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)

Effective Leaders

Peter Drucker said that every effective leader he had met knew four simple things:

1.  The only definition of a leader  is someone who has followers.  Some people are thinkers.  Some are prophets.  Both roles are important and badly needed.  But without followers, there can be no leaders.

2.  An effective leader is not someone who is loved or admired.  He or she is someone whose followers do the right things.  Popularity is not leadership.  Results are.

3.  Leaders are highly visible.  They therefore set examples.

4.  Leadership is not rank, privileges, titles, or money.  It is responsibility.

Effective leaders, regardless of their diversity with respect to personality styles, abilities or interests, behaved much the same way:

• They did not start out with th1e question, "What do I want?"  They started out asking, "What needs to be done?"
• Then they asked, "What can and should I do to make a difference?" This has to be something that both needs to be done and fits the leader's strengths and the way she or he is most effective.
• They constantly asked, "What are the organization's mission and goals? What constitutes performance and results in this organization?"
• They are extremely tolerant of diversity in people and did not look for carbon copies of themselves.  It rarely even occurred to them to ask, "Do I like or dislike this person?" But they were totally - fiendishly -= intolerant when it came to a person's performance, standards and values.
• They were not afraid of strength in their associates.  They gloried in it.  Whether they heard of it or not, their motto was what Andrew Carnegie wanted to have put on his tombstone: "Here lies a man who attracted better people into his service than he was himself."
• One way or another, they submitted themselves to the "mirror test" - that is, they made sure that the person they saw in the mirror in the morning was the kind of person they wanted to be, respect and believe in.  This way they fortified themselves against the leader's greatest temptations - to do things that are popular rather than right and to do petty, mean, sleazy things.

So here we go - follow me over the next 50 posts or so as we discover what leadership might look like in the future.

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• Spiritual leadership is moving people to God's agenda (andrewejenkins.wordpress.com)