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)

Executive Leaders

Gradually we are learning that leaders can benefit significantly from "executive champions" who can be protectors, mentors, and thinking partners.  When dramatic improvements achieved in organizations threaten others, executive partners can help in  managing the threat.

They also play a mentoring role, helping leaders to mature, to understand complex political crosscurrents, and to communicate their ideas and accomplishments to those who have not been involved. Let's face it, outside the team, those activities that are making a difference are sometimes seen as evidence of "being out of control."

Part of the problem in appreciating effective executive leadership in learning is that all of us are so used to the "captain of the ship" image of traditional hierarchical leaders.  When executives lead as teachers, stewards and designers, they fill roles that are much more subtle, contextual, and long term than the traditional model of the power-wielding hierarchical leaders suggests.

Effective executive leaders build an operating environment for learning.

One way is through articulating guiding ideas.  "I have always believed that good ideas will drive out bad ideas.  One of the basic problems with business today is that our organizations are guided by too many mediocre ideas, ideas which do not foster aspirations worthy of people's commitment." - Hanover's Bill O"Brien.

Another way is through conscious attention to learning infrastructure.  Shell's management team came up with a redesign so that management teams regularly were asked not just for their budget and their "plan" but for multiple plans describing how they would manage under multiple possible futures.  They call it "planning as learning."

Can't forget the executive team itself as a way to build operating environments for business.  What is important, first, is that executives see that they, too, must change, and that many of the skills that have made them successful in the past can actively inhibit learning.  Achieving such shifts in think, values, and behaviour among executives is not easy.  The name of the game is giving up power, giving up power is difficult.