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Here you will enjoy regular posts on Contagious Leadership™, Contagious Confidence™, Contagious Communication™ and well, all things contagious. Whether you are a manager looking to develop better leadership skills or someone who merely wants to manage the voices in your head more effectively, you'll enjoy reading Monica's insights and perspective on just how contagious our behavior can be. Feel free to share your comments and thoughts and share the posts with your friends through your social media channels.

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Does Dealing with Difficult People Work or Make it Worse?
Published date: 02/22/2012

Monica Wofford, CSP, teaches leaders to understand and improve their own leadership in using practice, skills, and desire as their three areas of focus.

Join me, April 24th!

Do the difficult people you lead or work with get worse or better when you deal with them in some way? It sure seems like they should improve, but there’s this old adage that stands out in my mind that makes me think the answer to that question might be different than we both want to believe. Read Full Article

Should Leaders Outsource Dealing with Difficult People?
Published date: 02/20/2012

The truth? Leaders are often part of the difficulty when they fail to effectively deal with difficult people. If you take a look at the offerings of most public seminar companies or corporate training firms, it’s a near guarantee that Dealing with Difficult People will be listed in their catalog because leaders often outsource this solution when they don’t know how to resolve the problem internally. Now there’s nothing wrong with Read Full Article

How Leading with a Complaint Can Land You in HR
Published date: 02/13/2012

Are you leading with a complaint, comment or question? Only one will get the results you’re looking for.

As someone who has recently written a book called Make Difficult People Disappear and is designing conference curriculum for the same issue, I’ve spent a lot of time recently focusing on complaints and how difficult people have a LOT of them. But, if you’re the leader in your organization and you are complaining regularly about those you lead, these efforts may not change the behavior and even worse, they may land you in the Human Resource office. Read Full Article

Are You One of the Managers Who Spends 25% of Your Time Dealing with Conflict?
Published date: 02/06/2012

According to my recent research, the greatest source of inefficiency and profit loss in organizations lies in ineffective working relationships. In fact, several sources on the cost of what is commonly called “people problems” indicate the following statistics:

For Managers who are not prepared to handle it or help in the resolution, 20-25% of their time is spent in day to day team member conflict
For each issue that requires disciplinary action, an average of 13 days are spent, invested, or what many would refer to as lost.
If that disciplinary issue escalates and requires additional follow through or formal documentation up to an including termination, the average additional investment of time is 9 days.

What could that 25% of time and 13 plus 9 days of productivity be put toward instead? Read Full Article

Leaders: Do you Help a Manager Save Face, if They Were Promoted but Not Prepared?
Published date: 02/01/2012

Perhaps this a question with more than one variable to factor into the answer. However, knowing self-esteem and confidence is an essential ingredient of effective leadership, the larger question is do you help someone rise up out of failure if they are not leading or managing well or do you sit back and watch them fail? Read Full Article

How Do You Do Your Job Well When You’ve Been Promoted?
Published date: 01/30/2012

Does getting promoted automatically mean you were prepared?

One of the areas of focus that we work on daily within Contagious Companies is to help develop managers who may have been promoted, but not prepared, learn to be more effective leaders. If you’ve been recently promoted, don’t you want to make sure you were not only promoted, but prepared to do the job well? Read Full Article

…And the Leadership Gumby Award Goes to…
Published date: 01/27/2012

Monica Wofford, CSP, is a leadership development strategist who shares the tools and techniques to actually lead so you don’t become a manager who was promoted, but not prepared.

How flexible are you in your willingness to learn to lead more effectively?

I would never have known it was him when I walked up to the desk to check in. Later I saw him bussing tables at the restaurant and the next day he was serving omelets in the breakfast buffet. It took my asking an employee who he was, merely on a hunch and she nearly beamed when she identified his actual title. Who are we talking about? Read Full Article

What Do You Do When Employees Deviate from the Development Plan?
Published date: 01/25/2012

You’ve shared the plan but what do you do if an employee doesn’t follow it?

When I was a child I learned to cook at about the age of six. My first dish was scrambled eggs and I was fascinated by how it all worked from the stove to the change in the eggs. Okay, so that’s a weird revelation, but often the lessons of employees are similar to what we learn as children and my first lesson in cooking was just how hot the stove really was. I was told and told, but had to see it for myself. In other words, Read Full Article

Researcher, Funny, Leader.. 3 Words that Often DON’T Go Together
Published date: 01/24/2012

This just in from our CIO who shared a great post from a Microsoft Researcher. The article is fascinating from a technical perspective and what he is working on, but that’s more for our CIO. The part I found fascinating was his take on leadership and on life. It shows up succinctly in the last paragraph, but you’ll see the leadership tenor throughout. The skills of those leaders he works with and the skills in leadership he has developed and uses… are truly contagious!

Here’s the link: http://blogs.technet.com/b/next/archive/2012/01/24/james-mickens-the-funniest-man-in-microsoft-research.aspx#comments

Go James at Microsoft!

Stay Contagious,
Monica

How DO You Develop Employees?
Published date: 01/23/2012

You know you should develop those employees, but do you know how?

We get promoted and then are put in charge of leading other people, yet often the directions on how to actually lead or develop those employees is nebulous at best. In your tenure as a leader, or even in your journey toward successful Contagious Leadership, you may have utilized more trial and error tactics to achieve employee development. If that is the case, Read Full Article