The Leader Lab

Core Skills to Become a Great Manager, Faster

Tania Luna, LeeAnn Renninger

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781394331703
  9781119793311
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119793335
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Decision Making
• Index: Business

What if you could become a great manager, leader, and communicator faster?

The Leader Lab is a high-speed leadership intensive, equipping managers with the Swiss Army Knife of skills that help you handle the toughest situations that come your way.

Through painstaking research and training over 200,000 managers, authors Tania Luna and LeeAnn Renninger, PhD (co-CEOs of LifeLab Learning) identified the most important skills that distinguish great managers from average. Most importantly,they've discovered how to help people rapidly develop these core skills. The result? You quickly achieve extraordinary team performance and a culture of engagement, fulfillment, and belonging.?

Too often, folks are promoted without any training for the countless crucial responsibilities of the modern manager: being part coach, part player, part therapist, part role model.The Leader Labserves as your definitive guide to what it means to be a great manager today – and how to become a great leader faster. This book is based on LifeLabs Learning's wildly successful workshop series. It combines research, tools, and the playful, fluff-free style that's made LifeLabs the go-to professional development resource for over 1,000 innovative companies around the world.??

You'll learn how to:?

• Quickly improve performance and engagement
• Handle tough conversations with confidence
• Identify and resolve the underlying issues holding your team back
• Create a culture of inclusion
• Spark innovation
• Reduce stress and burnout
• Finetune your coaching, productivity, feedback, one-on-one, strategic thinking, meeting facilitation, people development, and leading change skills
• Learn the same high-leverage skills that new managers at the world's most innovative organizations are using to create impactful change in business and in life

This interactive, accessible, and brain-friendly resource will help you and your team ramp up and reach the tipping point of managerial greatness fast.

II
The Core Skills

Congratulations! You have now collected all seven Core BUs – the small Behavioral Units that came up again and again in our research at LifeLabs Learning as the distinguishing behaviors of great managers. These BUs alone will make you a better manager faster by helping you create clarity, drive alignment, build trust, mitigate bias, and accelerate learning. But to become a truly great manager – someone who catalyzes engagement and helps people achieve amazing results – you need to know how to wield your leadership Swiss Army knife in an infinite array of situations. You'll need to mix and match different BUs to develop leadership skills.

What's the difference between a BU and a skill? As an analogy, consider the importance of strengthening your physical core muscles. Think of a strong physical core as a BU. While this BU alone is great to have, its true power comes from what it makes possible. With a strong core, you can more quickly develop your athleticism, posture, flexibility, and many other skills. Skills are more complex and take longer to master than BUs, but they will let you tackle an even greater array of obstacles and opportunities as a leader. The Core BUs you've learned so far are at the foundation of most leadership skills and will help you develop these skills faster.

Which leadership skills matter most? While the great managers we studied displayed dozens of skills, we found that a small set of just eight Core Skills came up more than any others across a wide range of leadership scenarios (from handling tough conversations to keeping people focused in times of uncertainty). Because mastering these Core Skills opens the door to countless other competencies faster, we refer to them as “tipping point skills.” These are the smallest changes that make the biggest impact in the shortest time. These skills are:

1. Coaching Skills
2. Feedback Skills
3. Productivity Skills
4. Effective One‐on‐Ones
5. Strategic Thinking
6. Meetings Mastery
7. Leading Change
8. People Development

Before you move on to this next floor of the leader lab, take five minutes to complete this self‐assessment, based on the Core Skills you're about to learn. This exercise will help you learn more quickly and track your progress along the way:

Leadership Scenarios Self‐Assessment	Score 1–10 (10 = highest)
1. Imagine you have a team member who is demotivated by their work. How confident are you that you know how to coach them to find more motivation?
2. Let's say someone on your team comes across as dismissive when others share ideas. How confident are you that you know how to give them feedback?
3. Assume that one of your team members is constantly overwhelmed, falling behind on deadlines, and having trouble focusing. How confident are you that you know how to help?
4. Effective one‐on‐one meetings increase engagement, development, and productivity. How confident are you that you know how to achieve these results with the one‐on‐ones you have with each person on your team?
5. Imagine that your team is working on a large, complex, cross‐functional project. How confident are you that you know how to help them think strategically and avoid common strategic thinking mistakes?
6. Let's say you are leading a meeting where some people are going off topic, some are overtalking, and it's unclear how the group should make a decision. How confident are you that you know how to course‐correct and get the meeting back on track?
7. When change happens, team members ofte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• The Backstory
• How to Use This Book
• I: The Core BUs
• II: The Core Skills
• Leader Lab Wrap-up
• References
• Acknowledgments
• Author Bios
• Index
• End User License Agreement