Gary Hamel’s “Nine Ways to Identify Natural Leaders” provides some insight into the age old question “How do you identify leaders?”

“The need to empower natural leaders isn’t an HR pipedream, it’s a competitive imperative. But before you can empower them, you have to find them. In most companies, the formal hierarchy is a matter of public record—it’s easy to discover who’s in charge of what. By contrast, natural leaders don’t appear on any organization chart. To hunt them down, you need to know . . .

• Whose advice is sought most often on any particular topic?
• Who responds most promptly to requests from peers?
• Whose responses are judged most helpful?
• Who is most likely to reach across organizational boundaries to aid a colleague?
• Whose opinions are most valued, internally and externally?
• Who gets the most kudos from customers?
• Who’s the most densely connected to other employees?
• Who’s generating the most buzz outside the company?
• Who consistently demonstrates real thought leadership?
• Who seems truly critical to key decisions?”

This is a great list to use in your leadership search efforts. Searching and selecting natural leadership is of critical importance in today’s competitive environment. Equally important is the need to create environments in which leadership thrives. Gary Hamel goes on to note that…

“One thing’s certain, though: we can’t invent Management 2.0 without inventing some new ways for people to accumulate and exercise authority. In the tempestuous seas of today’s creative economy, top-down leadership structures are fast becoming a liability. We need is a new currency of power—one based not on titles, but on every individual’s capacity to lead, every day….

“So here are some questions to ponder: How would you find the natural leaders in your company? And once found, how would you help them expand their influence? Can you imagine other alternatives to traditional power structures? If so, what might they be?”

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Photo by Elvire.R.

“The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.” – Theodore Roosevelt

In the January 2009 issue of John Maxwell’s newsletter Leadership Wired there is a great article on “A Leader’s Inner Circle”. The leaders inner circle is the group of people who is closest to the leader, they are the group of people who will have the greatest impact on the leader, influencing his thinking, his decision making and his behaviour. The leader’s inner circle can ensure a leader is successful or bring about his destruction.

In the article John Maxwell suggests the following five questions which leaders should ask when forming their inner circle:

1. Do they display exemplary character in everything they do? “Deception eats away at a leadership team like cancer. Dishonesty on the part of one member of an inner circle can bring shame and disaster to all. Entire organizations have toppled from the misbehavior of one bad apple.”
2. Do they bring complementary gifts to the table? “Imbalance within an inner circle can attune a leader’s ear to only one side of an argument. When putting together an inner circle, prioritize diversity of personality and perspective. By doing so, you widen the range of your vision and the breadth of your influence.”
3. Do they hold a strategic position and have influence within the organization? “Members of the inner circle must have the platform and influence to implement a leader’s decisions. If they cannot be relied upon to execute a chosen strategy, then they shouldn’t be entrusted with a spot on the leadership team. In addition, inviting uninfluential advisors into the inner circle disrupts the political balance of an organization. High performers suffer a motivational blow when they see a less deserving colleague granted special access to top leadership.”
4. Do they add value to the organization and to the leader? “When considering someone for the inner circle, you should be able to articulate clearly the value they will bring. Ask yourself the following questions: What will they infuse into discussion? Where do they have expertise? What unique skills can they be counted on to bring to the table?”
5. Do they positively impact other members of the inner circle? “If you’ve ever inhabited a house with a feuding husband and wife, then you can understand the need for leaders in close proximity to get along. Infighting saps energy and focus from a senior leader, forcing him or her to mediate conflicts with time that could be better spent elsewhere. Differences of opinion signal healthy debate, but personal animosities destroy a leadership team. Make sure members of your inner circle have the emotional intelligence to keep arguments from becoming too personal.”

This is a great set of questions that you can use to access your inner circle.

• Have you purposefully selected people to be part of your inner circle to support you in your vision?
• How to they shape up to these five questions?

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1. Evaluating the Leader’s Inner Circle

Great leaders surround themselves with great people. Lone ranger leadership is doomed to fail, there is no one great person that is going to transform an organisation it takes a strong team and a great leader. If you look at the life of anyone who has achieved success, such as Jack Welch, Bill gates and others, you’ll notice that they surround themselves with great people. But! It’s not that easy, the trick is to known what great looks like, "How do you know the great people when you see them?" An article by Peter Carbonara from Fast Company provides help for leaders looking to identify and select the right people for their team.

The proposition is undeniable: you can’t build a great company without great people. But how many companies are as rigorous about hiring as they comfortable evaluating job candidates as they are deciding on an investment proposal? The all-too-common reality, in far too many companies, is that hiring processes are poorly designed and shabbily executed.

Of course, making the commitment to hire great people raises an even more basic question: How do you know them when you see them? Over the last few years, a number of companies have asked themselves that question. They’ve analyzed what separates their winners from their losers, good hires from bad hires. These companies compete in a wide range of industries — from airlines to steel, computers to hotels — but they all arrived at the same answer: What people know is less important than who they are. Hiring, they believe, is not about finding people with the right experience. It’s about finding people with the right mind-set. These companies hire for attitude and train for skill.

The article proposes that by using the following four principles you can improve your chances of selecting the right person…..

1. What You Know Changes, Who You Are Doesn’t – Popeye was right: "I y’am what I y’am." The most common — and fatal — hiring mistake is to find someone with the right skills but the wrong mind-set and hire them on the theory, "We can change ‘em." Davidson’s response? Forget it. "The single best predictor of future behavior is past behavior," he says. "Your personality is going to be essentially the same throughout your life." As evidence, he points to U.S. Air Force research on personality types that began in the 1950s. For decades, researchers tracked their subjects by observing their behavior and interviewing their families, friends, and colleagues. The conclusion? Basic personality traits did not change, Davidson says. "Introverts were introverts, extroverts were extroverts. The descriptions were constant."
2. You Can’t Find What You’re Not Looking For – Bill Byham, perhaps the world’s foremost authority on hiring, is president and CEO of Pittsburgh-based Development Dimensions International (DDI) . He’s also the father of a hiring methodology that goes by many names ("Targeted Selection" is the most popular) but revolves around a simple idea: the best way to select people who’ll thrive in your company is to identify the personal characteristics of people who are already thriving and hire people just like them. In the Byham model, companies work to understand their star performers, identify their target behaviors and attitudes, and then develop interview questions to find people with those attributes.
3. The Best Way to Evaluate People is to Watch Them Work – A few companies take this rule literally — none more so than steelmaking giant Nucor. In many ways, Nucor is to steel what Southwest is to airlines: innovative, fast-moving, eager to break the rules. One of Nucor’s best sources of new steelworkers are the construction workers who build its plants. Managers monitor their construction sites, look for plumbers and electricians who demonstrate the work habits they value, and then hire them. At Nucor, the dirty and dangerous task of building a steel mill is one long interview for jobs running it.
4. You Can’t Hire People Who Don’t Apply – Companies that take hiring seriously also take recruiting seriously….. Companies that hire smart usually start their recruiting efforts close to home — with their own people. SGI’s Lane estimates that 65% of his company’s new hires began as referrals from current employees. It makes sense: it takes a certain kind of person to thrive at SGI, and those people tend to spend time (personally and professionally) with people like themselves.

One of the central tasks of leaders is the selection and development of people and teams. Leaders tend to recruit too hastily and take too long to remove those who are under-performing. The key to recruiting great people it to be clear about what you’re looking for in others. What are the characteristics of people who succeed in your team? Do you actively look for those characteristics in the people you’re looking to hire?

Technorati Tags: Teamwork, Selection, Talent, Recruitment, Leadership, Teams, People, Management, Business

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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

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“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….

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