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)

Leading from the Future

Trend watching consists of paying close attention to new or unexpected developments in the work team's environment and speculating about how they might affect people's career options.  Look at five distinct levels of systems: industries, professions, organizations, jobs, and individuals. 


Unfortunately, we do not properly track the emerging trends in our own area of influence, much less others.  That would suggest that we will not recognize critical changes in our industry until they have reached the point where the organization is forced to respond to them.

Same can be said for one's advancement.  Advancing in one company will no longer be the norm as there is a trend toward smaller organizations with flatter structures, so the trend will be for one to grow within one's profession.  That growth comes through active involvement through a variety of forums, including conferences, journals and other publications, computer bulletin boards, and professional associations.

Still, the trend to watch with regard to work is where the opportunities for certain types of learning are likely to become available.


http://vimeo.com/1092843

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On the Job Development

Managers are more involved in the how-to, the short term, and the bottom line, while leaders must have vision, mission, strategic intent and dreams.

There are many ways and opportunities to help people develop their career.  These actions can be divided into five broad categories and each category is a distinctive leadership role that corresponds to a different stage of the career development process.  These roles are facilitator, appraiser, forecaster, adviser, and enabler.  Caela Farren shared these and I have summarized some of what those roles look like below:

•  facilitator: helps people identify their gifts and passion, understand their personality type and relate their gifts to calling and ministry
• appraiser: provides candid feedback on performance and reputation; clarifies standards and expectations; listens to people's self-assessment, frustrations and hopes; relates performance to goals; suggests specific actions to improve
• forecaster: points out emerging trends and new developments, provides new opportunities, indicates new directions, understands cultural and spiritual realities
• advisor: identifies possibilities in relation to the individual's gifts, experience and performance; points out obstacles; provides support
• enabler: develops detailed plans, arranges useful contacts, establishes networks, identifies resources

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Outmoded Executive Education and Leadership Training

Training is no longer comprehensive.


Let me share a quote with you and some thoughts of others who think they know what it means,implies, assumes and maybe there is something for you in these to think about...

Professor Abraham Zaleznik: 'Leadership is made of substance, humanity and morality and we are painfully short of all three qualities in our collective lives."

SUBSTANCE, IND - Firma P.Lahti Tmi
"Based on this there is no more truth that in Enron and WorldCom there was badly lacking leadership with integrity and instead those two companies and also many other companies were and are still run by greedy managers."

 M. RINIVASA RAO, Reviewer of the book written by Mark A. Thomas, the author of “Gurus on Leadership,”
 With this profound articulation of deficiencies in contemporary leadership, Zaleznik differentiates between managers and leaders as his Harvard Business Review article “Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?” reveals.
According to Zaleznik, management is all about operating in a culture that “emphasizes rationality and control.” It is within this type of environment and organization where “it takes neither genius nor heroism to be a manager, but rather persistence, tough mindedness, hard work, intelligence, analytical ability and, perhaps most important, tolerance and goodwill.”

Book Review By Prof.M.S.Rao – “Gurus On Leadership” Authored By Mark A. Thomas (Publisher – Viva Books Private Limited)
"He differentiates between managers and leaders. His Harvard Business Review article entitled, ‘Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?’ received the McKinsey award for the best Harvard Business Review article in 1977 and was re-published as a classic in 1992. Earlier and later articles received the same recognition."

UK: THE LUST FOR LEADERSHIP. - If we are so dissatisfied with those up front, asks Simon Caulkin, is it time to re-examine the conventional model?

"There's the John Wayne, gung ho, follow-me attitude - but if there is no perceived reality or no human touch then it is unlikely to touch the constituents you want to lead. And without morality you may as well be Adolf Hitler. Leadership is the ability to change compelled performers into willing participants."

 

James Bolt: Leader of the Future article

"In his 1989 work, The Managerial Mystique, Harvard Business School professor Abraham Zaleznik writes that leadership is made up of "substance, humanity and morality. We are painfully short of all three qualities in our collective lives" (p. 124). Executive education has focused primarily on business skills. Also, most leadership seminars have presented leadership as an isolated issue apart from the individual and business challenges executives face, suggesting that leadership can simply be added on top of other skills, much like picking up a foreign language before going overseas. Such narrow training produces leaders who are not fully developed. Executives seeking a complete development package must often acquire it piecemeal. To develop leadership skills, they may attend courses offered by management training companies. To improve their business skills, they might spend a summer in a university executive program. This ad hoc approach is ineffective."

The last one was the best one!

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A New Paradigm of Leadership

Leadership focuses on ding the right things; management focuses on doing things right. 
Leadership makes sure the ladders we are climbing are leaning against the right wall; management makes sure we are climbing the ladders in the most efficient ways possible.

Most managers and executives operate within existing paradigms or ways of thinking, but leaders have the courage to bring those paradigms to the surface, identify the underlying assumptions and motivations, and challenge them by asking, "does this still hold water?"

Stephen Covey shared some thoughts titled, Three Roles of the Leader in the New Paradigm.

 So the first role of the leader is to be a model of principle-centered leadership.  Modeling, then is a combination of character (who you are as a person) and competence (what you can do)

 Three Roles of a Leader

• Path finding
• Aligning
• Empowering- When you have true alignment toward a common vision, a common mission, you begin to co-mission with those people.  Individuals purpose and mission are commingled with the mission of the organization.  When these purposes overlap, great synergy is created.  A fire is ignited within people that unleashes their latent talent, ingenuity, and creativity to do whatever is necessary and consistent with the principles agreed upon to accomplish their common values, vision, and mission in serving customers and other stakeholders.  This is what we mean by empowerment.

The leader of the future will be a leader in every area of life, especially family life.  There is no place where this spirit of service can be cultivated like the home

I think the last paragraph is his best statement and is the ultimate expression of leadership I have ever read and practiced.


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Define the Business of the Business

Best leadership frames the organization's mission and values in ways that members find tarnscedent: the goals of the business are transmuted from the dross of ordinary work into higher goals that are worthy of heroic efforst and even sacrifices.

Three stone masons in the middle ages were hard at work when a visitor came along and asked them what they were doing.
The first stone mason was hard at work, sweat beading his brow. “I am cutting this stone”, he grumbled.
The second stone mason, though less distraught, responded with a deep sigh, “I’m building a parapet”.
The third stone mason, replied with a radiant face, “I am building a beautiful cathedral that will glorify God for centuries to come”.

Strategy is conceptual - a winning strategy must accurately designate what the orgainzation will do better than anyone else in order to be the customer's choice.

Each organiztion must come up with its own receipe for success.

The "How to Be" Leader

Looking over the horizon of today's headlines, describing the future and identifying the tasks for leadership, there are three major challenges that they will face - quality of leadership, quality of the work force and quality of relationships.

The leader needs to be focused therefore on how to be, as Frances Hesselbein points out, how to develop quality, character, mind-set values, principles, and courage.

The "how to be" leader knows that people are the organization's greatest asset and in word, behaviour, and relationships they demonstrate this powerful philosophy.

The "how to be" leader builds dispersed and diverse leadership - distributing leadership to the outermost edges of the circle to unleash the power of shared responsibility.

The "how to be" leader holds forth the vision of the organization's future in compelling ways that ignite the spark needed to build the inclusive enterprise.

The "how to be" leader knows that listening to the customer and learning what they value - "digging in the field" - will be a critical component, even more so in the future than today.

Everyone will be watching to see if the business practices of the organization are consistent with the principles espoused by the leader.

Key is the way they embrace the totality of leadership, not just including "my organization" but reaching beyond the walls as well.

The wise leader embraces all those concerned in a circle that surrounds the corporation, the organization , the people, the leadership, and the community.

Check out Frances' complete thoughts here - make sure you read the concluding paragraph - its worth it all.

http://books.google.ca/books?id=iWrEIJMUEtkC&pg=PA11&lpg=PA11&dq=frances+hesselbein+great+observers+are+not+forecasting+good&source=bl&ots=cH_iRW_Yv0&sig=rR6Da6fatuERXhxLJx4pWg-kdtI&hl=en&ei=56LLTor4A4b00gG75-j4Dw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=fal