Leadership Education

Your PA System

Summary of the blog can be found here.

Your PA System, your Personal Attitude System, affects every single thing you do – at work, and at home.  Whether you are helping a customer, leading a team, negotiating a deal or just managing your time – your PA System needs to be loud and clear.  This means you need to be in control of all aspects of your life, but let’s look at emotional control.  If you allow someone to upset you, you lose.  So choose your emotions wisely.  Then control your behaviors.  Others will see and hear this, and will react accordingly.

Let’s use an example from leadership.  Imagine you need to have a “difficult conversation” with an employee who is not performing.  Your attitude about the situation is going to influence what you expect will happen, before you even have the conversation.  In other words if you think negative, your expectations will be negative.  If you think positive, your expectations should be positive.  This, in turn, will influence your behaviors, or how you actually handle the conversation.  How you actually behave will, of course, influence the results.

Try asking yourself this question several times per day:  “Am I being a leader, right now, in this situation?”  The beauty of this question is that you always know the answer.  If you answer “no,” then change a behavior, even some little thing, to get a positive result, and gain back control.  Make your PA System loud and clear.