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Leadership development is about personal development and the experiences we have on our life’s journey creates the necessary personal capacity required to lead. Consider the biography of the life of Winston Churchill, “Winston Spencer Churchill: The Last Lion, Visions of Glory” describes Churchill as:

“Sickly, an uncoordinated weakling with the pale fragile hands of a girl, speaking with a lisp and a slight stutter, he had been at the mercy of bullies. They beat him, ridiculed him, and pelted him with cricket balls. Trembling and humiliated, he hid in a nearby woods. This was hardly the stuff of which gladiators are made.”

Similarly, Peter Senge in his book “The Fifth Discipline” made the following observation of leaders:

“Most of the outstanding leaders I’ve worked with are neither tall nor especially handsome; they are often mediocre public speakers; they do not stand out in a crowd; they do not mesmerize an attending audience with there brilliance or eloquence. Rather, what distinguishes them is their clarity and persuasiveness of their ideas, the depth of their commitment, and their openness to continually learning more”

It seems to me that life’s experiences and our response to them are key to, how leaders are formed, and the kind of leaders they become. The experiences that shape us as leaders, as we journey through life are referred to as passages by David Dotlich in the Ivey Business Journal article, “Adversity: What Make a Leader the Most” describing life’s adverse and diverse experiences as passages because:

“they take you from one place to another. You see the world and yourself differently after you’ve gone through the events and emotional states that define each passage…these passages are emotionally and cognitively intense….as a result your sense of self changes in a fundamental way. Who you are, what you’re capable of doing and your place in the world will all shift”

These adverse and diverse passages are effectively illustrated by David using the following matrix:

The power of experiences to shape a leader’s life is huge, in fact experiences are so powerful they can have the opposite effect, just as experiences can make us stronger they can also paralyse us, causing us to cower and retreat from life. Fearful of having another similar experience, we rather play it safe, not venturing out, not taking risks, seeking the safety of “positional leadership”. The key is in how we respond to our life passages.

The result is that we have two types of leaders:

• Leaders who responded poorly to life’s passages, they developed negative or faulty worldviews and lead out of fear, abusing their power, controlling others and seeking position as a means to exert influence.
• Leaders who responded to life’s passages from a learning stance, looking for the opportunity and lessons to be learned, remaining open and vulnerable. They lead authentically, not from pride, exerting influence through relationships and personal character and commitment (as described by Peter Senge above)

This is described by Warren Bennis in “On Becoming a Leader” stating that:

“Until you make your life your own, you’re walking in borrowed clothes. Leaders, whatever their field, are made up as much of their experiences as their skills, like everyone else. Unlike everyone else, they use their experiences rather than being used by it.”

As mentioned in a previous post, “If you honestly evaluate your “leadership career”, do you have ten years of leadership experience…….or do you have a one year leadership experience repeated ten times?.” To develop, leaders need to seek experiences that will create a shift in their worldview, either through changes in career, industry, travel or exposure to other cultures. Whilst seeking diverse experiences leaders should simultaneously, strive to ensure a positive response and always looking for opportunities to learn and grow though the experience.
Technorati Tags: Personal Leadership, Leadership, Experience, Leadership Development, Personal Development, Management

A Fortune article “Catch a Rising Star” looks at rising top talent within large corporates. The following quote from the article really hit home for me the importance of talent in this new economy:

“Gates once said that if you took the 20 smartest people out of Microsoft, it would be an insignificant company. Imagine. The world’s software colossus reduced to insignificance by the loss of just 20 people. It’s suddenly easier to see why the company went ballistic over the loss of just one.”

One of the greatest skills required, according to the article is the need for “effective managers”, especially in the higher up in organisational structures. Tom Neff a headhunter from SpencerStuart a top CEO recruiter mentions the following requirements of organisations of their top managers:

Companies don’t want dictators, kings, or emperors.” Instead of someone who gives orders, they want someone who asks probing questions that force the team to think and find the right answers……a new survey from Right Management Consultants…….. finds that the No. 1 skill companies seek in managers is “ability to motivate and engage others.”…….. Ranking a close second is ability to communicate…….. Standout leaders should additionally have on-the-ground operating experience outside the U.S.…..and they’ll need megawatts of energy to meet the demands of global travel and a 24/7 world.

So how is leadership development attempting to meet the need…….?

How many people with those qualities are you likely to find if you just go out looking? The depressing answer–not many–is why many companies are getting serious about growing their own leaders. In a world where top managers can cost as much as top shortstops, a baseball analogy is apt: Companies want to find their future stars in their own farm systems rather than have to buy them from competing teams. Trouble is, most companies aren’t very good at leadership development………..77% of companies say they don’t have enough successors to their current senior managers. Yet they have a miserable time doing much about it………..

Where do we look to find the most powerful leadership experiences?

Steven Kerr, another GE alum who now oversees leadership development at Goldman Sachs, suggests a simple exercise: “Ask your company’s best leaders to name the most powerful learning experiences they’ve had.” They will hardly ever mention a class and will almost always name a real-life experience in business. The challenge is to find ways to replicate those experiences.

I found this short article insightful, it really grabbed my attention. With the proliferation of leadership theories, knowledge and training, it’s still the practice of leadership that really makes the leader……….. what’s the state of your leadership practice?

Are you having powerful leadership experiences?

Leadership experiences and one of the most important tools for leadership development. Are you consciously seeking out leadership experiences. Leadership experiences, are those that take you out your comfort zone, out of your everyday routine and cause you to embrace some risk. If you honestly evaluate your “leadership career”, do you have ten years of leadership experience…….or do you have a one year leadership experience repeated ten times?

Technorati Tags: Leadership Practice, Personal Leadership, Leadership, Management, Leadership Development

10 Easy Ways to Know You’re Not a Leader

1. You’re waiting on a bigger staff and more money to accomplish your vision.
2. You think you need to be in charge to have influence.
3. You’re content.
4. You tend to foster division instead of generating a helpful dialogue.
5. You think you need to say something to be heard.
6. You find it easier to blame others for your circumstances than to take responsibility for solutions.
7. It’s been some time since you said, “I messed up.”
8. You’re driven by the task instead of the relationships and the vision.
9. Your dreams are so small, people think they can be achieved.
10. No one is following you.

Via: [tony morgan | one of the simply strategic guys]

Technorati Tags: Leadership, Management, Strategy

In Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership, Howard Gardner defines leadership.

“A leader is an individual (or, rarely, a set of individuals) who significantly affects the thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviors of a significant number of individuals. Most acknowledged leaders are “direct.” They address their public face-to-face. But I have called attention to an unrecognized phenomenon: indirect leadership. In this variety of leading, individuals exert impact through the works that they create.

Whether direct or indirect, leaders fashion stories: principally stories of identity. It is important that a leader be a good storyteller, but equally crucial that the leader embody that story in his or her life. When a leader tells stories to experts, the stories can be quite sophisticated; but when the leader is dealing with a diverse, heterogeneous group, the story must be sufficiently elemental to be understood by the untutored, or ‘unschooled,’ mind.”

Via: New Horizons

Technorati Tags: Quote, Leadership, Story, Communication, Storytelling, Book

An article entitled “Where do you wear your thinking cap?” found that….

“New research into entrepreneurial thinking conducted by mobile phone company Sony Ericsson……offers an intriguing glimpse into patterns of creativity. A survey of men and women, working predominantly in “progressive” areas such as IT and biotechnology found that 81% of people have their best ideas outside of the office, specifically while in the car and in bed…….practical methods of maximising creativity at work include brain-priming exercises, where you focus on a problem, move on to something else, then come back to it; creating a dedicated space for ideas and even re-organising office layouts to enhance working relationships.”

Technorati Tags: Thinking, Creativity, Innovation, Business, Entrepreneur, Research

Here are some good questions, from the American Planning Association, that can be used as a sanity check for your strategic planning process:

1. Does our process produce a plan that’s “real?”
2. Is our plan “strategic?”
3. Do we have adequate external focus?
4. Do we make sufficient use of outsiders?
5. Does our plan really work for the organization?
6. Is our plan actionable?
7. Is anybody doing anything?
8. Are we getting lost in executing tactics, but missing the big picture?

Technorati Tags: Planning, strategy, Leadership, Management

I read an interesting article on Business Week on strategic planning which really resonated with me. The article challenges the effectiveness of the traditional lengthy, top-down strategic planning process given that the,

“formal strategic planning became popular first with big companies in the 1960s, after a decade characterized by stable interest rates, predictable (and primarily domestic) competition, long product life cycles, and, relative to today, slow rates of change in most industries. Traditional strategic planning was probably appropriate in that environment”

Reflecting that a more flexible, dynamic and inclusive strategic planning approach is needed,

one that better reflects the realities of today’s volatile and hypercompetitive markets, dizzying product life cycles, and increased globalization.

I can really relate to this principle, I’ve seen organisations spend huge amounts of money on consultants and take many months to develop a strategy which ends up being far too complex to effectively implement, especially in the current dynamic and fast change global environment. Some of the suggestions from the article to speed up strategic process are:

1) Compress the strategic planning process. Focus on getting as quickly as “possible from analysis to action”. The example cited is Microsoft who locks 20 or 30 people in a room for 48 hours to produce a strategic plan!

“These Microsoft groups learned that they could deliver in 48 hours a plan that was 90% as good as one they would have taken two months to produce. And considering how fast things change in today’s markets, 90% is probably good enough”

2) Get more people involved. Steven Covey is often quoted as saying “No involvement, no commitment”.

“when it comes time to implement the strategy and to identify new opportunities on a daily basis, these folks in the trenches will have both the knowledge and commitment to do so — since they helped create the plan in the first place”

3) Get the CEO off center stage.

No matter how much leaders want their teams to question the assumptions of the status quo, the mere fact that the chief exec is leading the meeting subtly links him or her to the prevailing state of affairs — and makes people in the room, perhaps unconsciously, “choke up on the bat.”

Technorati Tags: Strategy; Planning; Leadership, Management;

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