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."

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A Look Toward the Future

It takes learning ability and personal flexibility to evolve and change organizations.  New forms of governance and leadership will have to be learned.  As the rate of change itself increases, learning ability will consist of perpetual learning and change will be the only constant.

Drucker suggests that the leader of the future will look like this --

• extraordinary levels of perception and insight into the realities of the world and into themselves
• extraordinary levels of motivation to enable them to go through the inevitable pain of learning and change, especially in a world with looser boundaries, in which loyalties become more difficult to define
• the emotional strength to manage their own and others' anxiety as learning and change become more and more a way of life
• new sills in analyzing cultural assumptions, identifying functional and dysfunctional assumptions, and evolving processes that enlarge the culture by building on its strengths and functional elements
• willingness and ability to share power and control according to people's knowledge and skills, that is, to permit and encourage leadership to flourish throughout the organization

Perhaps the most salient aspect of future leadership will be that these characteristics will not be present in a few people all the time but will be present in many people some of the time, as circumstances change and as different people develop the insight to move into leadership roles.

Appointed leaders will not play the key leadership roles but will be perpetual diagnosticians who will be able to empower different people at different times and to let emergent leadership flourish.

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Internal Networkers

What is most important is that they are able to move around the organization freely, with high accessibility to many parts of the organization.

"The most effective community organizer is the person who is invisible." - Saul Alinsky in Reveille for Radicals (1969)

Internal networkers serve as project managers, as cofacilitatiors, or as "learning historians," people trained to track a major change process and to help those who are involved to better reflect on what they are learning.  As knowledge is built, internal networkers continue to serve as organizational "seed carriers," connecting people of like mind in diverse settings to each other's learning efforts.

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.

Three Views on Leadership

Most of us enjoy the thought and the comfort that comes when we are able to hold someone else, namely, top management, responsible for the lack of effective leadership.

There is an emotional element to the view of leadership as well and it involves the difference between compliance and commitment.  When genuine commitment is needed, hierarchical authority becomes problematic.

While people often want the support of top management, they also don't want it telling them what to do.

Drucker notes that there are three generic roles played by leaders at all levels - designer, teacher, and steward.

If we look at the leaders who have significant business responsibility and "bottom-line" focus - they can create organizational subcultures that may differ significantly from the mainstream organizational culture.  Only then will they be able to begin to design learning processes that might spread such skills throughout their organization and eventually become embedded in how work is done.  This answers the question - "We feel we need new tools for working with our key corporate customers as learning partners."

Once these learning processes become established, then you become teachers.

This is where there are limitations that may not lend itself as a natural counterpart to a leaders strength.  Because their focus is primarily on their business unit, they may not think much about the process of learning (teaching) within the larger organization and typically they have little time to devote to this aspect.  They may also be unaware of and relatively inept at dealing with anti-learning forces in the larger organization.  They can become impatient when the larger organization does not change to match their new ideas of what works and may start to feel misunderstood and unappreciated.  They can easily develop an "us against the world" siege mentality, which will then make them especially ineffective in communicating their ideas to the "unwashed."

These innovative leaders are often more at risk than they realize.  They typically share a mental model that says, "My boss will leave me alone as long as I produce results, regardless of the methods I use."  Improved results are often threatening to others, and the more dramatic the improvement, the greater the threat.  Complex organizations have complex forces that maintain the status quo and inhibit the spread of new ideas.  Often, even the most effective leaders fail to understand these forces or know how to work with them.

Still, there will be no significant progress made without this type of leadership - stewarding passion is more important from you and will produce more results than any sincerely committed CEO.