Leadership Beyond Vision

An article by By Blake Harris, Noel Tichy: Leadership Beyond Vision describes an interview with Noel Tichy, a professor of Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management at the University of Michigan Business School, where he is also the director of the Global Leadership Program – a consortium of 36 Japanese, European and North American companies who partnered to develop senior executives and conduct action research on globalization. Some of the key point in this article that caught my attention include:

• A Focus on Getting Things Done. “….vision without execution equals hallucination. The role of a leader is to be far more than a visionary. Vision has to link to execution. A world-class leader like Martin Luther King Jr. clearly had a dream, but he also was on the bus, organizing things in Selma, making stuff happen….. It is not by accident my former colleague at GE and former CEO of Honeywell, Larry Bossidy, has a book, Execution, that is a bestseller in the business world. There has been far too much [focus] on strategy and vision, and not enough on making it happen. My view on leadership — whether it be military leadership, business leadership, political leadership, health-care or education leadership — is simple. Leaders lead by being great teachers. “
• It Takes a Leader to Develop other Leaders The key is leadership at all levels. The leaders have to take responsibility for developing the next generation of leaders rather than rely on consultants or professors….. Leadership development has got to be in the fabric of the institution. If you buy the argument that leaders are developed best by successful leaders who have been there, then leaders have to have what I call a teachable point of view. If I take the top team in an organization and want to run them through a workshop, I’ve got to do my homework on what it takes to be successful. To be a leader teacher, you have to have ideas, values, emotional energy and edge — and a teachable point of view on all those….. what are the values …. The other thing a leader has to have is edge — making the yes/no decisions, not setting up another committee or task force, or hiring a consultant. The leaders get paid to make yes/no decisions. So the ticket of admission to develop other leaders is to articulate your own teachable point of view, first as an individual, then as a team……. I spent a number of years running [GE's John F. Welch Leadership Center at] Crotonville for Jack Welsh in the mid-’80s. In 1985, one of the No. 1 issues we were talking about — Larry Bossidy, at the time, was vice chairman, and he was part of that — was who’s going to take over GE in 2000 when Jack retires. That was 15 years before he was set to retire. In the ’80s, there were 20 candidates. They got into the ’90s and kept paring it down. As many people know, they got it down to three — Bob Nardelli who now runs Home Depot, Jim McNerney who now runs 3M, and Jeff Immelt who runs GE. That did not happen by accident. That’s the only business I know in the world that had that kind of bench strength in terms of candidates for CEO…… The point is if I look for any leader who developed other leaders, their calendar shows it.
• Leaders have a Clear Leadership Philosophy. When I’m running workshops with executives, I tell them to think about it this way: If you were a tennis coach and you were running a five-day tennis camp and you’ve got 50 people standing there on the tennis court, you better have a teachable point of view on how you teach tennis. They just paid you a lot of money to learn tennis…… The teachable point of view is a set of ideas about the game….. You’ve got to teach the backhand, the forehand, the serve and the rules of tennis. Those are the ideas. A good coach will have a set of values: show up on time, dress a certain way, maintain a certain kind of etiquette on the tennis court. Those values support the ideas. But if that’s all you have — a set of ideas and values — how are you going to get these 50 people to hit 500 backhands, 500 serves, and sweat and work hard 8 hours a day? You could hand them a brochure and say, “Read this.”

These ideas about leadership really resonate with me and they will be farmiliar to regular readers of this blog….

Technorati Tags: Leadership, Management, Business, Philosophy, Vision, Development, Growth, Execution

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