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?

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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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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

Need Cosmopolitan Leaders

These leaders are extremely learning-oriented.  They keep track of lesons drawn from experience in "what's worked" lists that are shared with everyon, and they try to articulate principles that will transfer experience from one activity to another.  They include many members of the staff in brainstorming.  They encourage opness to new ideas and do not assume that they already have the answers within their own minds or within the organization.

Their jobs are defined in terms of identifying and constantly comunicating commonly held values, shapeing such values to enhance performance, ensureing the capability of people around them, living the commonly hel values, listening a great deal of the time, and literyall speaking a different language than their tarditional counterparts.  In short, they see themselves as shapers and keepers of performance-oriented cultures.

There are six leadership styles that are found among successful leaders.  They are a special use of language, listening skills, values propagation, enhancement of employee capability, clarification of core values, and insurance of dignity.


http://youtu.be/rEH0emoe1t8

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Turning the Organizational Pyramid Upside Down

When individuals talk about effectiveness they are basically talking about vision and direction.  Effectiveness has to do with focusing the organization's energy in a particular direction.

When individuals talk about efficiency, they are talking about systems and procedures - the way things are done.  Efficiency is all about implementation.

The Quality LEAP Model introduces this concept well - Lead, Empower, Align, Persevere and with that comes four stages of interventions --

When you should be leading, but find yourself questing its because you are looking for visionary leadership direction.

When you are empowered its because vision and implementation in strategies are aligned

When you find yourself astray, align your systems with vision.

When you should be persevering, but feel lost, you need vision, not system implementation - even though you probably are still not organized once you get the vision)

You cannot separate these into leadership roles and management roles - they are all in the arena of the leader of the future.

Your target - your measurement - your goal - they are all found at the top of the upside-down organization.  The customer-contact people?  Who are really at the top?  The customers!  Who are at the bottom?  Top management.  When you turn a pyramid upside down philosophically, you work for your people in implementing visions and goals.  Although it seems minor, this one change makes a major difference.  The difference is between who is responsible and who is responsive.

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Leading a Diverse Work Force

Critically, the leader has come to replace the hero, and leadership, heroism.

There will be two causes that will give rise to leadership.  John Work describes the first one as perceived-inequity cause.  Simply what grows out of perceived inequities across diverse groups in corporate and organization workplaces, communities etc.  The second cause we can call the search-for-excellence cause.  Individuals with positions of responsibility and authority may perceive a need and be motivated to raise than improve an organization's level of efficiency, production and delivery of goods and/or services, and profitability.

Whatever the reason or cause, true leadership must lead to change that translates into social betterment.  Ultimately, true leadership makes a difference in the lives of people.

We need to take this to the workplace situations that, left leaderless, may well devolve into more complex patterns of discrimination, lowered levels of employee morale and productivity, a poor public and international image, and a failure to identify and develop new markets.  True leaders will recognize the opportunities and potential benefits inherent in diversity, such as the creation o new markets, broaden customer bases, higher levels of productivity, more creativity and new ides, and increased cor-orate capacity to effectively participate in different competitive and global configurations.

John W. Work shares some interesting thoughts on this subject.  He states that

"the seeming decline of heroes in our society as images possessed of enduring vison and values, capable of transforming the wretched into nobility, and serving as repositories for historic tales of victory over the implacable forces of evil is being offset today by the rise of the notion of leaders and leadership.  But who are the leaders of today, and what is leadership?  With respect to organizations and workplaces, true leaders are individuals with organization visions and commitments and embrace beyond traditional management concerns.  They fashion higher standards of social concern than are required by fundamental management skill.  Given this reenginerred  leadership, our institutiions and workplaces now can meaningfully adapt the values inherent in a diverse society."

TV Bits & Bites from Nadira Hira on Vimeo.

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.

Leaders for the De-Jobbed Organization

Drucker points out the basics - a traditional organization is hung upon a skeleton system of position-based leaders.  De-jobbed organizations, on the other hand, are patterned like an energy field, and leaders function as energy nodes around which activity clusters. 

If we identify them as ad hoc leaders then we have to understand that they tend to be self-selected far more often than they would be in a traditional organization.  They emerge in the natural course of business.  Like everything else, leadership is the thing that people do wherever and whenever it is needed.

De-jobbed organization's leaders are responsible for generating and delivering the resources needed by the working units in the organization - simply a different tool for a different task.

Because the leadership required by the de-jobbed organization is "softer" and more diffused than that needed by the traditional organization, it sometimes assumes as though such an organization is leaderless.  But it  is not.  The de-jobbed organization is going to require more leaders and leaders with more sophisticated skills, not the opposite.

However, as you can imagine, an organization such as this will attract people whose temperaments and personal values make them this kind of leader by nature.  Better have a plan that provides some nurturing and leadership development to sustain this incredible approach to leadership in the future.

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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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