Boost your leadership with a personal SWOT analysis

If you feel like your skills and talents are being overlooked, speak up for yourself by asking others to meet with you and share ideas, offer your thoughts in meetings and look for ways to connect with colleagues, write Karin Hurt and David Dye. "Getting to know your coworkers at a personal level can go a long way in making work interesting and fun, not to mention building a network of resources you can reach out to for help," they write.

Put it into practice: Identify the skills you want others to recognize by completing this sentence: "I wish people would know how much I ____," Hurt and Dye write. Then, approach your boss and ask for time to talk about how you can bring those skills to the table and more deeply connect with the team, they recommend.

La June Montgomery Tabron, the president and CEO of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, is the ninth of ten children whose father worked the third shift at the Chrysler factory to provide for his family, and she says knowing and sharing your history is essential for leaders to make connections. "It's hard to build a relationship with someone else if you're not confident and comfortable with your own story, your own identity," Montgomery Tabron says.

Hold music -- or worse yet, marketing messages -- while you wait is a necessary evil so you know you're still connected, but repetitive loops and low sound quality can leave customers frustrated and angry, says Leigh VanHandel, a professor at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada. "Companies should spend less time overthinking their hold music and more time hiring and training customer service representatives," says VanHandel.

I admit that I included Erik Dees' advice about being a peacemaking leader instead of a peacekeeping leader as a reminder to myself. I don't like confrontation and have spent most of my life being that peacekeeping leader.

Most of my direct leadership experience is in overseeing a spiritual community, which can have different nuances than office settings, but whenever humans are involved in groups, conflicts will arise. I've seen the damage that my own peacekeeping can do. I've had tough congregational meetings where people walked out because I tried to make everyone happy, which made no one happy.

As I progressed in my career, I realized Dees was right -- peacekeeping is a short-term solution. If you want to build trust, cohesion and harmony in a team -- or a congregation -- you must be able to confront issues head-on and address the conflicting feelings and desires within the group.

Once I began to do that, fewer people would leave in a huff, and still, not everyone got what they wanted -- but there was more peace and connection created when we took time to understand each other.

How do you handle conflict in your leadership role? Have you seen a difference when you switch from peacekeeping to peacemaking? Tell me about it.

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