The Practice of Leadership » Growth

Five Challenges that Accelerate Leadership Development

George Ambler — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 17:50:55 +0000

The high levels of change demand increased leadership capabilities and the requires organisation to focus on the development of future leaders. The Center for Creative Leadership has studies the development of leadership for the last 38 years and have identified five key challenges that have facilitate the effective development of leadership:

Challenge 1: Unfamiliar responsibilities. When you practice new skills and expand your knowledge base, you learn how to operate effectively when you are early in a learning curve.
Challenge 2: Creating change. When you lead change, you learn to operate in ambiguous situations, think strategically, make tough decisions and persevere in the face of adversity.
Challenge 3: Significant accountabilities. By expanding your role in terms of scope, scale, time pressure and accountability, you learn what it takes to be decisive, to work and learn at a fast pace and to have significant impact.
Challenge 4: Managing across boundaries. Assignments that require you to collaborate across functions and business units or to work with people over whom you have no authority will strengthen your ability to influence others.
Challenge 5: Dealing with diversity. By working with people of another culture, gender or background, you will be better prepared to adapt to different expectations and persuade people of different backgrounds to work together.

Organisation face an increasing leadership shortage, not having sufficient leaders to meet their organisations future needs. Given this leadership crunch the way organisations approach the development of leaders is critical.

Have you included these five challenges as key components of your leadership development programme?
Have you included these five challenges as part of your personal leadership development?

Seven Critical Questions To Assess Your Leadership

George Ambler — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 17:13:26 +0000

Effective leaders are always striving to become better, always stretching themselves and their teams. The Harvard Business Review of January 2007 had a great article “What to Ask the Person in the Mirror” by Robert S. Kaplan, discusses seven questions that leaders can use to access themselves to stay on top of their game.

“I have learned the key characteristics of highly successful leaders is not that they figure out how to always stay on course, but that they develop techniques to help them recognize a deteriorating situation and get back on track as quickly as possible. In may experience, the best way to do that is to step back regularly, say every three to six months (and certainly whenever things feel as though they aren’t going well), and honestly ask yourself some questions about how you’re doing and what you may need to do differently.”

The seven questions Robert recommends we ask ourselves to keep us on course and on track are are:

Vision and Priorities: “How frequently do I communicate a vision and priorities for my business? Would my employees, if asked, be able to articulate the vision and priorities?” “Have I identified and communicated three to five key priorities to achieve that vision?”
Managing Time: “How am I spending my time? Once you know your priorities, you need to determine whether you’re spending your time – your most precious asset – in a way that will allow you to achieve them…. The key here is, whatever you decide, time allocation needs to be a conscious decision that fits your vision and priorities for the business.”
Feedback: “Do I give people timely, direct and constructive feedback? And second: Do I have five or six junior people who will tell me things I don’t want to hear and need to hear? …As hard as it is to give effective and timely feedback, many leaders find it much more challenging to get feedback from their employees. Once you reach a certain stage of your career, junior people are in a much better position than your boss to tell you how you’re doing. They see you in your day-to-day activities, and they experience your decisions directly….”
Succession Planning: “Have I, at least in my own mind, picked one or more potential successors?” “Am I coaching them and giving them challenging assignments? Am I delegating sufficiently? Have I become a decision-making bottleneck?… This issue is critical because if you aren’t identifying potential successors, you are probably not delegating extensively as you should and you may well be a decision-making bottleneck. Being a bottleneck invariably means that you are not spending enough time on vital leadership priorities and are failing to develop your key subordinates.”
Evaluation and Alignment: “Am I attuned to changes in the business environment that would require a change in the way we organize and run our business?” “If I had to design my business with a clean sheet of paper, how would I design it? How would it differ from the current design? Should I create a task force of subordinates to answer these questions and make recommendations to me? …Even the most successful business is susceptible to new challenges posed by a changing world. Effective executives regularly look at their businesses with a clean sheet of paper – seeking advice and other perspectives from people who are less emotionally invested in the business – in order to determine whether key aspects of the way they run their organizations are still appropriate.”
Leading Under Pressure: “How do I behave under pressure, and what signals am I sending my employees?” “What types of events create pressure for me?… As a leader you are watched closely, During crisis, your people watch you with a microscope, noting every move you make. In such times, your subordinates learn a great deal about you and what you really believe, as opposed to what you say. Do you accept responsibility for your mistakes, or do you look for someone to blame. Do you support your employees or do you turn on them? Are you cool and calm, or do you lose your temper? D you stand up for what you believe, or do you take the expedient route and advocate what you think your seniors want to hear? You need to be self-aware enough to recognize the situations that create severe anxiety for you and manage your behavior to avoid sending unproductive messages to your people.”
Staying True to Yourself: “Does my leadership style reflect who I truly am? … A business career is a marathon, not a sprint, and if you aren’t true to yourself, eventually you’re going to wear down.”

Considering the above seven questions…. are you still on track?

Abraham Maslow’s 8 Ways to Self-Actualize

George Ambler — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 19:55:43 +0000

Derek Sivers has a great post on Abraham Maslow’s and his 8 Ways to Self-Actualize. Maslow defined as self actualisation follows:

“Self Actualization is the intrinsic growth of what is already in the organism, or more accurately, of what the organism is.”

One of the interesting insights concerning Maslow from this article is that:

“Maslow studied healthy people, most psychologists study sick people.”

Rather then studying sick people and seeking to avoid the issues and challenges faced by these people. Maslow studied healthy people and identified what drove them to be healthy and successful. This approach resulted in some really interesting insights. Maslow came to the conclusion the man is basically good and that man has a natural drive to become the best person that he can be. Maslow also recognised the need for man to live a life that is an expression of himself and a life that is founded in moral and ethical behaviour. That man has a longing to live as a person of character. His research led him to articulate the following eight ways to self actualise:

Experience things fully, vividly, selflessly. Throw yourself into the experiencing of something: concentrate on it fully, let it totally absorb you
Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for defense) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth): Make the growth choice a dozen times a day.
Let the self emerge. Try to shut out the external clues as to what you should think, feel, say, and so on, and let your experience enable you to say what you truly feel.
When in doubt, be honest. If you look into yourself and are honest, you will also take responsibility. Taking responsibility is self-actualizing.
Listen to your own tastes. Be prepared to be unpopular.
Use your intelligence, work to do well the things you want to do, no matter how insignificant they seem to be.
Make peak experiencing more likely: get rid of illusions and false notions. Learn what you are good at and what your potentialities are not.
Find out who you are, what you are, what you like and don’t like, what is good and what is bad for you, where you are going, what your mission is. Opening yourself up to yourself in this way means identifying defenses – and then finding the courage to give them up.

The Best Investment Advice from Warren Buffet

George Ambler — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:15:46 +0000

Photo by AssistedSeniorLiving.Net

Alec Hogg from Moneyweb provides insight into some of Warren Buffet’s best investment advice. During the question and answer session at the AGM of his Berkshire Hathaway group Warren Buffet made the following comment regarding the best investment that you can make…

“The most important investment you can make is in yourself. Very few people get anything like their potential horsepower translated into the actual horsepower of their output in life. Potential exceeds realisation for many people…… Just imagine you’re 16 and I was going to give you a car of your choice today, any car you wanted to pick. But there was one catch. It was the only car you were able to have for the rest of your life. You had to make it last. So how would you treat it?

Well, of course you’d read the owners’ manual about five times before you turn the key in the ignition. You would keep it garaged; any little rust would get taken care of immediately; you’d change the oil twice as often as you were supposed to – because you would know it had to last a lifetime….

Then I tell the students you get one body and one mind. And it’s going to have to last you a lifetime so you’d better treat it the same way. You’d better start doing it right now because it doesn’t do any good if you start working on it when you are 50 or 60 and the little speck of rust has turned into something big… The best asset is your own self. You can become to an enormous degree the person you want to be.”

This is great advice from a truly great investor. Taking the time and energy to investing oneself, is the starting point for great leadership. Leaders invest in themselves in the following ways.

Leaders surround themselves with great people: Successful leaders surround themselves with great people. Great people challenge our thinking and our behaviours. People shape us as much as we shape them. Leaders ensure that they are shaped by people who have demonstrated their competence and character.
Leaders read great books: Learning is critical, it is the most powerful lever we have in life. Books challenge our thinking and actions. Books provide leadership insight and a foundation for leadership action. The most important point to remember when reading for personal development is to focus on digesting and applying what we read. It’s not about the quantity of books we read, but how much of what we read that is applied to our lives.
Leaders have a personal growth plan: Growth does not just happen. Preparation is required for effective learning, growth requires deliberate practice and a conscious effort. One of the best things you can do is develop your own personal growth plan.

“The only difference between who you are today and the person you will be in five years will come from the books you read and the people you associate with” – Charles Tremendous Jones

Investing in oneself takes time and nobody has any extra time, leaders make room for what’s most important and personal growth and learning is most important to leaders. Remember, successful leaders are generally those people who are willing to do what most others aren’t willing to do. How much are you investing in yourself?

Warren Bennis Defines Leadership

Leaders who are open to growth… tend to grow

George Ambler — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 19:36:41 +0000

An article from the New York Times discusses research by the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, author of “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success”, has found that people generally approach life with one of two mind-sets when thinking about their talents and abilities…

“Those who believe they were born with all the smarts and gifts they’re ever going to have approach life with what she calls a ‘fixed mind-set.’ Those who believe that their own abilities can expand over time, however, live with a ‘growth mind-set.’… Guess which ones prove to be most innovative over time… ‘People who believe in the power of talent tend not to fulfill their potential because they’re so concerned with looking smart and not making mistakes. But people who believe that talent can be developed are the ones who really push, stretch, confront their own mistakes and learn from them.’ In this case, nurture wins out over nature just about every time.”

This research confirms what we have always known about great leaders, they continually seek to grow and increase their personal talents and abilities. In his book “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership”, John Maxwell refers to this as the Law of the Lid’…

“Leadership ability determines a person’s level of effectiveness…. the higher you want to climb, the more you need leadership. The greater the impact you want to make, the greater your influence needs to be. What ever you will accomplish is restricted by your ability to lead others…. Leadership ability is always the lid on personal and organizational effectiveness.”

A fixed mind-set creates a lib on our leadership potential, it constrains us, preventing us from becoming effective leaders. Talent will only take you so far, the higher you go, the greater the need for leadership. We can all develop and increase our leadership capability. To be effective we need to raise our “leadership lid” through continuous learning and development, and to grow leaders must adopt a growth mind-set. When leaders stop growing, they stop leading…! Continual personal growth is central to effective leadership.

As leaders build their teams, they should be looking not only for talented individuals, but also for individuals who have a growth mind-set.

“Ms. Dweck does not suggest that recruiters ignore innate talent. Instead, she suggests looking for both talent and a growth mind-set in prospective hires — people with a passion for learning who thrive on challenge and change…. People with a growth mind-set tend to demonstrate the kind of perseverance and resilience required to convert life’s setbacks into future successes. That ability to learn from experience was cited as the No. 1 ingredient for creative achievement in a poll of 143 creativity researchers cited in ‘Handbook of Creativity’ in 1999.”

Look to build your teams with talented individuals who have a grow mind-set. People who continually seek to grow and develop themselves.

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