Positive Leadership: Leading Through The Generations

Regardless of the hashtag used to mark our generation, most of us need:

• Focus and direction
• Meaningful work, and the freedom to pursue it
• Clear, helpful feedback
• Appreciation
• A leader who cares about us and has our best interest at heart.

Positive Leadership: Leading Through The Generations

Positive Leadership: Baroness Thatcher, a Great British Leader

Speaking about the late Baroness Thatcher yesterday, David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, said: “We've lost a great prime minister, a great leader, a great Briton. She didn't just lead our country, she saved our country, and I believe she'll go down as the greatest British peacetime prime minister.”

Here are a few favourite ‘Thatcherisms’:

“Consensus: “The process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner: ‘I stand for consensus?”

“Watch your thoughts for they become words.

Watch your words for they become actions.

Watch your actions for they become habits.

Watch your habits for they become your character.

And watch your character for it becomes your destiny.

What we think, we become.

My father always said that... and I think I am fine.”

“Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It's not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it's a day you've had everything to do and you've done it.”

“Don't follow the crowd, let the crowd follow you.”

Positive Leadership: Baroness Thatcher, a Great British Leader

Positive Leadership: What Kind of Leader Are You?

Positive Leadership: What Kind of Leader Are You?

Positive Leadership: Leading through Stories

Gavin Esler, one of Britain's leading journalists and interviewers reveals what the stories that leaders tell can teach us about getting to the top - and staying there.

Great leaders have always understood the power of stories. Through the stories they tell, the most successful leaders educate, persuade and bring about change, but we rarely have the background knowledge to explore how they do so

Introducing the questions every leader must answer - and the elements that the best stories must contain - Esler explains how creating a leadership story can promote success at all levels, whether running for the United States presidency, or applying for a place at university. 

Positive Leadership: Leading through Stories

Positive Leadership: Make Others Better

As leaders, our purpose should be to strive to make others better.  

We walk our talk and lead by the example we put forth in our actions, thoughts and words in everything we do.

As leaders, we must strive to ensure to make others better by encouraging others to find their own voice, not holding them back because we fear their capability or wisdom. To make others better means we are holding ourselves to our word, our truth and being honourable in all that we do. Sometimes, we can make others better in spite of what we are doing; even if we are not the best ourselves, we influence others. 

To be a better leader, we must be a leader who believes we are making others better in a positive way.

Positive Leadership: Make Others Better

Positive Leadership: The Wise Leader

Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, authors of the HBR article "The Wise Leader," explain how the best executives strive for the common good.

Positive Leadership: The Wise Leader

Positive Leadership: Behaviours Loyal Employees Trust

Here are 5 behaviours for leaders to adopt when struggling to keep employees happy and loyal:

1) Tell the truth. Not everyone is a star. Pick out those with leadership or other valued talent potential and nurture them. This will come back to the business as these individuals, in turn, nurture other workers.

2) Communicate roles and responsibilities. Provide a path to success not only for those with leadership promise but for all employees. Sometimes this will mean difficult changes, but remember the most important skill of a leader: never surprise an employee with bad news. Have a development plan for all, and a get-well plan for those whose performance lags. Make sure everyone knows the plan.

3) Create a workplace culture that values real people relationships. For many employees, workgroup relationships and relationships between managers and workers drive engagement and loyalty more effectively than wearing the corporate branded shirt.

4) Be fair and open. This does not mean treat everyone equally – it means have transparent processes for managing and leading. Employees are more likely to respond positively to change when the process used to manage change is fair.

5) Model the behaviours you seek. Accept your responsibility as a leader and act with engagement, commitment and responsibility. Do this every day.

Each of us possesses skills, strengths, talents and flaws. Each of us seeks to belong, to be engaged, to relate to those around us. Loyalty is built on relationships, shared understanding and trust. Engagement and commitment require loyalty, shared goals and fair treatment. Don’t take loyalty and engagement for granted – create a remarkable culture where there are possible and rewarding outcomes of the workplace.

We are only human after all – Every one of us. Every leader. Every brand. Every workplace. Every person.

Positive Leadership: Behaviours Loyal Employees Trust

Positive Leadership: Stay in Touch!

Former Medtronic CEO Bill George discusses how a leader can maintain relationships with employees at all levels of a company. He spoke as part of the Stanford Graduate School of Business' View from the Top series.

Positive Leadership: Stay in Touch!

Positive Leadership: Motivating Your Team to do Better

Do you think you can scare people into doing a better job?

With poor economic news in the headlines seemingly each and every day, it may feel like the only option. However, the trouble with using fear to motivate employees is: it just doesn’t work. Burning platforms and “doom-and-gloom” scenarios can catch people’s attention, but on-going use will spark false urgency and frantic activity, not the sort of urgent, enthusiastic behaviour necessary to drive strategic change. There are other ways to motivate your people to go above and beyond.

Listen to this conversation to learn how to stop pushing and start encouraging.

 

Positive Leadership: Motivating Your Team to do Better

Positive Leadership: The Keys to a Successful Leadership Strategy

What style of leadership works and what doesn't work in an organisation?

1) Strict hierarchical decision-making doesn't work. Shared consciousness or ‘smart autonomy’ - is what works.

Everyone — not just those on the top rungs of the organisational ladder — has to be empowered, but they must still look out for the needs of the whole organisation, not themselves.

2) Information ownership doesn't work. That's when people protect what they know without sharing it with others. It's a hindrance to an organisation.

It makes you more powerful but it makes the organisation weaker.

Inclusion and transparency is what works. Allowing information to flow between parts of an organisation, helps formulate ideas and foster trust.

3) Organisational equity doesn't work. It's the idea that everyone within the organisation is trying to make things "fair" for them in relation to their colleagues.

Having teams is what works, because it encourages collaboration and supports that "shared consciousness" idea.

If everybody on a football team scores plenty of goals, but you lose matches, you lost!

4) Command and control doesn't work. Micro-managing and imposing your will over much of an organisation stifles people.

Trust is what works. Without it, it's impossible to have autonomous parts of an organisation.

Positive Leadership: The Keys to a Successful Leadership Strategy

Positive Leadership: The Importance of the Softer Side of Leadership

Never underestimate the softer side of leadership.

By the time you become a senior leader, you have already mastered the technical skills. What may be missing, however, are the nuances and the seemingly simple truths that get lost in the noise around how to run an organisation. These are the softer skills, which may look simple, but are deceptively so.

There is nothing simple about empowering people so that the decisions they make and the actions they take are aligned with the overall values and strategy of the organisation. It is not easy to remember the importance of rewarding your team continuously with praise and acknowledgement of milestones achieved, especially while you’re steering an organisation to an endpoint over the horizon.

Leading is less about analytics and decisions, and much more about aligning, motivating, and empowering others to make those decisions. These truths are part of essential elements of leadership. Although strategic and practical, they are inspiring and motivational, as the entire organisation becomes aligned behind a greater purpose and a grander mission that is bigger than any one individual.

To be a leader is to make others believe; in challenging times to convey that “everything will be okay,” and that together the team will find a way forward. As a leader, you must have confidence in your own ability, but most important in your team. Leadership is humbling, knowing that it is never about you, as the leader. Leadership is all about what others achieve.

No matter how many times a footballer practices a shot, what counts most is his performance with the team. So too it is with leadership. Leaders seek feedback on what can be improved, make the change, and measure the outcome. Leaders review some performance indicators on a daily basis and others weekly. However, the best measure of all is talking to and observing customers and employees. Through the tone, cadence, and content of the feedback you receive, you can glean what no computer screen or spread-sheet can reveal; you can gauge the subtleties of whether the organisation is engaged and aligned to the purpose, vision, and strategy, as well as where the opportunities and challenges can be found.

The softer side of leadership is vital to results because if unheeded, it will become a leader’s blind spot. 

Being a leader, being a CEO, is not just a position; it is a privilege and a responsibility. 

The lessons learned from the leadership journey are numerous. Leaders are not simply messengers of corporate strategy. The leader’s job is to be the message—not only in words, but in demeanour, mannerisms, decisions, and actions.

It is the nuances of leadership that make the difference—the soft side, which just may be the hardest part of all.

Positive Leadership: The Importance of the Softer Side of Leadership

Positive Leadership: Leadership is a Choice

"Leadership is not a talent or a gift. It's a choice. It's not complex, but it's very hard.", General Stanley McChrystal explains to a packed auditorium of 600 at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. 

McChrystal shares his perspective on leadership and influence discussing the importance of understanding culture, leading by example, building trust, and creating a common goal within a team.

It's important, he told the audience, for a leader to share in the critical aspects of a task. "If there's risk, you've got to share it," he said. "If there's pain, you've got to share it."

McChrystal is a four-star general and former commander of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan. He also served as the former leader of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).

Positive Leadership: Leadership is a Choice

Positive Leadership: Conscious Business

John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods Market chain, has loftier goals than getting Americans to eat healthy foods, one of the missions of his grocery empire. He is out to change American business as well, putting it on the path to higher consciousness.

Positive Leadership: Conscious Business

Positive Leadership: The Real Test of a Leader

Rudy Giuliani was the Mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2001. He ran for the Republican Party nomination in the 2008 United States presidential election.

 

Positive Leadership: The Real Test of a Leader

Positive Leadership: What A Lovely Suit You're Wearing, Emperor

Warning: If you're opening this blog in a good mood, and you want to stay in it, you may want to skip this post and scroll right down to the bonus bits!

Of course, were you to block out the negative, you'd be acting in a way that Bob Sutton probably wouldn't find surprising. 

In a recent blog post, the Stanford management professor opines that leaders can be more easily swayed by positive feedback than by reality. 

Sutton synthesises several recent studies to show how flattery can lead to an inflated self-assessment and distract leaders from what's actually happening on the ground.

Positive Leadership: What A Lovely Suit You're Wearing, Emperor

Positive Leadership: A Team of Rival Perspectives

One element that fosters creativity is the ability to see an issue from multiple angles. When leaders build mechanisms that give them these various perspectives, they are more likely to see creative solutions.

One fascinating example is that of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was the surprise winner of a hotly contested primary election that included personal attacks and attempted coup d’états. Once he had secured the nomination, and later the presidency of the United States, Lincoln assembled his cabinet primarily of the very men he quarrelled with for the nomination. This “team of rivals” was able to provide a variety of perspectives and create a tension over the solutions that avoided the traditional, yes-man saturated groupthink sessions that marked so many other presidents’ cabinets.

What is important is for the leader of such diverse rivalries to sustain the right amount of creative friction, taking care to produce the tension needed to refine new ideas and challenge old assumptions while ensuring that the tension doesn’t get overbearing and melt the team. While there was a team of rivals in Lincoln’s cabinet, we suspect it was always certain who that needed leader was.

We tend to think of creatives as artists, musicians and writers. However, Lincoln’s deliberate attempt to leverage tension provided him with a style of creativity he found quite useful in navigating America through an equally tumultuous feud.

Positive Leadership: A Team of Rival Perspectives

Positive Leadership: On Excellence

For 10 years, Tom Peters wrote a syndicated column—"On Excellence"—for the Tribune Media Services. It was carried by over a hundred papers—the flagship carrier was the Chicago Tribune. After Steve Jobs' death, one of his old columns surfaced—on Jobs. It appeared on 8 November 1993, when Steve was still "in the wilderness"—before his subsequently triumphant return to Apple.

Herewith, in full ...

‘On Excellence

Marathoners call it "hitting the wall." You get to a point where you can't go on. But you do. And, miraculously, you come out the other side and finish the race.

Truth is, damn little of merit, in a profession or a hobby, is accomplished without running through a wall or two.

I got to thinking about that while reading Fortune's recent cover story, "America's Toughest Bosses." Some turn "beet red." Others "scream." Some engage in "sadistic" behavior and use tactics that amount to "psychological oppression." While I hardly countenance "Jack Attacks," the tirades by Jack Connors, head of the ad agency Hill Holliday, I also don't believe the best bosses are sweethearts.

The best leaders take their firms and followers to places they've never been before-and, more important, places they never imagined they would reach. The chief's voice may be subdued or, more likely, strident at times. The reason, Fortune acknowledges, is the incredible demands these honchos place, first and foremost, on themselves.

Take Steve Jobs, one of Fortune's seven nasties. I've seen him, in his days at Apple, lose his cool on occasion. Not a particularly pretty sight.

Yet I was thoroughly taken aback by one of Jobs' "excesses," as chronicled by Fortune. A subordinate at Next Computer was showing Jobs shades of green for the company's logo. More precisely, she produced some 37 shades of green before coming upon one that pleased the master. "Oh, come on," the minion recalled thinking, "green is green."

Oh, no, it isn't!

Almost every step Jobs took at Apple (and Next) broke the mold; moreover, it defied industry tradition as set by the all-powerful, undisputed master of the universe (IBM). To say Jobs was fighting an uphill battle is to suggest that Charles Lindbergh's historic flight across the Atlantic was "challenging." Jobs was reviled and ridiculed. Yet he reinvented the computer world, in a way that makes Bill Gates' more recent contributions at Microsoft seem meager by comparison.

How did Jobs do it? By worrying about which shade of green was "right." He triumphed with the Apple II. Then the Macintosh. It was precisely his stratospheric standards ("insanely great" was a common Jobsism in days past) that allowed him and his enormously spirited teams to push past the existing frontier time and time again.

No, sir. Green is not green. Not if you're reinventing the planet. Which is not to applaud his tirades. But it is to suggest that for every disaffected Apple or Next employee burned by Jobs, there are probably 10 who by age 28 achieved Neil Armstrong-like lifetime highs at his side. Perhaps the bitterness of some stems from the subliminal realization they'll never soar so high again. It's a nightmare for a 28-year-old software designer, just as it is for 30-year-old Michael Jordan.

My two best bosses were my two toughest bosses. Neither was a screamer, although one came reasonably close. Both practiced psychological terrorism-though neither knew he was doing so. Both set mercilessly high standards for themselves. And neither believed in barriers to achievement, including acts of God (which were seen simply as opportunities to demonstrate one's mettle as never before). Both sent me home screaming. I recall literally a year of just about non-stop headaches in one case.

It doesn't jibe with the perfectly balanced life. But I'll tell you, I learned more, faster, from these two than ever before or since.

The perfect boss is, of course, aware of individual differences and knows exactly how far to push each individual to "attain maximum performance," or some such ideal.

Except I very much doubt bosses like that exist. Those with shockingly high standards undoubtedly cause casualties among their followers. Yet without these outrageous pioneers, we wouldn't get anywhere.

Am I callous? Yes and no. To countenance, under any circumstances, the infliction of pain is callous. But to fail to understand that no epic bridge or dam has ever been built, or fighter aircraft tested, without casualties is to fail to comprehend the real world of high-performance anything.

Fortune quotes experts who say these executive thugs suffer from low self-awareness. I'm sure that's true, and perhaps the toughies would benefit from counseling by a trusted peer (unlikely) or elder (slightly more likely) who would clue them in on the havoc they've left in their wake.

But, let's face it. If these chiefs were thoroughly self-aware they would probably not realize how insane (literally) their towering quests are. And the world would be a poorer place for it.’

Positive Leadership: On Excellence

Positive Leadership: Fix the Problem and Not Just the Symptoms

This interview with Joseph Jimenez, chief executive of Novartis, the pharmaceutical company, was conducted by the New York Times:

‘Q. What are the most important leadership lessons you’ve learned?

A. One occurred when I was a division president of another company. I was sent in to turn the division around after four years of underperformance.  It was a declining business.  And when I got there, I completely misdiagnosed the problem.  I said: “Look.  We’re missing our forecast every month.  What’s wrong?”  I brought in a consulting firm, and we looked at what was wrong.  And the answer was that we had a bad sales and operations planning process, where salespeople, marketing people and operations people were supposed to come together and plan out the next 18 months and then forecast off of that.  So I said: “O.K.  We’re going to fix this.  We’re going to have the consulting team come in and help us make that a better, more robust process, with more analytics.”

And it turned out it wasn’t at all about analytics.  Because once we did that, and we put that new process in place, we still continued to miss forecasts.  So I thought, “Something’s really wrong here.”  I brought in a behavioural psychologist, and I said: “Look, either I’m misdiagnosing the problem or something’s fundamentally wrong in this organisation.  Come and help me figure it out.”  She came in with her team and about four weeks later came back and said: “This isn’t about skills or about process.  You have a fundamental behavioural issue in the organisation.  People aren’t telling the truth. So at all levels of the organisation, they’ll come together, and they’ll say, ‘Here’s our forecast for the month.’  And they won’t believe it.  They know they’re not going to hit it when they’re saying it.” The thing she taught me — and this sounds obvious — is that behaviour is a function of consequence.  We had to change the behaviour in the organisation so that people felt safe to bring bad news. And I looked in the mirror, and I realised I was part of the problem.  I didn’t want to hear the bad news, either. So I had to change how I behaved, and start to thank people for bringing me bad news.

Q. That doesn’t mean letting them off the hook, though.

A. Right. It’s more a chance to say: “Hey, thank you for bringing me that news.  Because you know what?  There are nine months left in the year.  Now we have time to do something about it.  Let’s roll up our sleeves, and let’s figure out how we’re going to make it.”  It was a total shift from where we had been previously.  So after that experience, I always ask all of my people, and I always think to myself: “Are we really fixing the root cause of this problem, if there’s any problem?  Or are we fixing the symptoms?”

For more, see: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/business/joseph-jimenez-of-novartis-on-finding-the-core-of-a-problem.html?_r=1

Positive Leadership: Fix the Problem and Not Just the Symptoms

Positive Leadership: Be a Yardstick of Quality

 

Positive Leadership: Be a Yardstick of Quality

Positive Leadership: Sharing Accountability

Uncertainty necessitates the need for finding more wisdom within our organisations. This can only be accomplished by creating a leadership mindset throughout the entire organisation. It is shared accountability. Any leader that thinks that they can do it alone is indulging their own ego.

Do not assume that no one else on the premises can match our own ambition, competence, and vision. We have to accept the fact that there are many points of wisdom within our organisations and a wise leader will engage them. Too many leaders are not accustomed to accepting input from junior members no matter how valuable it is. This creates a lack of trust and openness. The currency of leadership is relationships and a wise leader would do well to encourage input from as many sources as possible and especially not from the usual suspects.

The concept of distributed leadership will keep you in touch with the environment. If you want to prepare people for this environment, you have to get leadership further down the organisation. We generally tend to drive managing down the organisation, but not leadership. However, in order to maximise the opportunity for success, we have to prepare for acts of leadership further down the organisation – even if it feels like an unnatural act to people sitting at the top.

Leadership needs to be the expected norm at all levels. 

Positive Leadership: Sharing Accountability