Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Positive Leadership: The Real Test of a Leader
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Positive Leadership: The Elevator Pitch
Here is a simple and quick (less than 60 second) ‘elevator pitch’ template
that will work for most products and services, if it is delivered with passion!
“We sell [product/service deliverable] to [market niche] who
want [unmet market need]. Unlike [competition], we [differentiation].”
All you have to do is fill in the brackets and you have the
essence of an elevator pitch!
For more, see: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com/2012/01/great-startups-can-hook-investor-in-60.html
Monday, February 13, 2012
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Positive Leadership: Expectations
The best golfers in the world experience the same things you
do. It is important that they stick to the process and plan that they put
together for success. When expectations get ahead of their own present
preparation, it opens the door for frustration and anger. That becomes the
expectations spiral that results in struggling and poor performance.
To get out of the expectations spiral, focus on today and
what you can control. Commit to your own process. Replace expectations with
demands – demands focus on your investment and actions. Expectations involve
results, so by committing to demands, you are investing in your process.
Enjoy the read!
Friday, February 10, 2012
Positive Leadership: Routine is a Key to Winning
Iain Percy
Team GB Olympic Gold Medal Sailor
Thursday, February 09, 2012
Positive Leadership: Resilience
Because we always make mistakes and always will, one of the
most important qualities for business success is resilience—the ability to
bounce back from failure, to turn around a bad situation, to profit from your
mistakes.
Point One: Those who persevere win. Be resilient and welcome
failure. That’s how you become a better businessperson.
Point Two: You learn by refusing to make excuses and looking
inside yourself for the reason things have gone wrong.
Point Three: Focus and discipline are more important than
identifying opportunities, but they have to be balanced with flexibility.
Point Four: The solutions are seldom right in front of you.
You need to learn how to spot them out of the corner of your eye.
Wednesday, February 08, 2012
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.
Tuesday, February 07, 2012
Positive Leadership: A Checklist for Leadership Action
Monday, February 06, 2012
Positive Leadership: Restoring Trust in Corporate Leadership
Positive Leadership ceo, Graham Watson writes in The CA Magazine about the importance of restoring trust in corporate leadership.
Friday, February 03, 2012
Thursday, February 02, 2012
Positive Leadership: What Makes Ben Ainslie a Winner?
GB Olympic sailing manager Stephen Park agrees: "Ben is considerate and thoughtful onshore, people see him as a gentle giant.
"When he's afloat, in his environment, he's a different
animal. He's absolutely driven and determined and nothing is going to get in
his way to win. That's what you need to do if you're going to win time after
time after time."
Ainslie himself says of his sailing attitude: "When
you're racing you're there to win and be successful. If you don't care any more
you're not a sailor, you're not a racer and you shouldn't be doing it. It is a
competition."
Wednesday, February 01, 2012
Positive Leadership: Your Job as a Leader
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Positive Leadership: The Role of Business
We have a fundamental belief that the role of business is to
make the world a better place.
Jim Stengel, former Chief Marketing Officer of Proctor & Gamble and the author of Grow uses the expression "improving the lives of the
people a business serves.” He has teamed with data crunchers Millward Brown to
produce the “Stengel 50” – a ranking of 50 companies that have exponentially
improved their profits by dedicating themselves to improving the lives of
customers. Win-Win. His top 50 have generated a traditional ROI of 400% better
than S&P.
For more, see: http://millwardbrown.com/Sites/Brand_Ideal/The_Study.aspx
Monday, January 30, 2012
Positive Leadership: Being Average is No Use
In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average
job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over.
Being average just won’t earn you what it used to.
It can’t when so many more
employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign
labour, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius.
Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra — their unique value contribution
that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is
over.
There will always be change — new jobs, new products, new
services. But the one thing we know for sure is that with each advance in
globalisation and the I.T. revolution, the best jobs will require workers to
have more and better education to make themselves above average.
By way of
illustration, here are the latest unemployment rates from the Bureau of Labour
Statistics for Americans over 25 years old: those with less than a high school
degree, 13.8 per cent; those with a high school degree and no college, 8.7 per
cent; those with some college or associate degree, 7.7 per cent; and those with
bachelor’s degree or higher, 4.1 per cent.
In a world where average is officially over, there are many
things we need to do to buttress employment, but nothing would be more
important than passing some kind of Recovery Act for the 21st century that ensures that every Briton has access to
post-secondary school education.
Friday, January 27, 2012
Positive Leadership: Follow Your Instincts
Q. If you were
teaching a class to business school students, what lessons would you impart to
them?
A. Follow your instincts. If your instincts for the job are
good, you will be successful. If your instincts are bad, it’s the wrong job and
you should get out early and try something else. Textbook learning can take you
only so far. It can give you tools that will help you analyse things. But don’t
do it the way other C.E.O.’s that you read about have done it. Don’t follow the
case studies if your instinct tells you otherwise.
The great leaders, I think, are people who were smart enough
to gather all of the tools that they needed, all the information, all the peer
mentoring that they could get and then just tucked that away somewhere as extra
fuel and followed their instincts to do what they had a passion for, what they
thought they knew how to do.
Too often, leaders fail because someone told them they can’t
do it. If you don’t know what you can’t do, then you may well achieve it. That
is so important. Look at our great companies. Almost all of them shouldn’t have
succeeded the way they did. Often it’s accidental, opportunistic, it’s luck,
it’s something else. But it’s being open to falling into that success. And you
can see it in some of our most innovative companies.
As soon as you get overly tied to the lessons you were
taught in business school or elsewhere, I think you’re going to start doing it
the way it’s been done in the past. And then you’re going to have a company
that’s like those that existed in the past. You’re not going to see that new
technologies could offer possibilities that no one has even thought of. You
have to be willing to go into a room and say, “Why can’t this happen?” And then
have someone look at you and say, “That’s the dumbest question anybody ever asked.”
Even though you are the C.E.O., you have to allow and
encourage that kind of feedback. Because you can sink a company if you come in
with a load of ideas and innovation and creativity that’s bigger than the
company can carry. So you’ve got to have people coming back and saying, “We
know that,” or “We understand where you’re going with it, but it’s not
something we can do at this point.”
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Positive Leadership: Good Strategic Choices v Bad Strategic Choices
Strategy is about making choices that lead to sustainably
superior performance. Michael Porter's five tests of good strategy can help you
to tell the difference between good choices and bad.
So what are good choices?
First, you must
choose a distinctive value proposition. Which needs will you serve, which
customers, at what relative price? Have you staked out a positioning that's
different from rivals?
Second, and far less
intuitive, you must choose to tailor your activities to that value proposition.
Competitive advantage lies in the activities, in choosing to perform activities
differently or to perform different activities than rivals. These ultimately
are the choices that result in a company's ability to charge premium prices or
to operate at lower cost. (Remember, we're talking about quantifiable
performance.)
The third test of
strategy, making trade-offs, may well be the hardest. It means accepting limits
— saying no to some customers, for example, so that you can better serve
others. Porter explains why trade-offs are an important source of profitability
differences among rivals, and why trade-offs make it difficult for rivals to
copy what you do without compromising their own strategies. The essence of strategy, says Porter, is
choosing what not to do.
Fit is the fourth
test. Great strategies are like complex systems in which all of the parts
fit together seamlessly. Each thing you've chosen to do amplifies the value of
the other things you do. That's how fit improves the bottom line. It also
enhances sustainability. Says Porter, "Fit locks out imitators by creating
a chain that is as strong as its strongest link."
Continuity is
strategy's fifth test. While managers are often berated for changing too
slowly and too little, it is also possible to change too much, and in the wrong
ways. Faced with the latest ‘new thing’, managers must choose whether to
embrace it or not. Continuity of strategy helps companies to make good choices
about whether and how to change in the face of turbulence. Good choices will
strengthen tailoring, sharpen trade-offs, and enhance fit.
So, is it great by choice...or making great choices? Academics
tend to divide the world into two separate domains: people and numbers. There
are the "soft" subjects like leadership and organisational behaviour,
and the "hard" ones like finance, accounting, and operations. Of
course this distinction only makes sense in the classroom. All great leaders know that the central challenge of performance is
seamlessly integrating the two into a working whole. Good strategies do just
that.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Positive Leadership: A Team of Rival Perspectives
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.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Positive Leadership: What's Your Influencing Style?
While influence has always been a valuable managerial skill, today's highly collaborative organisations make it essential. Consider how often you have to influence people who don't even report to you in order to accomplish your objectives. Success depends on your ability to effectively influence both your direct reports and the people over whom you have no direct authority.
Have you ever thought about how you influence others? The
tactics you use? We are all aware that people use different influencing
tactics, but did you realise that we each naturally default to the same tactics
every time? Or that the tactics we default to are also the ones to which we are
most receptive when being influenced?
It is these preferred tactics that define our influencing
style. Analysing the different
influencing tactics, researchers have identified up to nine primary influencing
tactics. In our quest to further understand personal influencing styles, we
did additional research to build on the existing knowledge base. From our
research, we've identified five distinct influencing styles: rationalising,
asserting, negotiating, inspiring, and bridging.
You may have an idea what your style is just from hearing
these labels, but the most accurate way to identify your style is with an
influence style indicator — a self-scoring assessment that classifies your
style based on answers to questions about preferred influencing tactics. But
even without the indicator, here are some questions you can ask yourself to
begin to understand your style:
Rationalising: Do
you use logic, facts, and reasoning to present your ideas? Do you leverage your
facts, logic, expertise, and experience to persuade others?
Asserting: Do you
rely on your personal confidence, rules, law, and authority to influence
others? Do you insist that your ideas are heard and considered, even when
others disagree? Do you challenge the ideas of others when they don't agree
with yours? Do you debate with or pressure others to get them to see your point
of view?
Negotiating: Do
you look for compromises and make concessions in order to reach an outcome that
satisfies your greater interest? Do you make trade-offs and exchanges in order
to meet your larger interests? If necessary, will you delay the discussion
until a more opportune time?
Inspiring: Do you
encourage others toward your position by communicating a sense of shared
mission and exciting possibility? Do you use inspirational appeals, stories,
and metaphors to encourage a shared sense of purpose?
Bridging: Do you
attempt to influence outcomes by uniting or connecting with others? Do you rely
on reciprocity, engaging superior support, consultation, building coalitions,
and using personal relationships to get people to agree with your position?
While answering these questions, take your style a step
further. How often does it work for you? Are you more successful with certain
types of people? Have you ever wondered why? Since there are five different
influencing styles, using only your preferred style has the potential to
undermine your influence with as many as four out of five people.
Gaining awareness about our own influencing style and those
of others is especially critical in light of todays fast-paced and stressful
work environments, and here's why: When
we are operating unconsciously out of a preference (our style) and not seeing
the results we expect, we actually have the tendency to intensify our preferred
behaviour — even when it's not working!
If your individual success depends on gaining the cooperation
of people over whom you have no direct authority, this should concern you. The
way to begin to increase your odds of influencing more people is to learn to
recognise and use each of the five styles.
Becoming aware that there are influencing styles other than
yours is a good start. To further increase your influence, you must learn what
each style sounds like when it's being used effectively and ineffectively.
Gaining this awareness will help you recognise when the style you're using
isn't working and how to determine one that will.
What's your influencing style? And what are you going to do
about it?
Monday, January 23, 2012
Positive Leadership: Courage?
‘Courage is a virtue and heroism is admirable, but do we
have a right to demand them? Which of us cannot look back on his or her own
life and remember decisions, or compromises made, or silences kept because of
cowardice, even when the penalties for courage were negligible?
If we are cowardly in small things, shall we be brave in
large? Have we the right to point the finger until we have been tested
ourselves? When we read of the seemingly lamentable conduct of the captain of
the Costa Concordia, Francesco Schettino, who left his passengers to their
fate, do we say, “There but for the grace of God go I”?
Of course, leadership
entails an obligation to be courageous – morally, physically or both. It is the
price of leadership; it is why leaders are more highly regarded and rewarded
than the rest of us. But even subordinates in certain professions have the
duty to be brave, as the rest of us do not. A soldier is expected
unquestioningly to put himself in the way of bullets as a civilian is not……….
What, then, might Captain Schettino say in his defence? Let
us, for the sake of argument, leave aside the possibility that the whole
disaster was an error of his seamanship, and suppose instead that it was what
some people call “one of those things”.
In a world used to the utilitarian zeitgeist, he might say
that if he had stayed on board and gone down with his ship, nobody who died
would have been spared. We imagine a captain on his deck, as he slips under the
waves, but this is quixotic romanticism if in fact no one is saved. A captain’s
life is worth as much as anyone else’s; nobody’s interest is served by his
needless death.
Can we be sure that if Captain Schettino had kept calm and
carried on, fewer people would have died? Can it be wholly his fault if the
crew were not properly trained and members of it were not even able to
communicate with each other, let alone with all the passengers? He could, of
course, have refused his command: but how many of us resign our jobs on a
matter of principle? If we were to do so, the unemployment rate would be nearly
100 per cent…………………………….
Could he have known in advance that he was not up to the
mark, that no man was less fitted than he for such an emergency? I hope it is
not taken for lack of sympathy for the victims and their relations to say that,
on the scale of human monstrosity, the captain does not climb very high. His
place on the scale of human weakness is another matter.’
For more, see: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/9022832/Concordia-disaster-Should-a-captain-go-down-with-his-ship.html
Friday, January 20, 2012
Positive Leadership: What Makes Stanford University a Unique Environment
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Positive Leadership: Improve Productivity to Find Resources
Positive Leadership: 40,000 page views
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Positive Leadership: Cultivate a Culture of Confidence
Even for the best companies and most-accomplished
professionals, long track records of success are punctuated by slips, slides,
and mini-turnarounds. Even the team that wins the game might make mistakes,
fumble, and lag behind for part of it. That’s why the ability to recover
quickly and get back on course is so important.
Troubles are ubiquitous. Surprises can fall from the sky
like volcanic ash and appear to change everything. New ventures can begin with
great promise and still face unexpected obstacles, unanticipated delays, and
critics that pop up at the wrong moment. That’s why I coined Kanter’s Law:
“Anything can look like a failure in the middle.”
Nothing succeeds for long without considerable effort and
constant vigilance. Winning streaks end for predictable reasons: Strategies run
their course. New competition emerges to take on the industry leader. Ideas get
dusty. Technology marches on. Complacency sets in, making people feel entitled
to success rather than motivated to work for it.
Thus, a key factor in high achievement is bouncing back from
the low points. Long-term winners often face the same problems as long-term
losers, but they respond differently, as I found in the research for my book
Confidence. I compared companies and sports teams with long winning streaks and
long losing streaks, and then looked at how leaders led turnarounds from low to
high performance.
Consider first the pathologies of losing. Losing produces
temptations to behave in ways that make it hard to recover fast enough—and
could even make the situation worse. For example, panicking and throwing out
the game plan. Scrambling for self-protection and abandoning the rest of the
group. Hiding the facts and hoping that things will get better by themselves
before anyone notices. Denying that there is anything to learn or change. Using
decline as an excuse to let facilities or investments deteriorate.
The culture and support system that surrounds high
performers helps them avoid these temptations. They can put troubles in perspective
because they are ready for them. They rehearse through diligent practice and
preparation; they remain disciplined and professional. Their leaders put facts
on the table and review what went right or wrong in the last round, in order to
shore up strengths and pinpoint weaknesses and to encourage personal
responsibility for actions. They stress collaboration and teamwork—common
goals; commitment to a joint vision; respect and support for team members, so
when someone drops the ball, someone else is there to pick it up—and
responsibility for mentoring, so the best performers lift everyone’s
capabilities. They seek creative ideas for improvement and innovation, favouring
widespread dialogue and brainstorming.
Resilience is not simply an individual characteristic or a
psychological phenomenon. It is helped or hindered by the surrounding system.
Teams that are immersed in a culture of accountability, collaboration, and
initiative are more likely to believe that they can weather any storm.
Self-confidence, combined with confidence in one another and in the organisation,
motivates winners to make the extra push that can provide the margin of
victory.
The lesson for
leaders is clear: Build the cornerstones of confidence—accountability,
collaboration, and initiative—when times are good and achievement comes easily.
Maintain a culture of confidence as insurance against the inevitable downturns.
And while no one should deliberately seek failure, remember that performance
under pressure—the ability to stay calm, learn, adapt, and keep on
going—separates winners from losers.'
This post was written by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, who holds Harvard Business School’s
Arbuckle Professorship and specialises in strategy, innovation, and leadership.
Her latest book is SuperCorp.
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