The Soft Stuff is the Hard Stuff

"People cannot be reengineered.  Organizations cannot compel individuals to be empowered, and leaders cannot empower people to be innovative or courageous or to choose courses of action that are unfamiliar or uncomfortable.  Individuals have to empower themselves.  Only individuals can choose to take a new direction or risk their career reputations to achieve a new vision, because all change is self-change.  All reengineering demands major self-leadership choices." - Richard Leider

So lets look at balancing performance.

Delivering balanced performance now requires both functional and cross-functional ("process") excellence built on both individual and team contributions.   Goals and accomplishments must by continuous as well as sporadic.  And what matters most can be qualitative (for example, morale) as well as quantitative.  Finally, speed (cycle time) and specificity (zero defects) have joined volume and money as key metrics.

Following this then, leadership in the future:

1.  Works to turn aspirations into actions

• focus on the future by visualizing what can be
• connect and integrate the entire value chain of a firm (suppliers, customers, and employees) rather than what goes on inside the firm
• create energy and enthusiasm about what can be
• engage employees' hearts (emotion), minds (cognitions), feet (action).

2. Rests on five assumptions

• transform leadership at the top of the enterprise to shared leadership
• transform one-time event thinking to ongoing process
• transform thinking from individual champions to team victories
• transform problem solvers to pioneers
• transform unidimensional thinking to paradoxical thinking

3. Requires both personal credibility and organizational capability

• Credibility: Does this leader have credibility with those he or she works with?  Do individuals trust, respect, admire,and enjoy working for this leader? Do those who work with this leader as subordinates, peers, customers, or supervisors feel a personal and emotional bond with him or her?
• Capability: Does this leader have the ability to make the organization succeed? Does she or he have the ability to shape a vision, create commitment to the vision, build a plan of execution, develop capabilities, and hold people accountable for making things happen?

Related articles

• Not All Metrics Are Created Equal (customerthink.com)