Use Liberation to Increase Employee Engagement

A Liberating Manager must be utterly honest with his people – supportive and friendly yet very demanding.

Liberation requires total honesty and openness from both the manager and the people. In some cases, this philosophy is not for everyone and it is not even possible to practice in some organizations.

A Liberating Manager creates friendship, honesty and trust. You will be more successful if you rule by trust instead of fear.

A fear based culture is all about money, so people are willing to negate themselves. Many organizations have been based on power, fear and tight supervision which negates liberation. It worked well in traditional, predictable and slow-changing industries, but does not in today’s knowledge based industries.

Liberation makes people behave exactly as who they are and not as who they are expected to be – it makes people more engaged, positive, creative and productive.

As a Manager you need to liberate them to achieve their full potential, which means, identifying their outstanding personal attributes; then, encourage them to deploy these skills in ways that will benefit the team and the company. However, it is important that a Liberating Manager insists that their team works hard, not in terms of time or incessantly, but in imagination and determination. 

In essence, a Liberating Manager builds a culture (business culture) of trust and opens the door for creativeness.

How to Find Meaning As a Manager

Nothing is more important than achieving meaning in your life.

Meaning derives from achievement, from creating something or performing a task or deed that comes from your own self and talent.

Money and entertainment are only substitutes; and as much as we might think it creates happiness, it doesn’t.  Happiness is a by-product of leading a life with meaning.

Anything you are good at contributes to happiness.

As a Manager, in order to give meaning to your life you have to make the most of your inner potential – your contribution to the organization is what will provide you with meaning within that organization.

In today’s business world, Businesses require Managers who make the most of what is unique within them. It requires Managers who seek meaning in their work. It’s only when you “do your own thing” in a disciplined and creative way that meaning becomes reality.

The 80/20 principle relates to Meaning in the sense that a small minority are the ones who possess a higher individual imagination, creativity, personality and unique skills. One particularly talented executive can have hundreds of times more impact than another.

Everything in business is a commodity:  money, hard work, loyalty, degrees, etc. Everything in general is a commodity except individual inspiration and innovation.

In order to find meaning as a Manager:

• The field in which you work must turn you on
• The job must give you new and rewarding knowledge
• The job must allow you to perform you true potential
• The firm must inspire you rather than rule you
• Mutual like of your colleagues and bosses
• The firm must be going places