• Recent Comments

  • Dan McCarthy on The importance of philosophy to great leadership
  • Jyvgkzyx on The importance of questioning your work
  • balabo_ck on Change fails when employees don’t grasp the rationale for the change
  • balabo_ei on Change fails when employees don’t grasp the rationale for the change
  • What Leadership Demands - Philosophy & Legacy on The importance of philosophy to great leadership
  • suria on Leaders vs. Managers….. Are they really different?
  • Boom Daniel on Leaders vs. Managers….. Are they really different?

• Blogs I Read

  • All Things Workplace
  • Be Excellent
  • Employee Engagement: Results That Matter
  • Extreme Leadership
  • Leadership Now
  • Leading Questions
  • Life 2.0
  • Phil Gerbyshak Challenges You to Make It Great!
  • Servant Leadership Blog
  • Slacker Manager
  • The Changing NHS
  • The Question of Leadership

• Spam Blocked

  183,924 spam comments

  blocked by
  Akismet

I have highlighted previously the importance of employee engagement and meaning.  A new study by Philadelphia-based consultants PeopleMetrics, supports the previous posts, highlighting the importance of engagement and meaning in driving corporate profits. The study surveyed more than 5,095 workers, across the United States and found that Fortune 500 companies in the lowest quartile in company profitability had 50% fewer engaged employees compared to those in the top quartile. The research found…

“…that creating emotional connections to employees is what truly matters because this is where organizations can dramatically boost employee productivity and business outcomes….. Building an emotional bond with employees, … requires organizations to create a ’sense of meaning and purpose’ among employees by connecting them to the ‘higher vision and purpose’ of the organization…. Equally, organizations need to build trust and confidence through regular dialogue with managers and senior leadership as well as celebrating successes, having fun and showing individual appreciation.”

How engaged are people in your team? Engagement is the real measure of effective leadership…….. How do you measure up?

 

Technorati:Research, Engagement, Meaning, Leadership, Management, Passion

 

Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win by William C. Taylor and Polly LaBarre is a great book. It’s one of those business books that stand out from the crowd and not only in it’s cover design! The cover reflects nature of this book, bold, challenging and provocative. The authors describe the book as “more than a how-to book. It is also a What-If book” with the underlying premise that:

“.. in business, as in basket ball, the smart take from the strong - that the best way to outperform the competition is to outthink the competition.. ” and it’s the “..mavericks do the work that matters most - the work of originality, creativity, and experimentation..”

Two aspects of this book really stand out, firstly the curiosity of the authors, who throughout the book challenge your thinking with a number of provocative questions, secondly the book is littered with quotes from the numerous organisational leaders as they tell their story.

“We went deep inside these organisations, looking to understand the ideas they stand for and the ways they work.”

The book has 12 chapters and is grouped into four parts. The books is jam packed with insightful discussion, delving into what makes maverick companies successful. This made the book very difficult to review, however I have selected those thoughts and ideas that really impacted me in each part of the book to give you and idea of the books message.

 

Part One: Rethinking Competition

• Talking about the link between who Southwest airlines hires and promotes and their business strategy, Libby Sartain explains that ”We examined at the most detailed level and asked, ‘From the minute you think of working here to the minute you leave, what makes this experience unique? What is it about our workforce that separates us from the competition?’”
• “Anybody who’s running a business has to figure out the higher calling of that business, its purpose. Purpose is about the difference you’re trying to make - in the marketplace, in the world. If everybody is selling the same thing, what’s the tie-breaker? It’s purpose” - Roy Spence
• “How you talk about your company speaks volumes about how you think about your business. And ultimately, how you think about your business determines how well it performs.”
• “Re-creating your industry is about creating a story around customers, around employees, around products…” - Arkadi Kuhlmann
• “At Netscape, the competition with Microsoft was so severe, we’d wake up in the morning thinking about how we were going to deal with them instead of how we would build something great for our customers” - Mike McCue, previously vice president of technology in Netscape
• “We believe that a new wave of strategic innovation is being built around disruptive points of view. Maverick leaders don’t just strive to build high-performance companies….They present a fresh take on the world that clicks with customers, energizes employees, and shapes their business, from the markets they target to the customers they serve and the messages they send. They understand that the only sustainable form of market leadership is thought leadership”
• “Companies that compete on a disruptive point of view are defined as much by the opportunities they choose not to pursue as by the businesses they do enter.”
• “Companies that think differently about their business invariably talk about it differently as well. What language does your company speak?”
• “The customers who are right for you, they love you. They become evangelists. The customers who you close out, they hate you. But you know what they do when they hate you? They tell everybody about you–and that’s good. It creates dialogue. There’s nothing like differentiation.”
• “Perhaps the most powerful indicator of a company’s future share of the product market in its industry is its current position in the talent market for that industry: is it attracting more than its fair share of the best people?”
• If your company went out of business tomorrow, who would really miss you and why? “Why might a company be missed? Because it’s providing a produce or a service so unique that it can’t be provided nearly as well by any other company. Because it’s created a workplace so dynamic that most employees would be hard-pressed to find a similar environment somewhere else. Because it has forged a uniquely emotional connection with customers that other companies can’t replicate.”
• “Can you identify one piece of how your company operates that if it were to disappear, would be sorely missed in the marketplace? If not, can you identify one good reason why your company is not a risk of disappearing?” 

 

Provocative Questions:

• What ideas is your company fighting for?
• What purpose does your company serve?
• If you do things the way everybody else does, why do you think you’re going to do any better?
• Did today really matter?
• Are we who we say we are?
• Do you have a distinctive and disruptive set of purpose that sets you apart from the competition?
• Do you have a vocabulary of competition that is unique to your industry and compelling to your employees and customers?
• Are you prepared to reject opportunities that offer short-term benefits but distract your organisation from its long-term mission?
• If your company went out of business tomorrow, who would really miss you and why?

 

Part Two: Reinventing Innovation

• “The best leaders have a crisp answer to the question: why would great people want to work for us?”
• “Great performers tend to be naturally competitive. They want to know where they stand, they want to know how good they are. They also want to be challenged, to improve their skills.”
• “You cannot motivate the best people with money. Money is just a way to keep score. The best people in any field are motivated by passion. That becomes more true the higher the skill level goes. People do their best work when they are passionately engaged in what they’re doing.” - Eric Raymond
• “Wieden argues that his job is to ‘walk in stupid every day’ - to keep challenging the organization and himself, to seek out unexpected ideas, outside influences, and new perspectives on old problems. ‘It’s the hardest thing to do as a leader,’ he concedes, ‘but it’s the most important thing. Whatever day it is, something in the world changed overnight, and you better figure out what it is and what it means. You have to forget what you just did and what you just learned. You have to walk in stupid every day.”
• “It’s hard to find an executive who doesn’t appreciate the power of the experience curve - the idea that the more you do something (make computer chips, build airplanes, write TV spots), the more productive you becomes. Dan Wieden and his colleagues also appreciate the power of the inexperience curve - the idea that the more you do something, the more important it is to challenge the assumptions and habits that built your success so as to generate a wave of innovations to build the future.”
• “The most effective leaders are the ones who are the most insatiable learners, and experienced leaders learn the most by interacting with people whose interests, backgrounds, and experiences are the least like theirs.”

 

Provocative Questions:

• Why should people want to work for us?

 

Part Three: Reconnecting with Customers

• Levitant says. “For us the foundation of a brand is the psychological contract - the contract between a company and its employees and between those employees and their customers. Great consumer companies are built on genuine passion, plus a day-to-day commitment to great execution”
• “The challenge isn’t to perform as much as it is to connect, to offer something so distinctive that people can’t help but notice, even in a marketplace with low prices and big claims. In an era of overcapacity and oversupply, overloaded customers are eager to identify with companies that have an appealing identity.”
• “We’re customer experts. Our focus is on always doing what’s right for a specific customer we know very well. Every product we buy, every real estate decision we make, every action we take, is through the eyes of that customer. Our customer is our category” - Glen Senk
• “There are so many ways to defy expectations in the marketplace, to do enough little things that you wind up making a big impression on your customers.”
• “To make their offerings more memorable, companies are working desperately to make them more emotional.”
• “The first and most important piece of every job, is to tell a unique and relevant story about the space, the product, or the experience. story is the fundamental platform for organizing ideas. That’s how you connect emotionally with people.” - David Rockwell
• “The next frontier for making products more emotional is to turn them into something social - to create a sense of shared ownership and participation among customers themselves. The more people you invite to shape your company’s personality, the more you enable them to share their ideas with one another, the greater their stake in what your company does - and the more invested they become in its success. In the new world of competition, generating a whole lotta love means unleashing a whole lotta participation.”
• “There’s always a demand for something distinctive”
• If you want customer to invest in and talk about your brand, then invest time and money in developing products worth talking about in the first place”

 

Provocative Questions:

• How do you make a compelling offer to customer who already have more than enough of what you’re selling?

 

Part Four: Redesigning Work

• “I’m a capitalist, not a social worker. Too many companies spend too much time trying to ’fix’ their mediocre performers. They should spend more time recruiting and retaining great performers.” -John Sullivan
• “The difference between success and failure, Andreessen and McCue now understand, is not just a function of the markets a company enters or the products it launches. Just as important are the people it lets in the door - who it hires, who it turns away, and the criteria for making those decisions.”
• “Any company with a disruptive business model has to be clear about the distinctive work experience it creates to support that model - and how that work experience shapes the customer experience.”
• “Great people almost always have great jobs. So if you want to fill your organization with knockout contributors, you can’t wait for them to knock on your door. You’ve got to knock on their door and persuade them to walk into your office.”
• “Remember, stars don’t work for idiots. So as you raise the quality of your talent, you’ve got to raise the quality of your management.” - Dr John Sullivan
• “Great people want to work on exciting projects. Great people want to feel like impact players inside their organization. Great people want to be surrounded with and challenged by other great people. Put simply, great people want to feel like they’re part of something greater than themselves.”
• “Companies that compete differently tend to work differently from the competition.”

 

Provocative Questions:

• Be honest: how many companies do you know that are as creative, as disciplined, as businesslike about the people factor in business as they are about finance, engineering, and marketing?
• What is it about the ideas your company stands for, its point of view in the marketplace, the ways in which employees interact with customers or collaborate with one another, that becomes irresistible to the best people in your industry?
• Have I established a great fit between the customer experience and the work experience?
• Are you articulate and persuasive about why talented people are more likely to thrive at your company than at rivals?
• Why should great people join your organisation?
• Do you know a great person when you see one?
• Can you find great people who aren’t looking for you?
• Are you teaching great people how your organization works and wins?
• Does your organisation work as distinctly as it competes?

 

Summary

This is an insightful book and is supported by an excellent website, a manifesto and a blog. The book’s appendix also contains a wealth of useful resources that you can explore to gain increased insight into what it means to be a Maverick. I found the book very well written, engaging and challenging. The authors really challenge your thinking, they have done a great job of imparting the reader with the passion and purpose found in the companies they discuss. I highly recommend this book to all those looking to create a disruptive business, seeking to challenge and transform their industries. It’s fresh look at what it takes to disrupt and industry and to compete with passion and purpose.

 

Technorati:Book, Review, Maverick, Work, Strategy, Innovation, Leadership, Management, Recruiting, Talent, Reinvent, Brand, Customers, Passion

Motto Magazine published an interview with Deepak Chopra in the interview he is asked the question “How can companies and individuals bring more passion and soul to the workplace?” I thought that his answer was deeply insightful:

The way to get more passion in the workplace is to actually change the way we select people for the jobs they do. In the words of some really great leadership authors, companies need to put the right people in the right seat. That means understanding their inner values. Instead of asking people the usual questions about their resume or curriculum vitae, you ask them questions like:

• What’s your purpose?
• What kind of contribution do you make to the world?
• What’s your passion?
• What are your peak experiences?
• What are the top qualities you look for in a good friend?
• Who are your heroes and heroines from mythology and legend, and from history and religion?
• What are your unique talents and how do you like to express them?
• What are the best qualities you express in your relationships? (Those are the qualities that allow soul to manifest in the world and in the work place.)

What this means is that, instead of a resume, you do a soul profile. I frequently ask people to answer those questions using three words or three phrases, so they end up with about 25 words that express the longing of their soul.

The point is well taken, interviews are focused on the persons skills and cultural fit. We neglect to look for the individuals passion. These questions are a great way to inquire into a persons passion.

 

Technorati: Passion, Recruiting, Purpose, Hiring, Management, Leadership, Teams, Career, Business

When leading people communication is critically important. Fail to communicate effectively and you fail to lead.  I found this great article by Russell Kern on “B-to-B Insights: A Perfect ‘10’“ describing a communication model from Target Marketing that would be useful to all leaders. Although the model is meant for direct marketing, the model is a useful tool to help us think through the key ingredients necessary for communicating powerful messages. When crafting your message use the pyramid model, illustrated below to guide your thinking….

 

Challenge #1 : Getting Their Attention

People are overwhelmed with messages all day, each one competing for their attention, time and energy. So the first challenge for any message is overcome this noise, to do this your message has to grab the peoples attention. This is what the first row at the bottom of the pyramid is for, it’s to help you grab the reader’s attention and this requires your message to be:

• Arresting: How eye-catching is your message? What have you done to make it impressive, noticeable or striking? A message that is arresting is not necessarily one that shouts from the rooftops. Interest can be piqued by speaking softly. Curiosity can be aroused by not using any words at all. Or, alternatively, by not using any pictures.
• Compelling: How forceful is your message? Have you connected with your readers’ hopes, dreams and/or fears? How have you persuaded your readers that they really need to find out more?
• Clear: Is it instantly obvious what you’re offering? Why a reader should care? Why a reader should take action? Are the benefits of doing so readily apparent? Is it easy to see how to respond? Are brand messaging, graphics, standards or package concept getting in the way of any of the above?
• Credible: Are you delivering a message that is honest, realistic, sincere and believable? To what degree have you convinced readers to reduce their skepticism and actually read/listen to you? How about the brand behind the message? Is it well known and well respected? If so, how effectively are you leveraging the brand to maximize your credibility?  

Challenge # 2: Getting Them Involved

 Remember head and heart in your communication….

We know from the study of psychology that humans typically act on their emotions while using logic to justify their behavior. This is a fundamental concept of brand advertising. For example, consumers buy Mercedes Benz automobiles for the prestige they confer, while pointing to the vehicles’ superior engineering and safety to justify the purchase. We also know that humans always want to move from pain to pleasure. With all this in mind, let’s examine the second row of our pyramid, which focuses on tying into your target’s emotions and logic.

• Emotional: Does your message move your readers to laugh, smile, cry, agree, yell? What have you done to arouse the spirit of your readers? Is your message exciting, poignant or even disturbing to such a degree that you’ll get an immediate “rise” and, hopefully, response?
• Insightful: Have you demonstrated your understanding of your target audience’s problems, needs, desires, hopes, dreams or aspirations? Have you made your audience aware of a new solution or product usage? Having read or heard your message, will they say to themselves, “I’ve never thought of it like that before.” Delivering new insights is hard. It requires field research and knowledge about what your targets are using now and how your product or solution will help them do something better, easier, faster, quicker and/or cheaper.
• Informative: How educational is your message? In exchange for your readers’ consideration are you revealing new, important or little-known information and using it to build your case for action on their part? If they don’t respond this time around, is your message still helpful to them in some way?

Challenge #3: Telling Them ”What’s in it for Them?”

All consumers and business people have one thing in common—they are self-focused and evaluate all advertising messages (brand or direct) from the point of view of self-interest. The challenge, and opportunity, for direct marketers is to use data, past behaviors and market insights to create messages that scream, “THIS IS JUST FOR YOU. HERE’S WHY.” It starts with personalization, but ideally extends way beyond by delivering offers based on past purchases or messages based on insights into job role, responsibility and company size. Before you launch your next campaign, consider row three of the fundamentals pyramid.

• Relevant: What have you done to make both the message and offer germane to your reader? (And not just germane, but important.) How applicable is your offer to the problems your readers are facing?
• Valuable: Do you have an offer that’s important, priceless or, failing that, just downright useful? How well have you persuaded your readers that your offer is worthy of their time and indispensable to the improvement of their daily lives?

Challenge #4: Telling Them What To Do

At the end of the day, everything you do is about driving immediate action. Overcoming complacency, sparking desire in the mind of the reader and prompting response is the ultimate goal for any direct message. Even in this era of integrated direct, this must never be forgotten, which is why the element of motivation sits atop our pyramid.

• Motivating: How moving is your message? How immediate? Have you employed proven response words and motivational phrases (e.g., “discover,” “learn,” “gain,” “reveal,” “take away,” “go now,” “find out,” “visit,” “call today,” “don’t wait,” “avoid missing out”) to drive response behavior? Does your message have urgency built into it?

I thought this to be an excellent model and tool in helping to shape our communication as leaders.

 

Technorati: Communication, Framework, Model, Marketing, Message, Leadership, Business, Management, Motivation, Relating

 

An article from HBS Working Knowledge “Don’t Listen to ‘Yes’“ where Martha Lagace,talks with Professor Michael Roberto, author of the new book Why Great Leaders Don’t Take Yes for an Answer on why it’s essential for leaders to spark conflict in their organizations, as long as it is constructive.

If people smile, nod, and say “yes” at your company, maybe it’s time to start an argument. According to HBS professor Michael Roberto, the lack of good conflict—constructive conflict—within an organization makes it that much harder to accurately evaluate business ideas and make important decisions….. But conflict does not mean browbeating.

The importance of constructive conflict

Leaders should create a climate of constructive dissent to improve the quality of decision making and to increase the levels of commitment to the decisions being made. Michael Roberto finds that by:

“Keeping conflict constructive helps to build decision commitment, and therefore facilitates implementation”

This is a key insight which is too easily overlooked. Patrick Lencioni in his book ”The Five Dysfunctions of a Team“, reviewed here,  made a similar observation on the importance of conflict in teams and the key role that constructive conflict played in teams in building commitment to team vision and goals.

This insights means that to be effective we need to change the way we make important decisions. Encouraging constructive conflict in important decision-making processes increases people’s commitment to the decision and this in turn helps to ensure more effective implementation. Given the critical importance of conflict and dissent in effective decision making and execution leader need to take a more active role in fostering the dissent in their decision making processes.

“Leaders need to recognize that expressing dissent can be very difficult and uncomfortable for lower-level managers and employees. Therefore, leaders cannot wait for dissent to come to them; they must actively go seek it out in their organizations……. Leaders can and should take concrete steps to build conflict into their decision-making processes. For instance, they might ask a set of managers to role-play the firm’s competitors in a series of meetings so as to surface and test a set of core strategic assumptions. Or they might assign someone to play the devil’s advocate so as to ensure that a thorough critique and risk assessment of a proposal has been conducted before moving forward……. By inducing vigorous and open debate, leaders avoid the guessing game of trying to discern whether or not people truly agree with a choice that has been made” 

The three cultures of indecision

Looking at organisations culture of decision making Michael Roberto identifies three of what he calls ”cultures of indecision“ that undermine effective decision making in organisations:

 

The Culture of ‘No’

“Lou Gerstner coined the phrase ‘culture of no’ to describe the situation he inherited at IBM in the early 1990s. In this type of culture of indecision, dissenters essentially have veto power in the decision-making process, particularly if those individuals have power and status. The organization does not employ dissenting voices as a means of encouraging divergent thinking, but rather it enables those who disagree with a proposal to stifle dialogue and close off interesting avenues of inquiry. Such a culture does not force dissenters to defend their views with data and logic, or to explain how their objections are consistent with the organization-wide goals as opposed to the parochial interests of a particular division or subunit. A culture of no enables those with the most power or the loudest voice to impose their will.”

The Culture of ‘Yes’

“When Paul Levy embarked on a turnaround of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, he discovered a ‘culture of yes.’ Levy described the dynamics: ‘People will not tell the truth during meetings about how their department would react to a given proposal. They will sit there quietly and you won’t find out until a week later that they object to something. This behavior had become standard practice. If you object to a proposal, you get quiet during the meeting. Then later, when you leave the room, you undercut the consensus that appeared to have emerged.’ Many organizations have similar patterns of behavior, and the tell-tale signs are quite similar to those described by Levy.”

The Culture of ‘Maybe’

A ’culture of maybe’ exists when companies are highly analytical, yet also quite uncomfortable with ambiguity. They go to great lengths to gather more information and to perform additional formal analysis, in hopes of reducing the ambiguity associated with various options and contingencies. They strive for certainty in an inherently uncertain world—to turn every maybe into a simple yes or no. Indecision and a lack of closure result if managers cannot recognize the costs of trying to gather a more and more complete set of information.

It seems to me that these three cultures are drive by the need to avoid conflict and dissent. The price they pay is in the lack of commitment and execution. The key lesson I take away from this is that conflict, although uncomfortable and messy at times, is a powerful mean of fostering commitment to decisions.

 

Keep the conflict constructive 

To be effective, leaders need to ensure that conflict remains constructive. That is, they must stimulate task-oriented disagreement and debate while trying to minimize interpersonal conflict. Leaders can accomplish this by taking concrete steps before, during, and after a critical decision process.

Before the decision making process

• Establish ground rules for how people should interact during the deliberations.
• Clarify the role that each individual will play in the discussions.
• Build mutual respect.

During the debate

• Redirect people’s attention and recast the situation in a different light.
• Present ideas and data in novel ways so as to enhance understanding and spark new branches of discussion.
• Basic facts and assumptions when the group appears to reach an impasse.

After the decision making process

• Leaders should try to derive lessons learned regarding how to manage conflict constructively.
• They must attend to hurt feelings and damaged relationships that may not have been apparent during the process itself.

The skill of hosting constructive dialogue is necessary for all leaders to take time to learn.

 

Ensure that the process is fair

Constructive conflict requires a fair decision making process. All people involved in the debate need to feel that the process used to come to the decision was transparent and fair.

“Keeping conflict constructive helps to build decision commitment, and therefore facilitates implementation. But, to build buy-in, leaders also need to devise a fair process. During a decision-making process, some individuals will have their views accepted by the group, while other proposals garner little support. Leading a fair process does not mean trying to satisfy everyone in terms of the ultimate decision that is made. Instead, it means creating a process in which leaders have demonstrated authentic consideration of others’ views. For people to believe that a process is fair, they must:

• Have ample opportunity to express their views and to discuss how and why they disagree with other group members.
• Feel that that decision-making process has been transparent, i.e., that deliberations have been relatively free of secretive, behind-the-scenes maneuvering.
• Believe that the leader listened carefully to them and considered their views thoughtfully and seriously before making a decision.
• Perceive that they had a genuine opportunity to influence the leader’s final decision.
• Have a clear understanding of the rationale for the final decision.”

Make time in meetings for constructive debate

Constructive conflict and debate take time. Debate is one thing that your cannot optimize and make effective by limiting the time available to explore options and for each team member to feel heard.

“Leaders need to be careful about trying to maximize the efficiency of their meetings. In so doing, there may be a pernicious unintended consequence. Agenda overload, coupled with the quest for efficiency, often works against a leader’s best efforts to stimulate debate. Why does efficiency crowd out debate? For some dissenters, it takes some time to gather the courage to express their views or to determine precisely how they would like to articulate their point. For others, they may want to listen to others and gain a better understanding of the issues before offering their views. The rapid pace of the discussion may become discouraging to those who aren’t comfortable ’shooting from the hip’ as soon as a new topic opens.”

Hold people accountable

 To hold people accountable require clear rules of engagement and clarity around acceptable behaviour and norms.

“It is very important for leaders to be clear about the way in which they want people to contribute and behave during decision-making processes. People need to understand what is expected of them, as well as what to expect of the leader. But perhaps more importantly, leaders need to maintain discipline over time, holding people accountable if they violate the accepted norms and rules of engagement. If someone clearly engages in personal attacks or withholds a dissenting view only to obstruct the implementation later, they need to be held responsible for such dysfunctional behavior. Leaders may find that such moments are developmental opportunities, where they can help their managers and employees learn and improve from situations of poor performance.”

The need for constructive conflict to build commitment and to drive implementation is a key leadership principle. It’s a skill that’s essential to effective change and execution and as we all know the ability to facilitate change and drive results are priceless in today’s business environment.

 

Technorati Tags: Comitment, Communication, Management, Debate, Leadership, Decision, Change, Execution, Meetings, Business

I found this interesting post on Soul in the Sky - John Kwarsick Blog:

Mark Albion, Author of the book “Making a Life, Making a Living” cites a study by Srully Blotnick:

“A study of business school graduates tracked the careers of 1,500 people from 1960 to 1980. From the beginning, the graduates were grouped into two categories. Category A consisted of people who said they wanted to make money first so they could do what they really wanted to do later after they took care of their financial concerns. Those in category B pursued their interests first, sure that the money eventually would follow.

What percentage fell into each category? Of the 1,500 graduates in the survey, the money-now category A’s comprised 83 percent or 1,245 people. Category B risk takers made up 17 percent, 255 graduates.

After 20 years, there were 101 millionaires in the group. Only one came from category A, 100 from category B.

Some food for thought…..

Technorati Tags: Career, Passion, Leadership, Success, Research, Finance, Happiness

“A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.” - John Le Caré

 

The Leadership Insight

 

One of the dangers faced by leaders is isolation from the people they lead. Too busy to take the time to really listen, too distracted to notice what’s happening around them and too rushed to reflect on what really matters, this quickly escalates to create the trap of isolation. You cannot lead people without getting involved. When leaders fail to spend sufficient time their people, they loose touch with the key issues of the day. When leaders remain behind their desks they loose touch with reality, unable to articulate what’s on the hearts and minds of their people. This results in slow decision making and delayed action. Unless leaders have insight into their people’s hearts and minds they will……

• Fail to create a shared vision….
• Fail to communicate effectively….
• Fail to bring about change……
• Fail to take effective action….

 

Ultimately they will fail to lead!

 

How much time are you spending with the people you lead? Do you know what’s on their heart and minds?

 

Technorati Tags: Quote, Communication, Management, Reality, Leadership

Next Page →

• Welcome to The Practice of Leadership!

  Get updates by RSS

  Get updates by e-mail:

  
  

• Link to Our Supporters

  • Performance Management
  • Staffing & Employment Leaders
  • purell hand sanitizer
  • Paul Asplin - CEO of DAS
  • Succession Planning
• 
  

• Explore More Leadership Topics

  Attitude Book Reviews Career Change Character Clarity Collaboration Commitment Communication Conflict Context Conversation Creativity Culture Decision-Making Definitions Dissent Energy Engagement Execution Experience Failure Feedback Focus Framework General Getting Things Done Goal-Setting Growth Innovation Inquiry Inspire Lance Armstrong Leadership Development Leadership Practices Leadership Succession Learning Lessons Management Meaning Meetings Mental Model Observe Paradox Passion Personal Leadership Philosophy Planning Practice Purpose Questions Quotes Reality Reflection Relating Research Resources Results Risk Role Models Self-Awareness Self-Knowledge Sensemaking Strategy Strengths Style Success Systemic Talent Teamwork Thinking Thought Leadership Time Management Transition Trends Trust Values Vision

• Quote of the Day

  “Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.”
  -- Warren G. Bennis

• What I support...