There are many benefits to going green. You are making a statement that the environment is important and that you want it to be around for our children and grand-children. Going green can save money and time and it is contagious. Your staff is more likely to emulate the behavior in their homes and you will attract others who believe that going green is the only way to go. And you can use this as a marketing advantage in attracting new clients.

The following tips help your organization go green. While you may not be able to apply them all, the more that you can do will make the world that much of a better place.

Conduct virtual meetings and video conferences instead of traveling to meetings, as much as feasible. Traveling to meetings burns carbon fossils and other natural resources. This is true whether you are traveling by car or flying across the country. Travel is also expensive and time consuming. Although in-person meetings can be crucial when first establishing relationships or during important meetings, as much as possible, promote the use of virtual meetings using conference bridges and video conferencing.

Allow your team to work from home. Allowing your team to work from home lowers their carbon footprint as they don’t have to drive or use mass transit. This also lowers your costs as you don’t need a physical office, or can suffice with a much smaller office.

Become an expert working with disperse teams. This allows you to hire people from anywhere in the country (or beyond), which lets you find people with the exact experience that you need plus it lowers costs. For example, I know of a small agency in NYC that finds that using people who live in other parts of the country allows them to lower their costs by 20% compared to NYC resources. To successfully work with disperse teams means that you need the proper infrastructure and a standardized process so that everyone knows what to do in what order.

If you must meet in-person or need to maintain a physical office, do so in places where people can easily take mass transit. This means that if given a choice, you should locate meetings in major cities where the proper city infrastructure exists.

Use collaboration tools instead of printing documents. This allows teams to work on documents without everyone having to print out the documents.

Empower your staff to go green. Institute an award program for people who submit the best tips and for the person who lowers their carbon footprint the most.

There are also many things that you can do in your office such as:

• Promote the use of electric cars by providing charging stations in your office.
• Install enclosed bicycle lockers so that people can bike to work. Making them enclosed (or indoors) protects the bike from bad weather and theft.
• Get rid of disposable coffee cups. Give everyone a reusable coffee mug to use instead.
• Replace paper towels in your bathrooms with air blowers.
• Replace regular light bulbs with CFLs.
• Install motion detectors in your conference rooms that controls the lights so that they turn on/off automatically.
• Use power strips to turn off the power to computers and monitors when they are not in use.
• Purchase recycled paper for your printers and encourage people to print on both sides of the sheet.

Would love to hear your success stories and any tips that you have.

One of the things that holds back many people is their resistance to change. To succeed in the business world, you need to first recognize that change is happening, and then quickly adapt to the change. While such a simple philosophy, there are so many of us who are not very good at handling change. I know because for way too many years, I was one of those people. Then one of my managers recommended the book, “Who Moved My Cheese”, and ever since, I have been a convert. I loved the book so much that I immediately went out and bought copies of the book for every member of my team and made it required reading for them followed up a training session to discuss the book.

The premise of the book is about two mice who go the same spot everyday in a maze looking for their daily cheese. One day the cheese is moved to another location. One of the mice went looking for the cheese in another location while the other mouse stayed in the old location waiting for the cheese to return. The mouse who went looking for cheese in the new location thrived as it found the cheese while the other mouse did not fare so well.

Apply this to the business world. First you need to realize when change is happening. This requires you to be aware of your environment and read the signs. We’ve all seen signs of impending change that we refuse to comprehend. The change can be small or it can be life-changing. Regardless it is best to be ahead of the change and be proactive, rather than simply reacting to the change. Second, when change does happen, quickly figure out what you need to do to adapt to it, and then do it.

So if your cheese has been moved, be the mouse who goes looking for new cheese. Follow this simple philosophy throughout your career and your personal life and you will be all the better for it. Now go find that cheese!

To read more, pick up a copy of the book Who Moved My Cheese? It is a quick read and well worth it.

Most organizations have no idea of how to implement Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). They either measure everything that moves, or they operate in the blind and measure nothing except perhaps revenues or profitability.

KPIs allows you to quickly and directly evaluate the health of an organization. It is important to select the right KPIs to measure. This is the hardest part in determining your KPI strategy. You want to select those KPIs that truly tell you how your business is doing, and what are the true root-cause measurements you should be evaluating. They should be closely tied to your overall business strategy. For example, Southwest Airlines determined that their operations is based on a quick turnaround time of their planes once their planes reach the gate. They concluded that this allows them to fly fewer planes and have more on-time departures, which allows them to lower prices and gain more customers, ultimately making them more profitable. So whenever a Southwest plane touches down, every person who works for Southwest is doing their part to turn around their planes in thirty minutes or less.

Myth 1: Measure everything that moves

When selecting your KPIs, you will be tempted to measure everything. This is the wrong approach as you will be overloaded with way too much information and what is really important will be impossible to see. You want to limit the number of KPIs to seven to ten indicators, preferably closer to seven.

Myth 2: You need to spend two million dollars and have six months to implement KPIs

Hold off on high-end dashboard for at least three months. Although there are plenty of consultants willing to take your money to develop customized dashboards just for your business, hold off until you have time to measure KPIs for at least three months. I can guarantee that you will want to adjust and tweak the KPIs after you start measuring them, and you will probably make some mistakes. Plus you don’t want to spend six months in the planning stages while nothing is being measured. This is why I recommend keeping things as simple as possible when rolling out KPIs. Initially a spreadsheet will suffice.

Myth 3: Revenue is the most important thing to measure

While revenue is important, far more important is profitability. This determines how successful you are, and all other KPIs impact profitability either directly or indirectly. Keeping in mind that profitability is a factor of your overall revenue and what it costs you to deliver your product or service, everything feeds into profitability.

Myth 4: Keep KPIs private

While there may be some KPIs that you would not share with your entire staff, I recommend sharing as many as possible. Let them know how the organization is doing and use this as motivator to improve performance. Engage your staff and make it fun.

The steps to take to implement KPIs are:

1. Determine which KPIs to measure
2. Determine your goals. The goals need to be measurable and have a timeframe associated with it. For example, don’t just say “Improve employee retention” but “Employee turnover should be less than 5% per month”
3. Determine how you will measure each metric. Put in-writing the detailed formula so that others know how to interpret it. For example, if you are measuring employee billable utilization, you need to make organizational assumptions for how many working hours there are in a week, and how vacations and holidays are factored in.
4. Develop the workflows for obtaining data and reporting KPIs. Keep it simple at first and evolve it over time. Use a spreadsheet initially
5. Measure and report on KPIs

As a starter, below are the typical things that you will want to measure in an agency. Use this to get the discussion started within your organization. Evaluate what means the most to your organization. For example, I worked in one organization where winning awards was their key driver. They determined that this was the top factor in attracting new clients, partners and employees. In this organization, I would measure how many awards they win every month.

• Revenue: gross revenue for the office, segmented by business line and client
• Factored pipeline: the projected revenue from the pitch pipeline, in factored form
• Profitability: the single, most-important measurement and may be expressed in terms of PBT, EBIT or EBITDA. Measured across organization, client and department
• Project versus retainer: measures the amount of project revenue versus retainer revenue
• Gross margin per employee: how much each employee brings in comparison to their costs
• Billable utilization: how billable each employee is, separated by department and employee
• Headcount: number of employees broken out by full time, part time and freelance staff
• New business win rate: how effective the organization is at winning new business
• Employee turnover: the amount of people who leave the organization either on their own or because of performance issues, measured in comparison to the total number of employees. Does not include reductions in force

As much as possible, show numbers in graph format showing trends over the previous 12 months. This allows for easy comparison and to see if your are trending upward or downward. For further reading on KPIs, pick up a copy of The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action.

In your organization, is there confusion over what does a project manager does versus an account executive, or who develops the creative brief? How do new hires quickly come up-to-speed learning what they are responsible for? As you plan that next reorg, how are you going to reallocate work so that you are certain that everything is covered?

Having a clear definition of everyone’s roles and responsibilities is crucial for an organization. Sure, you can get along without one, but then you probably don’t even realize that your organization probably wastes a lot of time constantly battling over who does what, or ever worse, not giving your people the authority that they need to do their jobs, which leads to an inefficient organization and higher employee-turnover.

The RACI matrix is a useful tool that defines roles and responsibilities in an organization. It clarifies the role of each functional group or department in terms of their involvement while completing a task. RACI stands for Responsibility, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. Below is a snapshot from a RACI matrix.

Using a RACI matrix is simple. The top row contains the functional groups. The left column contains the tasks. For each box in the matrix, the box is either left blank, or it contains a R, A, C, I (or a combination) where:

• R = Responsible: the person or group who does the actual work (there can be multiple people/groups responsible)
• A = Accountable: the person or group who is ultimately accountable (there should only be one person/group responsible for each task)
• C = Consulted: the person or group that is consulted as the activity is being completed. Think of them as contributors to the task (there can be multiple people/groups consulted)
• I = Informed: the person or group that is informed of the activity. Typically they only need to receive notification that the task was completed or a copy of the final deliverable (there can be multiple people/groups informed)
• Blank: the person or group does not participate in this task

Here is a sample RACI diagram that outlines the responsibilities of the major departments in a typical interactive agency. Use this as a starting point and customize it for your organization by collaborating with the department heads. To do so, first identify and update the departments (the top row). Then modify the list of tasks (column B) that maps to your process for getting things done. In this sample document, the tasks are organized by major phase (column A) so you should update this as you see fit. Then update each row. Every task should have only one group who is Accountable, and one or more groups who are Responsible. This can be the same or a different group. There can be any number of groups who are Consulted or Informed.

Everyone makes mistakes from time to time. It is part of life and part of business. The only question is how you react to the mistake. Do you deny the mistake or do you admit to it and use it as a learning experience? It amazes me how many business (and political) leaders first try denying the mistake before they change their story and finally admit to it.

One of the true signs of a leader is how they handle mistakes. This applies to mistakes made by yourself, your team, or your organization. The following three steps will get you there.

Step 1. Admit the mistake

This crucial first step allows you to step up and take responsibility for the mistake. If you or your organization makes a mistake, it is always best to quickly admit it to. Many leaders spend a lot of energy trying to brush the mistake under the carpet or blame someone else. This strategy of hiding or not admitting to mistakes pretty much always backfires and makes the situation worse as you begin to lose trust. Instead do the opposite and take responsibility as soon as it’s clear that you made a mistake. Doing so will actually build trust as people will understand that you are taking responsibility for your (or your firm’s) actions. Remember that your boss, your employees, your peers, and your customers are watching.

In taking responsibility, don’t blame others as the reason you failed. If necessary, issue an apology but keep it short and to the point. The faster you get through this step, the better as it will cause others to start looking at the solution instead of focusing who is at fault.

Step 2: Analyze the root causes

Figure out what really happened that caused the problem to occur in the first place. Don’t just look at the symptoms but also evaluate what were the underlying reasons that caused this to happen. You need to keep asking “why” until you have a clear understanding. For example, if this was this a lapse of judgment or a communications error, ask why did this happen? Does this person have the proper training? If your team delivered something that was poor quality, ask why did this happen? Did you have the proper quality checkpoints in-place? Were the teams properly briefed? Remember to always look for the core problems, which may not be obvious at first.

Step 3: Make changes

Figure out what needs to be changed and make those changes immediately ensuring that this never happens again. Put a plan into action and put a deadline around it.

Use this as an opportunity for learning and coaching. Coach the person on your team who made the mistake focusing on what they could do different the next time.

A Real Life Example

A couple of years ago my team screwed up on an email blast for a major CPG client. Our team was testing an email newsletter that they coded and during the test, it was supposed to be sent only to a small group of internal reviewers to review the email. Our developer accidentally sent the test email to a larger distribution list containing thousands of real customers. To make matters worse, we only found out when our client called us. Obviously they were not happy with us.

The situation was a disaster. This was a client had lost trust in our ability to deliver because of the failures of our predecessors and with this crisis, we were concerned that they would use this as reason to end our multi-million dollar a year relationship. The first step that we did was a quick analysis of the situation where we realized that this was our fault. We immediately told the client that and that we will get back to them within four hours with details of what happened and an action plan.

We then moved onto step two where we analyzed what went wrong. At the surface, the problem was first diagnosed as being caused by the developer selecting the wrong email distribution list. We discovered a number of failures that caused this to happen (which happens quite often).  However after asking “why did this happen” many times, we realized that although the developer made a mistake, there were other major underlying reasons behind this.

First the development technical environment was not setup correctly as the developer was working directly in the live production environment, instead of a safe testing environment. Second before any emails are sent out to more than a handful of people, we should have been using an automated checkpoint that requires a second person to approve the email (this is already built into the software but we failed to use this safeguard). Third when the developer realized that a mistake was made, they panicked. They should have immediately notified the email vendor who could have stopped the emails on the back-end but instead they tried to delete the request to submit the email on the email vendor’s system, which only made manners worse because it made it impossible for the email vendor to now help. Forth, the team lacked real training on the vendor’s email platform. Fifth, as soon as the developer realized that something was wrong, they should have immediately raised the issue to senior management.

Once we had this information, we moved to step three where we shared with our client our 30-day plan for correcting all of these areas.

There are many reasons why big agencies are having trouble moving to digital. While some of them have solved these problems, many big agencies are left behind in the dust. This post is the first of a series that examines these issues.

One of the absolutes of executing digital projects is creative lock. Creative lock refers to a point in time (that is, a milestone) where the creative (including design, copy, editorial, site architecture and wireframes) is locked and no more changes can be made. No changes really means no changes, not even small ones! The exact time that creative lock occurs varies by the type of project. For example, on a microsite development project, creative lock is typically at the point when everything is handed off to the technology team to code. On a display ad project, it occurs when the display ads are handed to the production to be resized and tagged.

In the print world, creative lock is less of an issue because you can modify the layout and copy almost up to the last second with very little repercussion. For example, if the Art Director decided to move a call to action 4 pixels to the right, the cost and schedule impact to the project is minimal.

With the move to digital, creative lock becomes a must. This applies to all types of digital such as display ads, site development, Facebook applications, and mobile ads. The reason is that with digital, a certain process needs to be done in sequential order, usually involving many different people. So if you make a change, you need to redo all of the tasks that were already completed. For example, if the Art Director decides to move the call to action 4 pixels to the right on a product microsite, this requires the art director to work with a designer to revise the PSDs, then hand them off to an HTML developer, the  HTML developer recuts the PSD and updates the HTML with the new design, then the page is handed off to QA to retest the page, and so on (the exact tasks vary by your development process but you get the idea).

While the idea of creative lock may seem simple on paper. The problem is that for most agencies, it requires a cultural shift to grasp this. When you take a Creative or Art Director who’s been developing print ads for their entire career and they are now running a digital project, the idea of creative lock is foreign to them as they are used to tweaking the creative right up until it is delivered to the client.

The solution is to collaborate with the creative team before the project starts to ensure that they understand the development process for digital, and why creative lock. If you don’t enforce creative lock, then you will have cost overruns, the schedule may be impacted, the team will work more late nights trying to get everything done in-time, and you have general chaos, which leaves the door open for additional problems.

Now don’t think that changes cannot happen after creative lock. Changes are a fact of life and we need to demonstrate flexibility. So if changes are required after creative lock, then you need to have a discussion to determine (1) if the changes are really essential, (2) whether the client or the agency pays for the additional costs, (3) how you are going to deal with the schedule impact, and (4) do you have enough resources allocated to do the rework.

There is no great secret or magical potion to being a good Project Manager. 90% of the job is about doing the basics, but doing them exceptionally well.

What does this mean? You can ignore the long job spec that your HR group loves. Instead below is a list of the top ten things that a Project Manager does.

1. Make sure that you have the right resources assigned and the resources know what they are supposed to be working on every single day
2. Obtain status from every member of your team daily to make sure that they are on-track and no new issues popped up
3. Produce status reports and review them with the client every week without fail
4. Communicate with the client on a daily basis no matter what. Keeping the communication channel open with your client is one of the most important things that you can do
5. Meet with your project team weekly to track status, resolve issues and talk big picture stuff
6. Participate in client reviews to ensure that there are no schedule, scope, or cost impacts from client feedback
7. Resolve issues as they come up
8. Track your schedule and budget on a weekly basis, report discrepancies and make corrections as needed
9. Manage your vendors and third party providers
10. Report on KPIs to agency senior management every week

You can add hundreds of more tasks to this list but focusing on these ten mundane tasks day in and day out will get you 90% of the way there.

Does this sound familiar to you? Once a year, you get a notice from your HR person that it is time for the annual performance reviews. So all of the managers spend the next few weeks reviewing everyone’s performance, and determining who get the allocation of available money for raises.

The idea of yearly performance reviews is ridiculous and should be abolished immediately. It does very little to actually motivate people, and does a poor job at measuring performance. Instead I advocate making three changes.

Step 1: Have managers provide real time feedback. Change the culture so that feedback is given in real time. When someone does something exceptionally well, or if they under-perform, as soon as practical, let the person know in-private what they did well. In the case of under-performers, use those failures as learning opportunities so that they can understand what went wrong and how to do better next time. This should be done in a constructive manner so that the staff member can learn something from these, rather than feeling beaten down.

Step 2: Have monthly performance discussions. Managers should meet with their staff members once a month to evaluate each person’s performance against the mutually-agreed to goals. Call this a “performance discussion” to avoid the stigma that the term “performance review” has. This monthly discussion allows the staff members to understand how they are performing throughout the year, instead of just once or twice a year. The managers should use these as real opportunities to mentor their staff, instead of just being a “manager” to them. This reinforces the idea of “no surprises” and promotes true transparency as everyone will understand how they are performing and what they need to improve on a continued basis. Set these up as monthly recurring meetings and agree that these are important meetings that are not be canceled because everyone gets too busy (sound familiar?).

Step 3: Step 3: Realize that performance discussions are not the same as pay increases. Change the mindset so that the pay increase cycle is not tied to the frequency of performance reviews. Most people (including both managers and staff) act as if the sole purpose of performance reviews is to determine how big each person’s share is of the money available for raises, and they lose the real opportunity to grow and challenge the staff. By moving performance discussions to monthly and keeping the cycle for salary raises yearly, it will start to change the culture so that people can have real performance discussions outside of the yearly cycle for pay increases. When it is time for the consider who receives salary increases, it is important to use the performance discussions as input but it is done as part of an ongoing dialog, instead of a yearly event.

To summarize
To change how performance reviews are done, organizations should make the following changes:

1. Have managers provide real time feedback to staff
2. Have monthly performance discussions between managers and staff that promotes an ongoing dialogue
3. Realize that performance discussions are not the same as pay increases

Agree, disagree, have another point of view? Would love to hear from you.

Too many brands are developing a Facebook page only because their CMO read in a trade magazine that they should be on Facebook but they have no idea of why. The end result is that some marketing manager deep within the organization creates a Facebook page, posts one or two promotional videos, or perhaps a copy of their television ad, but it is completely disconnected from their brands and from their campaigns that are in-market. The result is lost opportunity and brand confusion in the marketplace. This all could have been avoiding by having a proper digital strategy.

When developing your digital strategy, your strategy needs to be integrated with your overall marketing strategy so that you have a cohesive brand and user experience. You want customers to experience the same brand and campaign traits regardless if they are in one of your stores, talking to one of your reps on the phone, reading an email from your company, visiting your web site, viewing banner ads, or posting updates to your Facebook wall.

The first step is to define your digital strategy, followed by executing on the strategy, and then testing and optimizing your strategy, as described below.

Phase 1 – Define your digital strategy
Defining your digital strategy is crucial to ensuring that it is on-market, and that it is integrated with your overall marketing objectives and your off-line campaigns. The steps to developing your digital strategy are:

1. Define your marketing objectives. What are the measurable goals that you want to accomplish? For example, are you building brand awareness or driving customer acquisitions?
2. Define your target audience. Understand your customers’ demographics (market size, age, income, education, location), ethnographics (common values and traits, hobbies, likes, dislikes, needs), and psychographics (values, attitudes and lifestyles).
3. Understand best practices. You need to have a handle on the latest best practices and on what your competitors are doing. This data informs your decision on what needs to be included. You can gleam best practices from the leading research firms such as Forrester Research (including Jupiter), Gartner, and Yankee Group, and from performing a competitive review. However do not fall into the trap thinking that you must include every best practice or feature from a competitor. This gives you a starting point for your decisions.
4. Define your KPIs. Understand how you will measure success. Select the key measures that will let you know how you are doing. Include a mix of five to eight indicators, including both leading and lagging indicators.
5. Define your digital platform. The platform defines which mediums you will be using however as the campaigns are not yet developed, this is a preliminary list of how digital will be used. As the team develops concepts during the execution phase, this platform list will evolve.

Below is a list of digital platforms. It should also be noted that this list is constantly evolving as new technologies and platforms are introduced:

• Sites: Landing pages, microsites, websites, white-labeled sites, SEO, blogs, CRM, games
• Social media: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube
• Affiliates: WOM, bloggers, sponsorships, advertorials, forums and interest groups
• Outbound communications: Email, Newsletters, RSS feeds
• Mobile: applications (iOS, Android OS, Blackberry OS), SMS
• Promotions: Coupons
• Paid media: display ads, text ads, pop-ups, integrated video ads, interstitial ads, page take-overs, SEM, game placement, interactive television

Phase 2 – Execute on the strategy
Many people believe that strategy ends once it is defined however this is really only the beginning. The next step is to execute on the strategy.

Every agency has their own process for execution however they are all based on the same basic process albeit sometimes with slightly different names, as follows.

Concepting. Concepting starts with the development of the creative brief, which is typically developed by the account team and approved by the client. Once the creative brief is approved, the next step is to conduct a kickoff meeting with the creative team where the creative brief is presented and the creative team brainstorms ideas. The results of the brainstorm are evaluated by the Creative Director, who will determine which concepts are worthy of continued exploration. The creative team fully develops those concepts and presents them to the account team, who reviews them, and may cull them down even further. Finally the concepts are presented to the client for review and selection. Agencies typically present three to five concepts, from which the client will select one or two to execute. The concepts include a graphical treatment and copy points, and demonstrate how the executions will be used across the different platforms.

Design. Using the client-selected concepts, the creative team will finish designing the executions. The actual work varies greatly depending on the executions. For example, the process for executing a web site is much different from developing flash display ads or a Facebook site.

Simultaneously the technology/production team develops the functional specification and technical specification (if required).

Develop. Once design wraps up and is approved by the client, the technology/production team codes and tests the work. Again, the process varies greatly depending on the executions but the phases generally includes coding, testing, and client approval.

Deploy. Once the client has reviewed and approved the work, it is released. Web sites are pushed to web servers by working with the client’s technology team or ISP, paid advertising is trafficked to the media partner, Facebook content is loaded onto Facebook, and so forth.

Phase 3 – Test and optimize your strategy
Optimization is critical to the success of your digital strategy. Most campaigns either skip optimization, or they minimize it, mostly due to cost concerns. Agencies need to become better at selling optimization to clients, and clients need to understand how critical this phase really is.

Two common testing techniques are A/B testing and multivariate testing. A/B testing allows you to test two items, such as two landing pages or two banner executions to see which performs better. Multivariate testing is a bit more complex as it allow you to test multiple variables at a time, and can have an endless amount of possible combinations.

During optimization, you measure the results and make changes as required. The optimization can include changes to the creative, copy points, technology, and paid media. For example, in managing SEM keywords, you may find that fine-tuning the keyword purchase or better targeted segments may increase conversions.

Further discussion
This article only touches the high-level points. You can dive into any of these areas pretty much as deep as you desire. For example, more and more companies are realizing the value of optimization and analytics, which experts are in high demand right now.

For further information on developing your strategy, there are many excellent resources that you can use. One of my favorites is the book On Competition by Michael Porter.

Who was the best leader you have ever worked for? What are the traits that made this this person a great leader, and what the characteristics that all great leaders share?

Below are the nine essential traits that a leader should possess. When going through this list, it does not matter if you are leading a team of three people, a department of 100, or an entire organization of thousands. While going through this list, ask yourself how do you rate?

1. Believe in a vision. Leaders must set a vision, and get people to believe in that vision. The vision is something that everyone should aspire to, in everything that they do. Find people who support the vision and who will help spread the word.

2. Excel in communicating. Leaders must be excellent in oral and written communications, and must know when to use which form. They must be adept at tailoring their message based on the audience, and breaking down communication barriers. Active listening and empathy are core components of leadership. Too many leaders are too busy talking and are not spending any real time truly listening.

3. Develop teamliness. For the organization to succeed, they must work together as a team. Everyone needs to do their piece, or there will be breakdowns. As a leader, you need to understand the needs of the team, especially any key decision makers. This may include direct contacts such as clients, employees and peers as well as indirect contacts such as vendors, industry experts, and the press.

As a leader, surround yourself with great lieutenants. It is important to build a team of can-do people who can provide you with the support that you need. If you have a team of naysayers, it is time to find a new team.

4. Be passionate. A leader inspires their team and gets people to change their behavior as a way to achieve the team’s desirable results. Passion is infectious. Your team will feel it and will emulate it. Be passionate about everything that you do.

5. Develop how you will measure success. Make sure that you have a clear understanding on what is required to succeed, and who are the key decision makers and influencers. Develop and share key performance indicators (KPIs) with your team so that they can be on the same page, and that they can develop KPIs within their groups that support your higher-level KPIs.

6. Demonstrate character. A leader needs to understand that they do not know everything and they should be constantly striving to learn.

A leader admits to their mistakes.  When you screw up (and you will!), it is essential to admit to mistakes and then to find solutions. Doing so builds trust and respect.

The leader must adapt their leadership style to the situation as different situations require different types of leaders and leadership styles.

7. Be customer focused. We must keep in mind who our “customers” are and then do everything possible to meet and exceed their expectations. If you lead an internal support organization, then your customer are other internal groups. For example, I’ve worked with many IT groups, both agency and client side, and the most successful of them go out of their way to treat their internal constituents as clients.

8. Possess a strong morale compass. A leader needs to operate with transparent integrity, at all costs. They must demand brutal honesty from their team and their vendors. This is non-negotiable.

9. React with stability. As a leader, being even keeled is critical.  It is important not to jump to conclusions when dealing with issues so that you make fact-based decisions, or when in the middle of a crisis, not to be too busy pointing blame instead of solving the actual problem and communicating with the outside world. Your team will emulate your behavior.

A few other things to consider:

It is about the soft skills. True leadership is really about people skills, and not the hard skills.  For example, no one will ever say that someone was a great leader because they “created amazing Excel pivot tables.”

Charisma can be an important aspect of leadership. Leaders with charisma have an easy time charming people to believe that they are strong leaders since they instantly gain the trust and respect of the people.  People feel very comfortable with charismatic leaders as they make everyone feel that they are the important person who the leader has spoken with.  People want to follow these leaders. However charisma is not a must have. Although having charisma is important, it does not mean that leaders without charisma will fail.

Remember that leadership is different from management. Although managers can (and should) provide leadership, not all leaders are managers. Managers focus on objects and position power.  Leaders focus on people and personal power.  Managers focus on organizing and staffing.  Leaders focus on creating shared culture and values.

So, how do you rate?