The Practice of Leadership » Results

Leadership is everyone’s responsibility

George Ambler — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 15:31:19 +0000

“If you don’t think of yourself as a leader, then you’re limited in your thinking. Leading is the way we help move people into action, including ourselves. The question is not whether you are a leader, but how well you lead.” — Bruce D. Schneider, Energy Leadership, from Everyone is a Leader

Everyone is a leader, however some of us are more effective leaders than others. As leaders we a firstly responsible for leading ourselves and secondly we are responsible for leading others. Effective leaders are those whom are able to move people into action. This is because leaders are known by their results, not by their grand visions and plans.

Judged by your results… How effective is your leadership?

Leadership’s New Rules

George Ambler — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 18:11:38 +0000

With the increasing complexity the roles and behaviours of leaders need to change to suite a complex environment. The Dannemiller Tyson Associates discusses three new rules for leaders in the 21st Century:

Old Rule #1: The leader’s job is to know, and to serve as a final authority in important decisions.

New Rule: The leader’s job (in the 21st Century) is to call people together whom we have typically kept apart, and to find ways to uncover and connect the collective wisdom of our people. When leaders follow this rule, we’ve seen that this shared wisdom emerges most effectively people are invited to come together and share “one-brain, one heart.” Here everyone in the organization, through accepting each others’ views, comes to see that we all know the same thing (“one brain”), and we are all connected around the same yearnings and vision of a preferred future for the organization (“one heart”).

Old Rule #2: The leader’s job is to control-information, people, risk, the future. The effective leader is in charge of everything that’s going on, both inside and outside the organization. The leader’s job is to ensure that people in the organization obey the rules, and people in the organization look to the leader to keep them safe (e.g., “If I obey, then I’ll have a job, and the company will survive).

New Rule: The leader’s job is to ask questions and facilitate conversations at ALL levels of the organization. An organization can achieve its goals quickly and successfully only when people’s energy is aligned and their commitment is focused, and we believe that this requires a leader to engage people at all levels of the organization in connected discussion.

Old Rule #3: The leader’s job is to drive and monitor organization performance by focusing on what is going wrong, and punishing mistakes.

New Rule: The leader’s job is to build and sustain high performance by noticing and appreciating when people do things right-especially when they act with courage, integrity, and accountability. Reinforcing courageous, right-minded action, especially when it turns out to be a mistake, is the only way to encourage people to take risks, and leaders who follow this rule typically build organizations with spirit and pride.

Technorati Tags: Leadership, Management, Business, Collaboration

Research finds leadership critical to organisational performance

George Ambler — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 20:18:14 +0000

Research by The Ken Blanchard Companies identified connections between leadership capacity and organizational vitality, the research findings indicate that “strategic leadership as well as operational leadership capacity are critical“.

“Strategic leadership defines the imperatives for everyone in the organization,” says Blanchard. “It is the ‘what’ that proves the key relationships and metrics needed to ensure that all units follow the same strategy.” According to Zigarmi, who joined with Blanchard to drive the study, “Organizational management practices provide the ‘how’ in organizations—enabling departments and employees to understand the manner in which they specifically contribute to organizational success. These are the procedures and policies that clarify how each unit will achieve the overall strategy.”

The Overall Findings

Analysis of the research…. suggests that leaders who hold people accountable and ensure effective, productive behaviors in their people are the most effective influencers and drivers of organizational results. Equally important is a leader’s ability to affect the mood, attitude and engagement of employees and the overall culture of the organization through a specific chain of events that are implicitly linked.

The research also revealed that Employee passion results from the employee’s positive experience and overall satisfaction with the organization, its policies, procedures, products, and management practices, and directly predicts customer devotion and organizational vitality. Hard measures of employee passion include retention, absenteeism, tenure, and productivity. Soft measures include employee perception of fairness, justice, and trust. Customer devotion, another direct indicator of organizational vitality, occurs as a result of positive experiences with the organization’s products, services, policies, procedures, and personnel. Hard measures of customer devotion include customer retention, length of the customer relationship, number of transactions, average transaction size and referral of new clients.

The conclusion: Creating an organization that is successful and effective is an inside-out proposition. The quality of the culture, the quality of management practices, and the alignment of these practices with key strategic initiatives rests with leadership…… leaders also hold the key to organizational vitality—the creating of an environment that allows employees to win and be passionate about what they do. By taking care of employees, leaders establish an environment in which the employees take care of the customers at a level that causes the customer to want to return year after year.

Leadership is the key to organisational health, yet we still have too many managers and too few leaders in organisations. Sadly, leadership development often takes a back seat to day-to-day operational pressures. This research confirms my belief that leadership development is one of the most important investments we can make.

Technorati Tags: Leadership, Research, Performance, Management, Business, Strategy