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In the article “Rule #3: Leadership Is Confusing As Hell” in Fast Company by Tom Peters discusses “why leadership will be more important than ever” and some of what his leadership insights…..

 

• Leaders on snorting steeds (the visionary greats!) are important. “But great managers are the bedrock of great organizations…. Stop being conned by the old mantra that says, “Leaders are cool, managers are dweebs.” Instead, follow the Peters Principle: Leaders are cool. Managers are cool too!”
• Leadership is confusing as hell. “If we’re going to make any headway in figuring out the new rules of leadership, we might as well say it up front: There is no one-size-fits-all approach to leadership. Leadership mantra #1: It all depends….. We need to think about situational leadership — the right person, the right style, for the right situation…. Motto: The situation rules. Leader for all seasons? In your dreams!”
• Leaders love the mess. “There’s no mess — and no creativity, no energy, no inspired leadership.”
• The leader is rarely — possibly never? — the best performer. “…there is no more important decision that a company makes than the selection of its first-line managers. The best leader is rarely the best pitcher or catcher. The best leader is just what’s advertised: the best leader. Leaders get their kicks from orchestrating the work of others — not from doing it themselves.”
• Leaders deliver. “If you’re aiming to be a real leader during the next five years, then you need to mimic the pizza man: You’d better deliver! For the past five years, ideas and cool have counted (which was important). What counts now? Performance. Results.”
• Leaders understand the ultimate power of relationships. ”….what really matters are the relationships that leaders have created with their people.”
• Leadership is an improvisational art. “The game — hey, the basic rule book — keeps changing. Competition keeps changing. So leaders need to change, to keep reinventing themselves. Leaders have to be ready to adapt, to move, to forget yesterday, to forgive, and to structure new roles and new relationships for themselves, their teams, and their ever-shifting portfolio of partners.”
• Leaders trust their guts. “‘Intuition’ is one of those good words that has gotten a bad rap. For some reason, intuition has become a “soft” notion. Garbage! Intuition is the new physics. It’s an Einsteinian, seven-sense, practical way to make tough decisions. Bottom line, circa 2001 to 2010: The crazier the times are, the more important it is for leaders to develop and to trust their intuition.”
• Leaders trust trust. “…In a world gone nuts, we cry out for something or someone to rely on. To trust. The fearless leader may (make that, had better) change his or her mind with the times. But as a subordinate, I trust a leader who shows up, makes the tough calls, takes the heat, sleeps well amidst the furor, and then aggressively chomps into the next task in the morning with visible vitality.”
• Leaders are natural empowerment freaks. “There are two ways to look at Jack Welch’s legacy as a leader. The first is to say that he has created more value for his shareholders than any other comparable modern-day business leader. Which he has. He has also created more leaders than any comparable modern-day business leader….. When we think of Welch, we do not ordinarily think vision. (What is GE’s vision? I haven’t a clue! “We bring good things to life” ain’t it.) We do think rigorous performance standards, empowerment (”WorkOut” in GE-speak), leadership, and talent development. Jack Welch, it turns out, is a great manager.”
• Leaders are good at forgetting. “Peter Senge’s brilliant insight 10 years ago was that companies need to be learning organizations. My campaign 2001: Companies need to be forgetting organizations…..  Got an idea? Don’t dally. Go for it while it’s an original! Doesn’t work? Try something else. If that doesn’t work, fuhgeddaboutit!”
• Leaders bring in different dudes. “….Winning leaders know that their organizations need to refresh the gene pool. That happens when leaders forget old practices and open up their minds to new ones. That also happens — and more effectively — when leaders bring in new people and new partners with new ideas. As a leader, do with your people what Cisco has done so effectively with technology: Acquire a new line of thinking by acquiring a new group of thinkers.”
• Leaders make mistakes — and make no bones about it. Nobody — repeat, nobody — gets it right the first time. Most of us don’t get it right the second, third, or fourth time either. Winston Churchill said it best: “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” Churchill blew one assignment after another — until he came up against the big one and saved the world…. When you make mistakes, you need to recognize them quickly, deal with them quickly, move on quickly — and make cooler mistakes tomorrow.
• Leaders love to work with other leaders. ”….Leaders are known by the company they keep. If you work with people who are cool, pioneering leaders who have customers who are cool, pioneering leaders who source from suppliers who are cool, pioneering leaders — then you’ll stay on the leading edge for the next five years. Laggards work with laggards. Leaders work with leaders. It really is that simple.”
• Leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders. “Too many old-fashioned leaders measure their influence by the number of followers that they can claim. But the greatest leaders are those who don’t look for followers.”
• Leaders love rainbows — for totally pragmatic reasons. “Another good word gone bad: “diversity.” The case for diversity during the past 20 years has been that it was the “right thing to do.” Well, in no-bull times, diversity isn’t a good thing, it’s an essential thing. It’s a survival thing. The case for diversity is the case against homogeneity: When the world is undergoing sudden, unpredictable, dire change, you need to have a diverse gene pool. You need to have multiple points of view. In a heterogeneous time, homogeneity sucks!”
• Leaders don’t fall prey to their own success. “There are a lot of people who have made it really, really big over the past five years. Some of them actually think that they’re responsible for their success, if you can imagine that. But in crazy times, leaders don’t believe in their own press clippings. And they never, ever let their organizations get complacent!”
• Leaders wear their passion on their sleeve. “There’s absolutely no question in my mind: Leaders dream in Technicolor. They see the world in brighter colors, sharper images, and higher resolution. Leadership, in the end, is all about having energy, creating energy, showing energy, and spreading energy. Leaders emote, they erupt, they flame, and they have boundless (nutty) enthusiasm. And why shouldn’t they? The cold logic of it is unassailable: If you do not love what you’re doing, if you do not go totally bonkers for your project, your team, your customers, and your company, then why in the world are you doing what you’re doing? And why in the world would you expect anybody to follow you?”
• Leaders know: Energy begets energy. “Every successful company, every successful team, and every successful project runs on one thing: energy. It’s the leader’s job to be the energy source that others feed from. But sometimes the leader has no energy. Sometimes the situation is bleak, and the outcome is in doubt. And I say: Fake it! For it is at that critical juncture that having energy is the most essential. So if you gotta fake it, then fake it! Once you kick-start the energy cycle, nature takes over. The energy will start to flow. Benjamin Zander said it best: The job of the leader is to be a ‘dispenser of enthusiasm.’”
• Leaders give respect. “…Care. Respect. Leaders care about connecting — because it moves mountains.”
• Leadership is a performance. “According to HP big cheese Carly Fiorina, ‘Leadership is a performance. You have to be conscious about your behavior, because everyone else is.’ Leaders spend time leading — which means that they spend time and exert ceaseless effort making sure that they come across with the right message in the way that they walk, talk, dress, and stand. Leadership is not only about action. It’s also about acting.”
• Leaders have great stories. “A performance needs to have a script. Howard Gardner wrote about that in his book, Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership (BasicBooks, 1995). Effective communication of a story is a key — perhaps the key — to leadership… Why? Because stories are the real thing. They are how we remember, how we learn, and how we visualize what can be. If you want to involve your colleagues in the future performance of your business, then don’t just present them with the numbers. Tell them a story. Numbers are numbing. Stories are personal, passionate, and purposeful.“

 

 

Technorati Tags: Leadership, Management, Passion, Energy, Tom Peters, Change, Performance, Business, Tips, Insight, Lessons

“Leadership is a function of knowing yourself, having a vision that is well communicated, building trust among colleagues, and taking effective action to realize your own leadership potential.” - Warren Bennis

 

Technorati Tags: Leadership, Definition, Warren Bennis

 

 

 

The First 90 Days a Harvard business Review book by Micheal Watkins provides a guide for leaders making a transition from one role into a new one. Transitions are one of the most difficult times for most leaders. This book is an essential guide for leaders in transition… 

“Transition failures happen when new leaders either misunderstand the essential demands of the situation or the lack of skill and flexibility to adapt to them.”

 

Promote Yourself

“This doesn’t mean hiring your own publicist. It means making the mental break from your old job and preparing to take charge in the new one. Perhaps the biggest pitfall you face is assuming that what has made you successful to this point in your career will continue to do so. The dangers of sticking with what you know, working extremely hard at doing it, and failing miserably are very real.”

 

Accelerate Your Learning

“You need to climb the learning curve as fast as you can in your new organization. This means understanding its markets, products, technologies, systems and structures, as well as its culture and politics. Getting acquainted with the new organization can feel like drinking from a fire hose. You have to be systematic and focused about deciding what you need to learn and how you will learn it most effectively.”

 

Match Strategy to Situation

“There are no universal rules for success in transitions. You need to diagnose the business situation accurately and clarify its challenges and opportunities. Start-ups, for instance - of a new product, process, plant, or completely new business - share challenges quite different from those you would face while turning around a product, process, or plant in serious trouble. A clear diagnosis of the situation is an essential prerequisite for developing your action plan.”

 

Secure Early Wins

“Early wins build your credibility and create momentum. They create virtuous cycles that leverage the energy you are putting into the organization to create a pervasive sense that good things are happening. In the first few weeks, you need to identify opportunities to build personal credibility. In the first 90 days, you need to identify ways to create value, improve business results, and get to the breakeven point more rapidly.”

 

Negotiate Success

“Because no other single relationship is more important, you need to figure out how to build a productive working relationship with you new boss and manage his or her expectations. This means carefully planning for a series of critical conversations about situation, expectations, style, resources, and your personal development. Critically, it means developing and gaining consensus on your 90-day plan.”

 

Achieve Alignment

“The higher you rise in an organization, the more you have to play the role of organizational architect. This means figuring out whether the organization’s strategy is sound, bringing its structure into alignment with its strategy, and developing the systems and skill bases necessary to realize strategic intent.”

 

Build Your Team

“If you are inheriting a team, you will need to evaluate its members and perhaps restructure it to better meet the demands of the situation. Your willingness to make tough early personnel calls and your capacity to select the right people for the right positions are amongst the most important drivers of success during your transition. You will need to be both systematic and strategic in approaching your team building challenge.”

 

Create Coalitions

“Your success will depend on your ability to influence people outside your direct line of control. Supportive alliances, both internal and external, will be necessary to achieve your goals. You should therefore start right away to identify those whose support is essential for your success, and to figure out how to line them up on your side.”

 

Keep Your Balance

“In the personal and profession tumult of a transition, you will have to work hard to maintain your equilibrium and preserve your ability to make good judgements. The risk of losing perspective, getting isolated, and making bad calls are ever present during transitions. There is much you can do to accelerate your personal transition and to gain more control over your work environment. The right advise-and-counsel network is an indispensable resource.” 

 

Expedite Everyone

“Finally, you need to help everyone in your organization - direct reports, bosses, and peers - accelerate their own transitions. The quicker you can get your new direct reports up to speed, the more you will help your own performance. Beyond that, the benefits to the organization of systematically accelerating everyone’s transitions are potentially vast.”

 

In Conclusion….

Transitions need to be carefully managed as they are risky and prone to failure. This book is very well written and full of practice advice to guide leaders through the crucial first 90 days in their new roles. I found this book an extremely useful resource in a recent transitions that I made from a leadership position in one organization to another. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for some guidance and advice as they seek to develop their personal 90 day transition plans.

 

Technorati Tags: Book, Review, 90-days, 100-days, Plan, Career, Transition, Leadership, Management, Business, Change, HBR

The article titled “Leading for the Next Act: Why CEOs Must Evolve or Step Aside“ published in Knowledge@Wharton provides an interesting discussion concerning the need for leaders to change their leadership style to fit that challenges facing their organisations.

“The secret to long-term CEO success, suggests David Nadler, a consultant to boards and senior executives, is conceiving of a CEO’s tenure as a performance with a series of distinct acts. ‘Each act requires the CEO to lead, think and behave in fundamentally different ways. The successful ones are those who are able to make the transitions,’ Nadler said during his presentation at the 11^th annual Wharton Leadership Conference, sponsored by the Center for Leadership and Change Management, the Center for Human Resources and Wharton Executive Education…… “The problem comes after the CEO solves that first issue; then it is act two and something else is needed,” he says. Many CEOs fail because of what Nadler terms ’success syndrome,’ that is, codifying a certain way of doing things, and then charging ahead with the old game plan no matter how the context has changed…… What leaders who successfully transition from one act to the next share is an awareness of what kind of leadership is required at the right moment — and they don’t rest on their laurels.”

This is a common leadership challenge, success can be a leaders worst enemy. Success often deceives leaders, causing them to think they have it “all figured out”, it creates pride and fuels ego’s, creating the perfect cocktail for future failure….

“‘They fail to recognize that things are changing, and often, they are unable to assess their own capabilities.’ With these blind spots in place, the CEOs continue to press ahead, widening the gap between their vision and the company’s reality. ‘We call that ‘the death spiral,’ said Nadler…. Feeding into this negative cycle is the hard fact that CEOs may not hear frank words from their insular circle of advisors — or care to listen when the truth is spoken. ‘Normally we think of learning-disabled kids, but I see learning-disable executives, who lack the ability to take in new information and determine the insider implications for it.’”

When leaders are not open to feedback from the business environment and people around them, they cannot adapt to the changing business context, resulting in failure. I’ve often observed how executive will choose to rationalize and defend deteriorating results, rather than looking inward to examine the appropriateness of their leadership style…..

“Part of the CEO’s task, then, is to ruthlessly assess him or herself as the business context changes. ‘Do I have an understanding of what’s needed now in terms of new leadership requirements? Do I have a sense of my own leadership capabilities? Can I understand the gap between what’s required by the new situation and what I’m capable of doing?’”

For successful leaders this is a whole lot more difficult than it seems! A critical leadership capability is the ability to face reality. As Jack Welch says “face reality as it is, not as it was nor as you wish it were“. To me, facing reality means having NO ILLUSIONS, to focus on outcomes and to become more self-aware.

 

Technorati Tags: Leadership, Reality, Evolve, Change, Deception, Self-Awareness, CEO, Management, Business, Success, Failure, Transition

Kathrine Walsh discusses some of the lessons John Kotter, the author of ”Leading Change“ and ”The Heart of Change” has learnt, in the article ”Five Things I’ve Learned About Change“

I personally admire Jack Welch as a change leader. And I have learned many lessons from him. He’s said that “the world is moving in nanoseconds,” so you better damn well be sure you’re good at change. He’s also talked about how “incremental change can easily be resisted by a bureaucracy.” Constant baby-step improvement is fine, but it is not enough. Sometimes sweeping change is what you need. It is what leaders do. They take existing systems and adapt them to new waves of technology and competition.

The more adaptable you are, the better. I’ve found that the more adaptable organizations or individuals are to change, the better they can sustain high performance over time. There is a definitive relationship between leadership and change……. The companies that were better at change were performing better over time. And they had better leadership.

The most basic aspects of leadership and change are a function of human nature. I’ve found there are specific steps in the process of how people make significant changes. The steps tend to be universal, independent of the content of change. They apply to process reengineering, the need for more innovation, new business strategies, you name it. The eight steps are to create a sense of urgency, put the right team together, create a sensible change vision and strategy, communicate the plan to obtain buy-in, empower people to act, garner some short-term wins, then pound away the changes you are trying to make until you implement them and can make them stick. That basic process is at the heart of leading change.

Details of leadership are situational. Leaders, by definition, have to fit into the situations they’re dealing with. As situations change culturally, and through time, successful leadership styles change too. I would bet that if you look at the people today who are providing terrific leadership in their organizations, some of the things they’re doing are different from their counterparts in 1950. Today there is more diversity in terms of gender, ethnic background and race. As the details vary, so does the leadership style.

I’ve had to lead change at various points in my career. So I can say that if you don’t know how to do it, good luck to you! The better you are at seeing and identifying the right steps, the higher your chances of success. In my personal life, I cope with change poorly at times (according to my wife). But in general, I create change, and the reason I do it well is because I have a high sense of urgency.

Some great tips….! 

 

Technorati Tags: Change, Lessons, Learning, Leadership, Management, Business, Context, Book

“You must constantly ask yourself these questions: Who am I around? What are they doing to me? What have they got me reading? What have they got me saying? Where do they have me going? What do they have me thinking? And most important, what do they have me becoming? Then ask yourself the big question: Is that okay?” - Jim Rohn

We are profoundly affected by those in their inner circle. Leaders are no exception and therefore must to surround themselves with others that complement them - that is people who are strong in areas that they may be weak. Who you have in your inner-circle will determine your effectiveness. Selecting people to fulfil a leadership role is a difficult task. John Maxwell provides some help, he asks the following questions before bring new people into his team:

• Character — who they are.
• Relationships — who they know.
• Knowledge — what they know.
• Passion — how strongly they feel.
• Experience — where they’ve been.
• Past successes — what they’ve done.
• Ability — what they can do.

 

Great leaders aren’t afraid to surround themselves with great people….

 

Technorati Tags: Talent, Recruitment, Leadership, Team, Teamwork, Influence, Relationships

 

In his book “The Effective Executive” Peter Drucker discusses the five essential practices that are hallmarks of effective executives:

 

1. Effective executives know where their time goes. They work systematically at managing the little of their time that can be brought under their control.
2. Effective executives focus on outward contribution. They gear their efforts to results rather than work. They start out with the question, “What results are expected of me?” rather than with the work to be done, let alone with its techniques and tools.
3. Effective executives build on strengths - their own strengths, the strengths of their superiors, colleagues, and subordinates; and on the strengths in the situation, that on what they can do. They do not build on weaknesses. They  do not start out with the things they cannot do.
4. Effective executives concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results. They force themselves to set priorities and stay with their priority decisions. They know that they have no choice but to do first things first - and second things not at all. The alternative is to get nothing done.
5. Effective executives, finally, make effective decisions. They know that this is, above all, a matter of system - of the right steps in the right sequence. They know that an effective decision is always a judgement based on “dissenting opinions” rather than on “consensus on the facts”. And they know to make many decisions fast means to make the wrong decisions. What is needed are few, but fundamental decisions. What is needed is the right strategy rather than the razzle-dazzle tactics.

 

The first step on the road to effective leadership is the decision to take responsibility for managing oneself. This book provides a foundation for personal effectiveness - to help us focus on doing the right things. Effectiveness is a habit that we all need to learn and the five practices described by Peter Drucker provide a base set of practices that underpin personal effectiveness.

 

Technorati Tags: Peter Drucker, Leadership, Management, GTD, Lifehacks, Productivity, Effectiveness, Focus, Book

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