The Snowstorm Study: A Classic Study of Employee Commitment

With the UK gripped in the midst of another winter freeze, consider this fascinating piece of research!

Behavioural scientists do many studies, including controlled experiments, which entail massive advanced planning. But some of the most interesting studies happen when something strange or unplanned unfolds, and the researcher capitalises on serendipity. Consider a little study done in the late 1970’s by industrial psychologist Frank J. Smith, who had collected employee attitude data from about 3000 employees at Sears’ headquarters in Chicago. Smith found that employee attitudes towards their jobs and their supervisors weren’t especially useful predictors of which employees were absent from work UNTIL the day a crippling snowstorm hit. Employees had a good excuse to stay home, so they had considerable discretion over whether to make the tough trip in or not. That day, employees who were more satisfied with their supervision and other parts of their jobs were far more likely to make the trip in than those who were dissatisfied.  In particular, whether or not they were satisfied with their supervision was among the strongest predictors of attendance.

Since then, many other researchers have shown that when people feel mistreated and dissatisfied with their jobs, they are unwilling to expend “discretionary effort.”  It makes sense.  When you are stuck working for, or with, people you don’t admire, you don’t go out of your way to help. But when you  admire your bosses and peers, you will go to extreme lengths to help –- and it is clear that most people feel and act the same way.

For more, see :http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/work-matters/201011/the-snowstorm-study-classic-study-employee-commitment

The Snowstorm Study: A Classic Study of Employee Commitment

Chinese, Indian Workers Give Bosses Top Marks

Workers in Japan gave their bosses low marks while managers in China and India won kudos in a recent survey. Only 35% of employees in Japan rated their company's senior management highly on a set of five attributes—such as their commitment to high-quality products and their people management skills. Globally, 55% of employees rated their senior managers highly, and in the U.S., 56% of employees did.

The survey was conducted earlier this year by the Kenexa Research Institute, and included 29,000 respondents from companies with at least 100 workers.

Separately, Kenexa's research has found that employees at higher-performing companies tend to rate their leaders more highly than employees at lower-performing companies do. In the U.S., Americans gave the highest scores to senior managers' commitment to high quality products and services, and the lowest marks to the confidence they inspired. Among industries, only 46% of government workers believed that their senior managers were effective, according to the report. In contrast, 64% of workers in high-tech manufacturing rated them highly.

For more, see: https://www.kenexa.com/KenexaResearchInstitute

Chinese, Indian Workers Give Bosses Top Marks

Making Choices

Life provides all of us with a series of choices. The choices we make determine how successful we are.  

When you acknowledge that you and only you are responsible and accountable for the choices you make, and when you refuse to blame others for the choices you have made, you have in your hands the blueprint for success. When you allow others to choose your path so that you can then blame someone else when things don’t go your way, you are fooling no one and cheating no one but yourself.  When you accept the fact that you are in your present condition, good or bad, because of the choices you have made, you will then find yourself capable of changing your situation by making better choices.  No one but you determines your success in life. Making the right choices paves your way.

Think about all of the sports fans, who love watching successful coaches lead their teams, cheering them on when they win, exhorting them when the game is close, or even booing them when they fail, not living up to expectations. How many of these fans, fans who expect nothing less than excellence from their favourite teams, have the same high expectations for their occupational teams, ie, their work or business teams? 

High achievement requires disciplined thinking, thus the goal setting, personal responsibility and work ethic.  But, why is it that many of these same fans, fans that pay good money to see excellence during the sporting event, will, in their own professional lives, live with mediocrity, seeming to ignore the success standards and principles that they demand of their favourite sports teams?  Have you ever thought about this paradox?   

Why do fans, who love excellence in competitive sports, enough to pay for the right to experience it real time, not apply the same excellence in their own competitive professions, even though others are paying for the right to experience it real time.  Don’t the customers or employers have the same right to witness excellence in the workplace that fans at the sporting event have?  Imagine the quality of products and services across the world, if everyone took their professional excellence, as seriously, as they did their professional sports.

Making Choices

Keep Your Team Smiling

We once had a colleague ask how we trained our employees to smile. We told him we didn’t. We hired the people who smiled during the interview, and then told them to just keep smiling when they worked.

Now here’s the story about what good managers can do to keep employees smiling.

Welcome employees — everyday!

Try to imagine being a new employee (again) for a day and realise what that’s like. Joining a new group of people or a new company is usually confusing and full of anxiety. Most of us don’t like change and this represents one of life’s bigger changes.

• Give them a warm initial welcome.
• Provide lots of information and printed materials. Make sure the answers to all their questions are easy to find and understand. Create FAQs about everything.
• Say “good bye” and “thank you” when you’re done, always.
• Let them take stuff with them, to read and absorb it when they can, and have it when and how and where they need it.

Follow the Golden Rule

Treating others the way you want to be treated is just plain good sense. It’s what we all learned growing up and there’s no reason not to practice this at work, everyday, in every way:

• Set high standards for yourself and make sure you apply those standards to them.
• You like getting as much information, in a friendly and relaxed environment, as you can get — so will they.
• You want to be treated with respect and sensitivity — so will they.
• You want to know how you’re doing and what’s really going on — so will they.
• You want to feel comfortable — so will they.
• You’ll want answers to your questions — so will they.

Explain “why”

Adults like to understand the big picture, to see how things fit together with everything else, to feel like they matter, to know that there’s a plan, to have a say in what’s going on. You can do all of that if you are always prepared to explain “why” you’re doing or asking something.

• Be attentive, communicate well, articulate your thoughts understandably, listen to questions about what you just said, resolve conflicts and confusion, and respond appropriately — all the things effective managers are supposed to do that employees appreciate.
• And if they appreciate you, they’ll follow you.
• Remember: “People don’t care what you ask them to do as long as they know you care”.

Catch people doing things right

If you’ve hired the right people, told them in simple terms what you need them to do, trained them well and explained “why” – then get out of the way and let them do what they do.

• If they meet or exceed your expectations, let them know! How often have you been in the situation where you’re doing what’s expected and nobody says anything? It’s disheartening.
• Decide what you can and should you do to recognise those efforts (after all, isn’t that what you asked them to do?
• Never ignore the behaviours you want repeated — start telling the people who meet or exceed your expectations how good they are and how much you appreciate their efforts.

Ask questions and really listen to the answers

The best people to ask about customer needs and preferences are your employees. They’re also the best ones to ask how you and your company can be better. They’re out there on the front line, so they should know.

• Don’t say you don’t trust them. You hired them, so now you need to listen to them and use their experience to make things as good as they need to be.
• Give them the tools they need to do what’s expected — everybody’s okay with doing more with less; most won’t put up with doing it with nothing.

Be fair

• Forget consistent — unless two separate circumstances are identical, consistency is far less important than fairness.
• “Play the face.” It means you look someone in the eye and use your experience, common sense and judgement to do what’s right. In the end, that’s all anyone asks for and can expect. Done right, this promotes trust and respect.

Sounds like a lot, but it’s not! In reality it’s just about following the Golden Rule,  and if people feel like you are — every day and in every way — they’ll smile. 

Keep Your Team Smiling

Winning Breeds Winning

An appreciation of legendary basketball coach John Wooden who died earlier this year.

Winning Breeds Winning

Positive Leadership and Elite Sport

Positive Leadership Limited helps leaders throughout an organisation excel under pressure. Our advice assists clients solve critical strategic issues, accelerate growth and enhance financial performance. We equip leaders at all levels with the values, confidence and practical skills necessary to succeed and win consistently in a highly competitive environment.  

The Values of Positive Leadership™ are the keys to unlocking the strategy for delivering high performance and optimum results under pressure. We draw extensively on thought leadership from international business and elite sport in our consulting work. 

For more information on how our advice might help you and your team excel under pressure, please contact: graham.watson@positiveleadership.co.uk

Positive Leadership and Elite Sport

Creating Meaningful Corporate Values

Andrew Cosslett has been Chief Executive of IHG since February 2005. IHG is the World’s largest hotel company operating over 4,100 hotels under brands such as Holiday Inn, Crowne Plaza and InterContinental. 

Here he talks about how to turn your front-line into raving fans of your corporate values and why bringing passion into the business is so important for all winning organisations. Don't just talk about your values, live them!

Creating Meaningful Corporate Values

Servant Leadership In the Workplace

An exceptional recent study of 815 employees and 123 supervisors published in the Journal of Applied Psychology makes a very strong argument for the value of servant leadership at work. 

The authors found that the practice of servant leadership had important implications for both individuals and the groups they worked in. The study found that servant leadership enhanced both the self-efficacy and the commitment to the supervisor of the individual employee. At the group level, servant leadership lead to employees’ perception that they were treated fairly (justice climate) and the shared perception customer service was expected, supported, and rewarded (positive service climate). These individual and group effects combined to produce a significant impact on the organisational citizenship behaviour of individual employees.

Employees that are good organisational citizens go above and beyond their formal job descriptions. If everyone in an organisation only did what was required of them, the organisation would be mediocre at best. Organisational excellence requires a critical mass of employees doing more than what is officially recognised and rewarded. The extant research has demonstrated organisational citizenship behaviour is strongly associated with employee task performance, organisational productivity, and customer satisfaction.

Servant Leadership In the Workplace

Asking the Right Questions

Today, we would like to suggest a way to ask questions that will help you change your focus from problems to solutions.

If you want to make your communications as effective as possible, and if you're interested in finding solutions to problems rather than becoming bogged down in them, we have a suggestion that will help. If you ask the right questions, you can direct your communications to get answers that are genuinely helpful.

For example, if you ask someone, “What's wrong?” you will get an answer - often a long one - which will focus on the problem. But if you ask, “What do you want?” or “How would you like to change things,” you have redirected the conversation from the problem to the solution.

In every situation, no matter how dark or dismal, there is a desirable outcome. You can convince people, including yourself, to focus on that outcome, by avoiding questions that ask “why” and choosing “how” or “what” questions instead.

So, instead of asking your boss why you didn’t get a raise, ask him, or her, what you need to do in order to justify a salary increase. And, instead of demanding from your employees why they didn’t make the sale, ask them what they can do differently so they will be certain to make the next one.

Asking the Right Questions

How Companies Can Develop Critical Thinkers and Creative Leaders

This article was written by Col. Bernard Banks, a faculty member in the Department of Behavioural Sciences & Leadership at West Point and a Colonel in the United States Army.

'Today's leaders are continually cajoled to act as "outside-the-box" thinkers. Such pronouncements give the impression the only sound solutions are ones never previously conceived. However, what industry and the military really strive to produce are leaders possessing strong critical and creative thinking skills. Both implicitly eschew the notion that a box even exists. What can industry learn from the military about how to advance the development of such leaders? One tangible example is how to construct and execute experiential training while continuing to meet the needs of customers and stakeholders.

Today's organisations operate in what the U.S. Army War College defines as a VUCA environment. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity are constant realities in the 21st century. The military seeks to prepare for the challenges it will inevitably face by crafting realistic training scenarios and routinely integrating such activities into its ongoing operations. The goal is not to teach them what to think, but to enhance their ability to think critically and creatively about the myriad of contingencies posed by a fluid environment — in essence to teach them how to think.

In industry, 90% of time is typically devoted to executing business actions, and less than 10% is allocated for increasing organisational and individual capabilities through training. The military, on the other hand, spends as much time training as it does executing — even in the midst of high stress/high risk operations. A unit in Afghanistan or Iraq will not suspend its experiential training program while involved in combat operations, because its ability to cogently and creatively address future challenges is enhanced by an enduring commitment to improving people's competence and adaptability through experiential exercises, as well as actual experiences. But the real lesson for industry leaders is not simply that training is important. What's really valuable is how the military crafts its training opportunities.

The Army defines leadership as both accomplishing the mission and improving the organisation. Permanently improving the organisation requires the development of its human capital. The military believes you substantively improve people by improving their ability to adroitly address challenges in their environment. Therefore, we do not seek to confine people's thinking by restricting the solutions available to them, unless the proposed action violates any of these criteria: is it immoral, unsafe, unethical, or illegal?

In order to have people wrestle with what it takes to conceive of action plans where the aforementioned criteria constitute their only boundaries, the military structures its experiential training activities with wide parameters. Events are constructed to reflect ambiguity in the operating environment (while also targeting specific organisation needs). Leaders are responsible for setting the conditions in every training event and resourcing them appropriately, as well as for reminding participants throughout the exercises that there are a myriad of potentially elegant solutions to each ill-defined challenge.

Two other things are important to take away from the military practice of engaging in routine experiential training. First, feedback is crucial. The military practice of conducting intermediate and final after-action reviews (AARs) — in which all participants examine the planning, preparation, execution, and follow-up of any significant organizational initiative — fosters a learning culture. Second, coaching is required to translate feedback into behavioural changes. Research has demonstrated that feedback without coaching  rarely results in behavioural changes. So, all leaders must develop their capacity to coach others. Reflection and dialog lie at the heart of development. Experiential training creates the impetus for both to occur.

If you wait for the right time to train it'll rarely occur. Today is the opportunity to prepare for tomorrow, regardless of how much else is going on.'

For more, see: http://blogs.hbr.org/frontline-leadership/2010/10/how-companies-can-develop-crit.html

How Companies Can Develop Critical Thinkers and Creative Leaders

Persistence Wins!

Persistence. 

You must have more than your fair share to succeed. There's plenty of advice out there about knowing when to give up!

Tom Peters' advice? Hold out longer than anyone thinks is wise.

Persistence Wins!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving to all followers of the Positive Leadership Blog and especially to all our friends in the USA. 

Please remember at this special time that everyone we interact with is a chance to create a remarkable experience.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Aligning Behaviour Around Values

Leaders intent on optimising performance and results need to recognise the importance of aligning everyone around a single set of core leadership values; defined as the behaviours and activities essential to the organisation's success. 

Here are four steps to align behaviours with core leadership values:

1) Start by listing your core leadership values and related performance measures.

2) Next brainstorm the associated behaviours that support these core leadership values.

3) Share this list with other people in the organszation and solicit their feedback.

4) Incorporate the core leadership behaviours into your performance appraisals and assessments.

This process can be done regularly and will result in an organisation whose behaviours are well aligned around its core leadership values.

For more on the Values of Positive Leadership™ and how our approach of building strategy around these values can help maximise profitability, please contact: graham.watson@positiveleadership.co.uk

Aligning Behaviour Around Values

What is an Authentic Organisation?

An organisation is authentic when its actions, its character, and its sense of purpose are aligned with and support each other. 

An organisation can be authentic only when: 

• The organisation knows ‘who it is” and what characteristics make it distinctive. 
• People in the organisation understand why these distinctive features are meaningful.
• The organisation knows what it is striving to create in this world. It has a sense of purpose that goes beyond the products and services it offers.
• The organisation knows how its distinctiveness fuels and adds unique insight to the pursuit of organisation’s purpose.
• The organisation has a few signature actions, behaviours and products that bring to life the organisation’s meaning, and move it towards its purpose.
• Both the purpose and the distinctive, meaningful characteristics of the organisation resonate with stakeholders and draw members, customers, and constituencies to the organisation.
• The organisation actively supports its members, customers, and constituencies in their own authenticity as they work with the organisation to achieve its purpose.

What is an Authentic Organisation?

Positive Leadership

A Positive Leadership strategy will help you optimise the profitability of your business.

For more information on how we can help your business succeed under pressure, please contact: gavin.hastings@positiveleadership.co.uk

Positive Leadership

It Is About You

When we think about the best bosses, we think of pride-builders. Pride-builders are experts at engaging the emotional commitment of employees. They do this with a laser-like focus on making their people feel good about the work they have to do — whatever it may be — and take pride in giving their personal best every day.

In the excerpt below, Robert Sutton, the author of  Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the Worst reminds us that there are important emotional and informal elements to leading people, and that some leadership qualities are more important than others in this regard. One of the more telling qualities, he says, is an acute sense of self-awareness. This is certainly true for pride-builders. If they didn’t understand how others perceived and responded to them, they could not hope to frame their actions in ways that motivate and energise their followers emotionally as well as rationally.

Excerpted from Chapter 9 of Good Boss, Bad Boss:

‘How to Be the Best…and Learn from the Worst

Last year, I led a workshop at Stanford on being a good boss during tough times. As we walked to lunch afterwards, a manager from the session told me about his boss. A few weeks earlier, a secretary in his office walked up to this vice-president and asked, “When are the layoffs coming?” The boss was stunned. He had no clue how she discovered big cuts were in the offing: the decision had just been made and extreme care had been taken to keep it under wraps. When the bewildered VP asked how she knew, the secretary answered that when bad news was coming, he couldn’t bring himself to look his people in the eye. This VP had what poker players call a “tell,” a habit or quirk that revealed when he was hiding something (bad news in this case). The codeword among his charges was, “The boss is wearing interesting shoes today.”

The “interesting shoes” story reflects a pervasive theme…that…distinguishes the best from the worst bosses: If you are a boss, your success depends on staying in tune with how others think, feel, and react to you. Bosses who persistently promote performance and humanity devote considerable energy to reading and responding to followers’ feelings and actions, and those of other key players like superiors, peers, and customers. Of course, there is no single magical or simple thing that defines a great boss…anyone who promises you an easy or instant pathway to success is ignorant or dishonest, or both. The moves that great bosses make are too complex, varied, messy, and unpredictable to be captured by any single theme, slogan, or set of steps.

Yet some skills and aspirations are more important than others. Developing and sustaining self-awareness ought to be at the top of the list for every boss. David Dunning of Cornell University shows that a hallmark of poor performers is they lack self-awareness, consistently overestimating their skills in just about any task that requires intellectual and social skills, such as debating, having a sense of humour, or interviewing others. In contrast, Dunning finds that self-awareness is a hallmark of the best performers — they are especially cognizant of their strengths and weaknesses, and fret about overcoming pitfalls that can undermine their performance. 

When it comes to bosses, one implication is the best might laugh at the VP in the “interesting shoes” story. But they also realise that they could easily be that guy — that every boss is prone to bouts of cluelessness and to forgetting how closely followers track every little thing they do. The best bosses reduce the risk of self-delusion by seeking and responding to hints and hard data about how others read their moods and moves. They urge followers to challenge them with enlightening — and disconcerting — questions, like when the VP’s secretary asked, “When are the layoffs coming?” They want their followers (and bosses, peers, and customers, too) to keep feeding them such information, no matter how unpleasant and unflattering, because they are obsessed with how their words and deeds are interpreted by others.

The upshot is, to be a great boss, you’ve got to think and act as if “it is all about you.” Your success depends on being fixated on yourself. On the surface, this conclusion clashes with advice from many gurus and experts. Former GE CEO Jack Welch and Stanford’s Robert Joss (dean of the Graduate School of Business for a decade), for example, implore managers, “It’s not about you.” I agree with the spirit of this advice, as the aim is to discourage bosses from falling prey to their most selfish and destructive instincts. Yet I question the words because most bosses, like most human beings, are remarkably self-obsessed — and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Yes, the worst are selfish, are oblivious to their charges, and cling to dangerous delusions about their magnificent leadership skills. The best are equally self-obsessed, but have different motivations. Their obsession isn’t for egotistical or for selfish reasons. On the contrary, they focus on controlling their moods and moves, accurately interpreting their impact on others, and making adjustments on the fly because they want their people to produce work that others will admire — and to feel respect and dignity along the way.’

It Is About You

Use Failure to Grow Your Business

How can companies plan and pursue an aggressive growth agenda with confidence? By framing their strategic growth opportunities, testing assumptions, and creating a culture that acts on evidence and learning. (An interview with Rita McGrath, Professor, Columbia Business School.)

Use Failure to Grow Your Business

Dominating Leaders Make Worse Decisions

Powerful leaders make worse decisions by dominating their colleagues into silence, a new study from the London School of Economics (LSE) has found (http://gradworks.umi.com/33/53/3353459.html).

According to the LSE study, entitled The Downside of Looking Like a Leader, strong leaders may also be worse managers because they give off such an impression of power that their colleagues’ opinions are stifled.

The study suggests that while it is important for leaders to exude authority and competence, the evidence suggests that appearing too powerful will inhibit their team members from expressing an opinion. This harms the ability to make good decisions by excluding arguments and evidence from the decision-making process.

The study’s authors point out that to dominate the decision-making process may be damaging in a business world loaded with specialist and technical information, where team members often know more about a specific subject than their leader and where participative decision-making is accepted as more effective.

Dominating Leaders Make Worse Decisions

Doing What We Already Know

In the final round of the 2006 World Match Play Event, professional golfer Stephen Ames loses to Tiger Woods “nine and eight” (almost as badly as it’s possible to lose in match play). One month later, he surges six strokes ahead of his closest competitor (and fifteen strokes ahead of Tiger Woods), to win the Tournament Players Championship and take home the biggest check in golf history at the time ($1,440,000). How did he make it happen?

One answer may be the fact that the biggest obstacle in performance isn’t not knowing what to do; it’s not doing what we already know. 

So what keeps us from doing what we know? Typically, it’s interference—or more often, interFEARence—created by those external and internal factors that slow us down, immobilise us, and keep us from performing at our best. By shifting what you pay attention to and how you pay attention, the resulting performance improvement can be dramatic.

Doing What We Already Know

Positive Leadership Limited - The Power of Sound Advice™

For more information, please contact: graham.watson@positiveleadership.co.uk

Positive Leadership Limited - The Power of Sound Advice™

Building Power and Leadership

When Ann Moore was on her way to becoming CEO of Time Inc., before women were found in top management ranks, she won loyalty by, among other things, spreading a perquisite of her magazine publisher job to peers and subordinates: preferred seats at the best sporting events in New York. Across the Atlantic, Maurice Levy was appointed CEO of Publicis while still a junior employee, in part because of his fervent commitment when the headquarters in Paris caught on fire, and he ran into the offices to rescue client files.

High achievers don't turn into leaders, even if they seem to have the right skills, without the power that comes from going beyond the letter of the job and doing the 'Extras':

1. Colleagueship. Being a good colleague means helping the entire group achieve results even when you're not in charge — for example, by filling in for an absent colleague, turning up at a special event that's not required, or helping with ideas and information for someone else's project. Colleagueship is considered a sign of whether someone can take on bigger leadership responsibilities in a flat, decentralised organisation.

2. Opening doors. Power to the connectors! Those who rise to leadership keep their virtual Rolodex rolling. They know enough about others to spot something of interest to them and pass it on, opening doors or making key introductions. In the new networked companies, connectors are the go-to people, the must-haves at meetings. The effects are viral. The more they connect, the more connections come to them.

3. Extra resources. Being a giver is powerful, especially when the gift is unexpected. Sprinkling small amounts of money or opportunities around the organisation can build enormous goodwill, for example; funding dinners for a hard-working project team or providing seed money for expenses for promising innovations. Using personal resources can matter even more, such as donations to colleagues favourite charities.

4. Framing issues. Being the first to name an issue shows leadership. One big Extra in any endeavour is to identify new opportunities or unsolved problems, and then convene conversations around them. With self-organising now a major operating mode, the people who set the agenda also set themselves up as potential leaders. It's not necessary to ask anyone's permission to lead; the self-organisers just do it.

5. Strong commitment. Some people falsely equate commitment with hours worked. But commitment is about quality, not quantity. This Extra involves the verve or passion which potential leaders convey about the mission and the singular focus they exhibit when doing each piece of work. Other people want to be led by committed leaders, not those whose eyes are always on another project or who make it clear that other parts of their lives matter more to them.

6. External diplomacy. Civic boards or charitable causes can groom leaders, and even more so if one's own organisation has an interest in the cause. Joining professional associations or industry networks and carrying information back and forth to and from the home team can also build internal power. Being a good ambassador externally reverberates internally.

Extras serve as signs of whether a person can be entrusted with major decisions or control over assets that requires doing what needs to be done regardless of formal requirements. They show that the leader will take care of others and the organisation.

At the same time, Extras carry a tinge of unfairness. Extras can be tapped more readily from jobs with discretionary budgets, or that face outward, toward clients and customers. In contrast, people holding more routine, internally-facing jobs have fewer automatic chances to show leadership. That group often includes women, who are disproportionately concentrated in staff jobs such as the Ps of personnel, public relations, and purchasing. Moreover, women who might be time-constrained by family obligations don't always have the time for Extras.

But not every Extra is out of the reach of determined potential leaders. Commitment and colleagueship are largely under individuals' control, and they build a better work community for everyone.

If the why and how of Extras can be discussed more openly, perhaps they can become more universally attainable. So consider this list both a How-To guide and a manifesto for change.

Building Power and Leadership

Enduring Truths About Leadership

Here are ten enduring truths about leadership, backed by research carried out over the years:

You make a difference: Before you can lead, you have to believe you can make a positive impact on others. You have to believe in yourself.

Credibility is the foundation of leadership: As well as believing in yourself, you have to behave in a way that will spur belief in you. If people don’t believe in you, they won’t willingly follow you.

Values drive commitment: People want to know what you believe in and you need to know what others treasure if you are going to create the commitment needed to bring everyone together into a powerful force.

Focusing on the future sets leaders apart: Leaders need the capacity to imagine and articulate exciting future possibilities. They need a long-term perspective.

You can’t do it alone: Leadership is a team sport.

Trust is paramount: If you rely on others, you will need their trust. That will only come if you trust them first.

Challenge is the crucible for greatness: Exemplary leaders don’t maintain the status quo, they change it. Change invariably involves challenge, and challenge tests you. It introduces you to yourself. It brings you face-to-face with your level of commitment, your grittiness, and your values.

You either lead by example or you don’t lead at all: Leaders must keep their promises, and be role models for the values and actions they espouse.

The best leaders are the best learners: Learning is the master skill of leadership.

Leadership is an affair of the heart: Leaders respect their colleagues and their constituents. They make others feel important, and graciously show appreciation. And they love their work, or they wouldn’t be successful at it. 

Enduring Truths About Leadership

HP's New Leadership: A Vision for the Future?

New Hewlett-Packard CEO Leo Apotheker and non-executive board chairman Ray Lane took over the reins at the technology giant on 1st November and their to-do list was daunting. Apotheker, the former CEO of business software company SAP, needs to convince doubters he is the right leader for HP, do battle with rivals such as IBM, Oracle and Apple, and set the company's long-term strategy. In addition, Apotheker must maintain the efficiency the company enjoyed under former CEO Mark Hurd, while gaining the buy-in from employees that his embattled predecessor reportedly lacked.

HP's New Leadership: A Vision for the Future?

Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life

An interview with Stewart Friedman, Professor, University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and author of Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life. 

Traditional thinking pits work and the rest of our lives against each other. But taking smart steps to integrate work, home, community, and self will make you a more productive leader and a more fulfilled person.

Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life