• 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

  183,923 spam comments

  blocked by
  Akismet

Carol Hymowitz wrote an interesting article "Sometimes, Moving Up Makes It Harder to See What Goes On Below" discussing the need to leaders to kee in touch with what’s happening on the ground in their organisations and teams…

"Executives know success in business depends on identifying and fixing problems before they become crises. It is the most basic rule in management: No matter how smart your strategies seem on paper, if you don’t know how they’re being executed and whether there are urgent problems, you won’t be successful. …The higher executives climb, the less likely they are to know what is and isn’t working at their companies. Many are surrounded by yes people who filter information; others dismiss or ignore bearers of bad news…..Ken Siegel, an organizational psychologist and president of the Impact Group in Los Angeles, believes that most CEOs avoid learning what their employees are thinking and doing. He advises those who want to get to the truth to assemble a senior team of people with diverse points of view. ‘Instead of surrounding them with executives who think just like they do, they need people down the hall who are their opposites, have very different strengths and push them to see reality differently,’ he says….. Executives at big companies who have many layers of management between themselves and front-line employees face the biggest challenge finding out how their strategies are actually working. Those who want accurate information must commit to spending time in the field — often and on their own — where they are away from handlers and can coax employees to be forthcoming about problems."

How effective is your feedback loop? Are you getting the good and especially the bad news from the ground? Good quality information and feedback is essential for the effective execution of your vision and strategy. Poor information equals poor decision making and failed strategy….!

 

Technorati Tags: Leadership, Management, Business, Communication, Conversation, Feedback, Strategy, Execution

 

Photo by by _Neverletmego_

 

An article "The Clear Leader" from Fast Company discusses research conducted by Marcus Buckingham, author of First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths, on the heart of leadership. Based upon his research Marcus Buckingham, maps out the core concepts that mark superior leadership as follows:

• Leaders are Compelled by the Future - "There’s something unique and different that makes a leader, and it’s not about creativity or courage or integrity. As important as they are, you can have those attributes and still fail to be a great leader. A leader’s job is to rally people toward a better future. Leaders can’t help but change the present, because the present isn’t good enough. They succeed only when they find a way to make people excited by and confident in what comes next……..  With leaders, the future calls to them in a voice they can’t drown out. The future is more real than the present; it compels them to act."

• Turn Anxiety into Confidence - "For a leader, the challenge is that in every society ever studied, people fear the future. The future is unstable, unknown, and therefore potentially dangerous. So in order to succeed, leaders must engage our fear of the unknown and turn it into spiritedness. By far the most effective way to turn fear into confidence is to be clear — to define the future in such vivid terms that we can see where we are headed. Clarity is the antidote to anxiety, and therefore clarity is the preoccupation of the effective leader. If you do nothing else as a leader, be clear."

• Be Clear about Whom You Serve - "Leaders can be wrong. They can’t be confusing. If we are going to follow you into the future, we need to know precisely whom we are trying to please. It’s a scary thing to please all of the people all of the time. So to calm our fear, we need you to narrow our focus. Tell us who will be judging our success. When you do this with clarity, you give us confidence — confidence in our judgment, in our decisions, and ultimately in our ability to know where to look to determine if we have fulfilled our mission."

• Be Clear About Why You’re Going to Win - "….As a leader, your job is to make people more confident about the future you’re dragging them into. To that end, you need to tell them why they’re going to win. There are many competitors out there. Why will we beat them? There are many obstacles in our path. Why will we overcome them? The more clearly you can answer these questions, the more confident we will be, and therefore the more resilient, the more persistent, and the more creative…. Even if it doesn’t incorporate all the reality of the world, find the edge — one edge — and talk about it all the time…."

• Keep Your Core Score - "…clarity is lost if you end up looking at 15 different metrics. It’s a terrible leadership failure to tell your employees that all of these measurements are important. When followers are presented with numerous scores, they get confused. The job of a leader is to say, ‘Of all the things we measure, this is the most important.’"

• If You Want to be Clear, Act - "Of course, a leader must take action — action leads to impact. But actions also possess a separate, equally powerful quality. Actions are unambiguous. If you, the leader, can highlight a few carefully selected actions, then your followers will no longer have to infer the future from theoretical pronouncements about "core values" or your "mission statement." We will simply look to see what actions you take and found our faith and confidence on these. But be aware that we respond best to two types of action: symbolic action and systemic action… Symbolic action is just that — a representation of what the future can look like. Symbolic action grabs our attention; it gives us something new and vivid on which to focus."

 

I have previously posted on the importance of clarity for successful leadership (here, here, here and here). Have you acted yet? Are you clear on why you’re doing what you’re doing? Is your team clear?

 

Technorati Tags: Clarity, Clear, Vision, Future, Leadership, Management, Business, Execution, Action, Measurement

 

Photo by hellopoe

 

"From now on, [choosing my successor] is the most important decision I’ll make. It occupies a considerable amount of thought almost every day." - Jack Welch, on succession planning in 1991 (10 years before his retirement)

Leadership development and succession planing is critical for today’s organisations. Successful leaders take considerable time in developing leaders and plan for leadership succession, to ensure that they leave a legacy and that their mission is completed. Sucession planning starts long before the leader is ready to leave the organisation. It’s part of the leaders responsibility to develop others.

• How are you going about succession planning in your team and organisation?
• Is succession planning a daily responsibility of company management and leadership?

Consider the following…..

"How am I doing as a leader? The answer is how the people you lead are doing. Do they learn? Do they visit customers? Do they manage conflict? Do they initiate change? Are they growing and getting promoted? You won’t remember when you retire what you did in the first quarter of 1994 or the third. What you’ll remember is how many people you developed. How many people you helped have a better career because of your interest and your dedication to their development…. When confused as to how you’re doing as a leader, find out how the people you lead are doing. You’ll know the answer." - Larry Bossidy from The Leadership Engine

If the answer to the above questions is "no" or "I don’t know" then I would say you’re not effectively managing leadership succession….

"At the end of the day, you be on people, not on strategies" - Larry Bossidy from The Leadership Engine

 

Technorati Tags: Leadership Development, Leadership, Management, Business, Succession, Planning, Strategy, HR, Talent, Learning, Growth

This post from Curt Rosengren really struck a cord with me… It’s a great question for leaders….

If we’re going to make a positive change in the world, hope is a prerequisite. And that sense of hope can be either fed or depleted by what you choose to let into your brain to begin with……. Two simple questions.

• What information am I choosing to focus on? Does it feed or drain my sense of hope?
• Who do I surround myself with (literally or through reading their blogs, etc.)? Do they feed or drain my sense of hope?

Then, of course, comes the all important step of taking action….

• What steps can you take to bring more of what feeds that sense of hope into your life?
• What steps can you take to reduce or eliminate more of what drains it?

It’s important for leaders to give people hope, the French General Napoleon Bonaparte knew this too he is quoted saying that "leaders are dealers in hope". Hope is one of a leaders greatest possessions, without it a leader ceases to lead! What worldview are you creating?

 

Technorati Tags: Hope, Pessimism, Optimism, Positive, Negative, Quotes, Question, Leadership, Attitude

Fast Company discusses the "Ten Habits of Incompetent Managers" by Margret Hefferman which are as follows:

1. Bias against action: "There are always plenty of reasons not to take a decision, reasons to wait for more information, more options, more opinions. But real leaders display a consistent bias for action. People who don’t make mistakes generally don’t make anything."
2. Secrecy: "….If you treat employees like children, they will behave that way — which means trouble. If you treat them like adults, they may just respond likewise. Very few matters in business must remain confidential and good managers can identify those easily…. Secrets make companies political, anxious and full of distrust."
3. Over-sensitivity: "An inability to be direct and honest with staff is a critical warning sign. Can your manager see a problem, address it headlong and move on? If not, problems won’t get resolved, they’ll grow…… Interestingly, secrecy and over-sensitivity almost always travel together. They are a bias against honesty."
4. Love of procedure: "Managers who cleave to the rule book, to points of order and who refer to colleagues by their titles have forgotten that rules and processes exist to expedite business, not ritualize it."
5. Preference for weak candidates: "…Who did our manager want to hire? The junior. She felt threatened by the super-competent manager and hadn’t the confidence to know that you must always hire people smarter than yourself."
6. Focus on small tasks
7. Allergy to deadlines: "A deadline is a commitment. The manager who cannot set, and stick to deadlines, cannot honor commitments. A failure to set and meet deadlines also means that no one can ever feel a true sense of achievement."
8. Inability to hire former employees: "… Every good manager has alumni, eager to join the team again; if they don’t, smell a rat."
9. Addiction to consultants: "A common — but expensive — way to put off making decisions is to hire consultants who can recommend several alternatives."
10. Long hours: "In my experience, bad managers work very long hours. They think this is a brand of heroism but it is probably the single biggest hallmark of incompetence. To work effectively, you must prioritize and you must pace yourself. The manager who boasts of late nights, early mornings and no time off cannot manage himself so you’d better not let him manage anyone else."

Margret goes on stating that "Any one of these behaviours should sound a warning bell. More than two — sound the alarm" I found the last point especially interesting….!

 

Technorati Tags: Management, Leadership, Business, Effectiveness, Efficiency

Bob Sutton posts on four principles that leaders can use to guide a "leader who [is]  implementing any change that employees will find disconcerting". The four key principles are prediction, understanding, control, and compassion and are described as follows:

1. Prediction: Give people as much information as you can about what will happen — to them as individuals, to their workgroups, and to the organization as a whole — and when it will happen. This makes the layoff real for people and helps them prepare for the future. 
2. Understanding: Explain why you believe the change is necessary. Human beings have consistently negative reactions to unexplained events. This effect is so strong that it is better to give an explanation that people dislike than no explanation at all — so long as the explanation is credible.
3. Control: Giving people influence over what will happen is often impossible, but giving them influence over how it happens and when it happens is often possible.
4. Compassion: Senior executives should express human compassion, and when appropriate, sorrow, for the consequences of their business decisions.

These principles are key to sustaining employee motivation an loyalty during and after the difficult times…

 

Technorati Tags: Change, Principles, Morale, Transformation

Fast Company has an article by Michael Useem on his thoughts on leadership research conducted by a colleague of his who studies "48 firms among the Fortune 500 largest U.S. firms and asked two direct reports of their CEOs to describe their boss personally. To what extent are they visionary, self-confident, performing pretty high, walking the talk, and determined to get the job done?" Some of his comments on the research includes..

 

The Future Success of a Company Begins with the Top Management Team…

"With some exceptions, to forecast the future of a company, you need to know more about the top management team than you do about any single chief executive, including the CEO. How many people are on that team? How good are they? Is there a sharing of the agenda? You want to talk about your leadership, but by ‘you’ we mean the plural ‘you.’"

Core Leadership Qualities…

"You’ve got to get this leadership thing right if you want to get where we want to go. What are the leadership qualities that really make a difference? What are the common capacities? Strong moral character. Passion for a point of view. A vision they believed in. They walk their talk under a lot of duress. They have character."

A Template for Your Personal Leadership…

"This is starting to build out a template for your own leadership. A template is generic, but the moves are specific. Leaders consistently talk vision at every occasion. You can’t say it too often in slightly different terms. Vision, strategy. Something that’s less obvious is that leaders always honor the people in the room, the team, in effect, that will take the chosen path to that dream. It also has to be translated to the personal implications for everybody. …… You’ve got to say what you say in a way that it hits people. Say it so it sticks."

The 3 Keys of Success….

"The No. 1 factor that people will cite at the end of a career that got them where they are is that they had stretch assignments given to them that they took. No. 2 is a mentor. Sometimes people don’t know they’re mentoring. No. 3, your style — strategy, vision, honoring the people, personalizing your message, making it stick — is a style that’s acquired. That ties into No. 2, mentoring, and No. 1, the stretch experience, and that’s part of why you’re here."

Technorati Tags: Leadership, Vision, Passion, Character, Mentor, Strategy, Management

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 practiced not so much in words as in attitude and in actions.”
  -- Harold Geneen

• What I support...