Five Keys to Good Leadership

1. Be aware. Understand yourself and your context. Know your own strengths, limitations, and development needs. If you don't have time to build your skills, bring people into your team who will complement you. Be aware of the organisation and the people you are leading.

2. Have a plan. Know where you are going. One great definition of leadership is to have followers. If you cannot create a sense of the future, no one can follow you.

3. Build relationships. Give more of yourself. A leader has to get things done through others, so people skills are critical. Take time to get to know your peers, bosses, and subordinates. Talk less, listen more, and remember the details of what people say. Investing time to understand the roles, ideas, and personalities of those around you will yield a strong network, corporate allies, motivated staff, and personal goodwill.

4. Deliver. Get things done. Whatever your line of business, you need to show the results of your leadership. So whether it's a better product, an improved service, a higher profit or share price, make sure you deliver.

5. Have integrity. Get your values right. Your values define who you are and why others should work for you. The important point here is that values should be lived, not written down or occasionally talked about. Show by your own example that honesty, truth, transparency, respect, and sustainability matter. 

Five Keys to Good Leadership

More Tomorrow than Today

When you can see yourself, not as you are, but as you can become, you stimulate incredible growth and previously unbelievable change. People who find life exciting and who continue to grow and expand their accomplishments are people who have an expanding self-image.

Now this doesn't mean that you go around completely out of touch with reality. But it does mean that you have a vision of reality that includes not just the past and the present, but also the future. It also means that your primary focus is not on what you are today, but what you can be tomorrow. It is this technique, this ability that motivates people to grow, to surpass themselves, to break records, to change in positive, exciting ways.

After all, if you can't see it, how can you be it? This is what you want to do for your children, friends, relatives and colleagues – indeed, all whom your life touches. Keep painting a vivid mental picture for them of all that they can be and do. Let them know you believe in their abilities, and watch them move towards that picture. Help them be more today than they were yesterday, and on their way to a greater tomorrow.

More Tomorrow than Today

Building A Team That Loves What They Do

Global Business School Network president Guy Pfeffermann talks about the importance of building a team that loves what they do. 

Building A Team That Loves What They Do

Presentation Advice

Presentations go wrong for numerous reasons, but the most common reason is poor preparation. 

Follow these two rules to make sure you're ready before you step up to the podium:

1. Know your audience. Speeches are about the audience, not the presenter. Before you write anything down, be sure you know who you're addressing. The size, attitudes, and emotional state of your audience should affect the length, style, and content of your presentation.
2. Tell them one thing. The sad truth is that audience members remember very little of what they hear. Keep it simple. Focus on one idea and eliminate everything that doesn't support that idea.

Presentation Advice

Think Like a Golfer

The amazing thing about golf is that at the end of the day golfers don't remember the poor shots they made. All they remember is their one great shot and this memory inspires them to come back again and again in an attempt to make another great shot. It’s no wonder that golf is so addicting.

Compare this thought process to how many of us approach work and life. Instead of focusing on the one good thing that happened to us each day we often think about the 100 things that went wrong. Instead of thinking about our successes we replay our failures over and over again in our mind. No wonder so many of us retreat from life and work instead of getting addicted to it.

The key is to think like a golfer and remember the one great conversation, the one energising meeting, the one act of kindness, the one meaningful accomplishment or the one special moment that made you smile, laugh and cheer.

No matter how difficult our days are, there’s always a positive moment we can choose to focus on. The key is to remember them, focus on them and get addicted to them. Let them inspire you to wake up and take on each day just as you would a golf course. You'll go through life learning from your mistakes but remembering and focusing on your successes.

Sure, there will be days that make you want to give up but the memory of your successes and positive experiences will motivate you to come back again and again. You'll forget the 100 things that went wrong and you'll remember the one thing that went right. You’ll get addicted to the moments that make life the greatest game in the universe and you’ll intoxicate yourself with positive energy, happiness, joy and success! 

Think Like a Golfer

Redefining Success in a Recession Economy

A recession is a great reminder that all of us need to learn, as Samuel Beckett said, to “fail better” - http://www.newsweek.com/video/2010/09/13/the-power-of-failure.html

Redefining Success in a Recession Economy

Positive Leadership partners with Scotland rugby head coach Andy Robinson

Positive Leadership is delighted to be partnering with Scotland rugby head coach, Andy Robinson, to bring the lessons of sports leadership into the boardroom. 

In an event organised by the IOD entitled; ‘Living Your Leadership Values – Even Under Pressure – To Achieve Desired Results: Lessons from the Six Nations’ you can hear from Graham Watson and Gavin Hastings of Positive Leadership and Andy Robinson how values play a hugely significant role in delivering high performance on a consistent basis. 

Details of the event, which is being held on 28 September 2010 in Edinburgh, can be obtained at http://www.iodscotland.com/local or by contacting the event organiser, Gillian Rose at Gillian@cognito-events.com .

For a chance to win a free seat at the event, please email;  graham.watson@positiveleadership.co.uk 

Positive Leadership partners with Scotland rugby head coach Andy Robinson

Managing Clashing Leadership Styles

If everyone had the same management style as you, life at work would be easier, wouldn't it? Not necessarily. While managing the tension can be challenging, working with someone who has a different approach than you can often yield innovation and creativity. 

Here are three ways to make the most of differing styles:

1. Unpeel the onion. On the surface, you may seem to have little in common with your colleague. But if you look deeper, you are likely to see shared values or a mutual goal. Focus on what you have in common, not on what you don't.
2. Manage your expectations. Recognise that you and your colleagues are going to have different expectations about how things should be done. Communicate about these disparities and be open to doing something another way.
3. Push for innovation. The true value of diversity is a richer end product. Use your relationship to find innovation and benefit in the work you do together.

Managing Clashing Leadership Styles

Character Counts

Surveys suggest that worker satisfaction is more profoundly affected by perceptions of top management than by their immediate supervisor. What lessons can top leaders glean from this?

One of the key lessons is that the leader's character has a profound effect on the development and maintenance of an organisation's culture. 

Those at the top are presumed to merit their positions because of competence, but their character also matters. What differentiates the most effective leaders, no matter where they reside in the hierarchy, is the combination of these two attributes. These are the leaders with integrity; they have a high degree of congruence between their values and their actions. They engender trust and commitment, evoke a comforting, non-stagnant predictability, and cultivate confidence in the long term viability of their organisations. 

This combination of competence and character provides meaning and inspires hope to those whose dreams may be dimmed by middle management's tendency to divide the work force into leaders and losers. In top-down bureaucracies where status and title matter most, the individual at the top of the pyramid is always accorded formal authority and power. Whether they are authorised to lead or not is actually determined by who they are and what they do. The most effective leaders understand this; they know that leadership by title is insufficient and superficial without the legitimisation of those being led.

Character Counts

Why Some Executives Fail

Here are some common executive ‘derailers’ :

- Lack of ethics and values
- Overly ambitious
- Arrogance

- Blocked personal learner

- Defensiveness
- Insensitive to others
- Non-strategic
- Failure to build a team
- Lack of composure
- Unable to adapt to differences.

Why Some Executives Fail

What is Talent?

Talent can be found in extraordinary and ordinary places if we choose to be completely open about what talent actually 'is'.

So, what does it mean to be “talented” or “gifted” or a “genius”?

According to David Shenk, the author of  The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong, the traditional view of talent as a “gift” that is somehow given to us through our genes is both simplistic and outdated. 

Genes mean very little, considering that, as Shenk points out, “genes are constantly activated and deactivated by environmental stimuli, nutrition, hormones, nerve impulses and other genes.” In other words, our genes don’t guarantee anything.

He also goes into great detail about the hard work and focus that some of the most talented people in history – including Mozart and Michael Jordan – put into developing their skills. His finding is that talent has less to do with the “gifts” that nature has endowed us with as it does with environmental and behavioural factors. That is, most of us aren’t destined to be talented or untalented. It’s something that happens over time, due to conscious effort and environmental stimuli.

The inspirational upshot of Shenk’s research is that “few of us know our true limits and that the vast majority of us have not even come close to tapping what scientists call our ‘unactualised potential.’”

This is exciting news, and hopefully it will inspire many of us to work harder at developing our skills. Too often we hear people label themselves as “not gifted at math” or “not artistic” or “not creative.” According to the research cited in Shenk’s book, we can’t let ourselves off that easy.

If we broaden our understanding of talent, we’ll start seeing it in unexpected places. The truth is, we’ve all got unbelievable potential. it’s just up to us, our mentors and our leaders to tap into it and put it to good use. A tall order, to be sure, but one that’s definitely worth the work. 

What is Talent?

Connecting

The two key elements of all leadership are simply: 1) to connect everyone to the mission, and 2) to each other. Other aspects of leadership may be critical, but not as indispensable as these two. Connecting everyone to the mission takes identifying that mission. Only top leaders can do that. Only they can set the whole organisation's direction, and give it meaning.

The larger, the more important the mission, the more satisfaction people have in pursuing it. As Shakespeare says:

'O, the blood more stirs
To rouse a lion than
To start a hare.' (Henry IV, I)

People get more satisfaction from coping with a big challenge, like rousing a lion, than going after small tasks, like chasing a rabbit. It's the responsibility of top leadership to explain how and why their whole organisation is pursuing a big, important mission. Supervisors can repeat their message, and specify their unit's role in that mission.

Both elements, connecting folks to the mission, and to each other come together magnificently when Shakespeare's Henry V inspires the "we few, we happy few, we band of brothers" at the Battle of Agincourt on October 25, 1415.

His St. Crispin Day's Speech (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9fa3HFR02E) is the greatest motivational speech ever made. That's why Sir Winston Churchill adapted its approach and beauty to his powerful speeches during the British Empire's darkest days of 1940.

Connecting

The Secrets of Resilient Leadership: When Failure is Not an Option

When faced with adversity, leaders can get caught up trying to manage their own stress. In the worst cases, such as the demise of Enron or the fiasco after Hurricane Katrina, they become so concerned for their own position that they jeopardise the entire operation.

The authors of The Secrets of Resilient Leadership: When Failure Is Not an Option.Six Essential Characteristics for Leading in Adversity remind us of a simple fact -

Resilient leadership is not only about how well you survive, it is about helping others rebound. The true test of leadership, they point out, is how well others follow.

“Although a leader may have the vision and courage to lead, he must do so in a way that followers respond to”, they say. The prerequisites for this are trust and devotion. Leaders must act with “bold and decisive action built on honour and honesty.”

These are basic qualities that most leaders are already aware of, even if they do not always exhibit them. The strength in this book is in the authors’ ability to break down these abstract concepts into concrete, achievable steps. 

The book is structured on their top six components of resilient leadership:

(1) Acting with integrity. Bold, decisive action is not enough; it must come from integrity. Integrity inspires trust, trust enhances a sense of safety, and safety helps fulfil the most fundamental need—survival.

(2) Communicating effectively and honestly. There is no such thing as an information vacuum—if you don’t talk, others will.

(3) Using the power of decisiveness, optimism, and self-fulfilling prophecies. Optimism has been shown to influence outcomes: Your thoughts define and create reality as much, or possibly more, than vice versa. Leaders must not only see opportunity in adversity, they must model it, convey and create optimism in others.

(4) Persevering and taking responsibility for actions. Perseverance is what provides strength, and responsibility generates honour. To your employer, your first duty is to earn your income; to others, it is understanding and respect; to your community, consideration and appreciation; and to those you lead it is to protect, act in their best interest, and teach.

(5) Building a resilient culture.  Fostering a group identity, or sense of belonging, combined with group cohesion—the degree of interpersonal affinity, commitment or attraction that members share—are keys to cultural resilience. The tenet “No one left behind” creates the sense of safety without which followers won’t follow.

(6) Developing physical and psychological health as a competitive advantage. Overwhelm, frustration, fatigue and illness will undermine any effort towards resilience. To combat this, leaders need to follow, model, and promote common sense rules for physical and mental health.

The Secrets of Resilient Leadership: When Failure is Not an Option

See Direction as a Result of Process?

See Direction as a Result of Process?

Value Creation and Sport

Over the last two decades, professional sport has grown to be one of the biggest and most influential industries in the world.

There is a great deal that managers and business leaders can learn from examining the unique role sport plays in the global economy – and specifically by analysing what makes certain franchises economically successful. And yet, there’s a real shortage of research on this topic. Few people are thinking and writing about it intelligently.

Enter Sandalio Gómez, Kimio Kase and Ignacio Urrutia. Their new book, Value Creation and Sport Management proposes an insightful and academically rigorous framework for understanding the growth of the sport industry over the last few decades. 

As they point out, “twenty years ago Real Madrid football team had a budget of less than €60 million; today, it is €400 million.” Something is going on here, and these three authors do a superb job of getting to the bottom of it.

Sport taps into the deepest emotional feelings of the world’s population, regardless of geography age or demographics. This is territory that today’s business leaders need to be deeply knowledgeable about, especially as it is in the arena of experiences (rather than products) where optimum value is being created. Emotional experiences like the ones provoked by sport that will be at the core of the successful businesses of tomorrow, which is why it is important to study the underlying forces that govern this vibrant, unique industry.

Gómez, Kase and Urrutia have hit upon an important and overlooked research project, and hopefully their work sparks a firestorm of academic investigation into the inner workings of sports franchises.

Value Creation and Sport

Creating Value from Values

In companies that are innovative, profitable, and responsible, widespread dialogue about the interpretation and application of values enhances accountability, collaboration, and initiative.

Here are ten essential ingredients that make values work to produce organisational value:

·         Values are a priority for leaders, invoked often in their messages and on the agenda for management discussions.

·         The entire work force can enter the conversation; employees are invited to discuss or interpret values and principles in conjunction with their peers, who help ensure alignment.

·         Principles are codified, made explicit, transmitted in writing in many media, and reviewed regularly to make sure people understand and remember them.

·         Statements about values and principles invoke a higher purpose, a purpose beyond current tasks that indicates service to society. This purpose can become part of the company's brand and a source of competitive differentiation.

·         The words become a basis for on-going dialogue that guides debate when there is controversy or initial disagreement. Decisions are supported by reference to particular values or principles.

·         Principles guide choices, in terms of business opportunities to pursue or reject, or in terms of investments with a longer time horizon that might seem uneconomic today.

·         As they become internalised by employees, values and principles can substitute for more impersonal or coercive rules. They can serve as a control system against violations, excesses, or veering off course.

·         Actions reflecting values and principles — especially difficult choices — become the basis for iconic stories that are easy to remember and retell, reinforcing to employees and the world what the company stands for.

·         Values are aspirational, signalling long-term intentions that guide thinking about the future.

·         Principles, purpose, and values are discussed with suppliers, distributors, and other business partners, to promote consistent high standards everywhere.

In short, it's not the words that make a difference; it's the conversation. Frequent discussion about organisational values can be engaging and empowering. The organisation becomes a community united by shared purpose, which reinforces teamwork and collaboration. People can be more readily relied on to do the right thing, and to guide their colleagues to do the same, once they buy into and internalise core principles. People can become more aware of the drivers and impact of their behaviour. Active consideration of core values and purpose can unlock creative potential.

Creating Value from Values

The Power of Positive Deviance

Think of the toughest problems in your organisation or community. What if they'd already been solved and you didn't even know it?

In The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World's Toughest Problems, the authors present a counterintuitive new approach to problem-solving. Their advice? Leverage positive deviants - the few individuals in a group who find unique ways to look at, and overcome, seemingly insoluble difficulties. By seeing solutions where others don't, positive deviants spread and sustain needed change.

With vivid, firsthand stories of how positive deviance has alleviated some of the world's toughest problems (malnutrition in Vietnam, staph infections in hospitals), the authors illuminate its core practices, including:

• Mobilising communities to discover "invisible" solutions in their midst
• Using innovative designs to "act" your way into a new way of thinking instead of thinking your way into a new way of acting
• Confounding the organisational "immune response" seeking to sustain the status quo

Inspiring and insightful, The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World's Toughest Problems unveils a potent new way to tackle the thorniest challenges in your own company and community.

The Power of Positive Deviance

The Biggest Mistake Leaders Can Make

Through Imagining the Future of Leadership, a symposium at the Harvard Business School, expert thinkers gathered to investigate what is necessary today to develop the leaders we need for tomorrow.

Featuring:

Bill George, Professor, Harvard Business School and former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Medtronic

Evan Wittenberg, Head of Global Leadership Development, Google, Inc.

Dr. Ellen Langer, Professor, Harvard University

Andrew Pettigrew, Professor, Sïad Business School, University of Oxford

Gianpiero Petriglieri, Affiliate Professor of Organizational Behavior, INSEAD

Carl Sloane, Professor Emeritus, Harvard Business School

Jonathan Doochin, Leadership Institute at Harvard College

Scott Snook, Associate Professor, Harvard Business School and retired Colonel, US Army Corps of Engineers

Daisy Wademan Dowling, Executive Director, Leadership Development at Morgan Stanley

The Biggest Mistake Leaders Can Make

Behind the Curtain

In Behind the Berkshire Hathaway Curtain: Lessons from Warren Buffett's Top Business Leaders, Ron Chan has interviewed a number of CEOs and executives who have contributed to Berkshire’s success. Here are some of the insights, philosophies an mindsets from people at the top of their fields: 

• Cathy Baron-Tamraz, President and CEO of Business Wire: “I think a liberal arts education is invaluable in preparing one for the working world. I look at the people I have hired these past 30 years, and to be candid, most of them have had a more general background than a strictly business background.” The whole idea of college is to learn about general principles by taking a variety of courses. 
• Randy Watson, President and CEO of Justin Brands: “I learned that to run a company and be a leader, it is not about the individual, but how the team of people work together to accomplish something for the greater good. It is about working in unison. My job is to make sure that I have the right people in the right place, and then I stay out of their way.” 
• Stanford Lipsey, Publisher of the Buffalo News: “As an advertising executive, I learned to be observant and flexible. I learned to pick up information from my clients so that I could prepare data to attract them. As the saying goes, ‘persistence succeeds when all else fails!’ I just kept trying and trying.” 
• Brad Kinstler, President and CEO of See’s Candies: “Spotting talent is more of an art than a science. You’ll never know whether you have an eye for it until you put your managers out in the playing field and observe the way they perform. What I realised is that there is no right or wrong when it comes to picking talent. In fact, you can’t even tell who will be the next leader until he or she becomes one. Leaders come in different shapes and sizes, and it is often during a crisis or other extraordinary situation that their true ability emerges.” 
• David Sokol, Chairman of the Board of MidAmerican Energy Holdings Company: “When I was a 27-year-pld project manager, I had to lead some older and more experienced managers. The reality was that some of them were uncomfortable working with me. The only thing I could do was to keep my head down, check my ego at the door, and work extremely hard to prove that I was capable of leading. I didn’t try to convince them of anything other than the need to accomplish everything as a team. “My father taught me that it is difficult to control others’ perceptions, but I can always control my own actions, and these actions can, over time, alter those perceptions. I constantly show my colleagues that I am an active listener, and I make sure to explain my rationale for every decision and to consider their opinions. That is all I can do, because the reality is that it will soon become clear whether or not I am capable.”

Behind the Curtain

Voicing Values in the Workplace

Recent years have seen an unprecedented breakdown in public trust of business, spurred in no small part by instances of unethical behaviour at some of the world’s most powerful institutions. 

Mary Gentile, director of the business curriculum at Babson College, says the real challenge for business students, employees, and executives isn’t knowing what’s right, but knowing how to act on those convictions within an organisation. 

In this video interview, Gentile shares insights and experiences on how to do that, which she’s gathered through her work developing the Giving Voice to Values curriculum and her book, Giving Voice to Values: How to Speak Your Mind When You Know What's Right. McKinsey Publishing’s Lily Cunningham conducted the interview with Mary Gentile in New York in June 2010. 

Voicing Values in the Workplace

What Can You Expect from a Leader with a Big Ego?

What can you expect from a leader with a narcissistic personality? 

The results of one very well done study recently published in the Journal of Applied Psychology entitled “The Bright-Side and the Dark-Side of CEO Personality: Examining Core Self-Evaluations, Narcissism, Transformational Leadership, and Strategic Influence.” provide some pointers.

This study of 75 CEOs of Major League Baseball organisations in the USA over a 100 year period examined how positive and negative personality characteristics affected the individual’s leadership style and ultimately important outcomes for the organisation.

Terms like confident, determined, optimistic, stable, persistent, and positive were associated with the bright-side of leadership, while terms like arrogant, boastful, conceited, egotistical, self-centred, show-off and temperamental were associated with the narcissistic dark-side of leadership. 

The authors of the study suggest the following five things based on their findings (pp. 1373-1374):

The Bright-side of personality

1. Leaders who have an overall positive self-concept are better able to articulate a vision in a manner that builds commitment to the organisation’s goals.

2. Positive leaders may role model the efforts needed for the organisation to be successful and are comfortable empowering others because they have a realistic sense of their own and their organisation’s capabilities

3. Positive leaders are more comfortable with the focus being on the good of the organisation rather than on their individual success.

The Dark-side of personality

1. Narcissistic leaders are unlikely to be concerned about developing equitable exchange relationships with members of their organisation. When followers meet objectives, narcissistic leaders do a poor job of allocating recognition and rewards to reinforce desired behaviour.

2. Narcissistic leaders are very unlikely to offer a compelling vision for the organisation and inspire others to higher levels of morale and motivation.

Narcissistic leadership in this study eventually lead to more manager turnover, while positive leadership lead to higher attendance, a better winning percentage, and greater external influence in the industry (Major League Baseball).

Just like the advice to avoid hiring narcissistic employees, you should likewise avoid hiring and promoting narcissistic individuals into positions of management and leadership. It’s impossible for narcissists to see the best in others when they are so laser-focused on spotlighting the best they see in themselves. They won’t treat people fairly because it simply is not a concern for them, and their vision of individual greatness is unlikely to inspire others and may even expose the organisation to competitive peril.

There is no guarantee that simply hiring and promoting positive people is a recipe for organisational success. However, the research is pretty clear that narcissistic individuals, especially in positions of power and influence, are more likely to do harm than to do lasting good.

What Can You Expect from a Leader with a Big Ego?

Educating Tomorrow's Ethical Leaders

Rich Lyons, dean of University of California at Berkeley's Haas School of business, is leading an overhaul of the school's curriculum, with special attention to who it admits and how instructors develop innovative and responsible leaders. He talks here with Wall Street Journal Careers editor Jennifer Merritt.

Educating Tomorrow's Ethical Leaders

The Positive Leadership Tweetbook 2009/2010

Here is our first anniversary book of Tweets -

http://tweetbook.in/store/posleadership/posleadership-Tweet-Book491ff74b3e1bbc9f9ae477f0be7db878.pdf

Graham Watson is a passionate communicator with many provocative ideas to share. The contents of this blog and the Twitter book include a number of Graham's most stimulating messages. And they're all absolutely free. Download, print, discuss, dissect, and disseminate to your heart's content. We ask only that you not alter the files, claim them as your own work, or charge for their use.

PDFs require Acrobat Reader which you can download free from Adobe.

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

The Positive Leadership Tweetbook 2009/2010

Happy Birthday!

Today marks the first anniversary of the Positive Leadership blog.

We hope that with our over 900 posts and many thousands of page loads in the last year we have helped stimulate thinking and discussion on the importance which great leadership plays in delivering consistent high performance.

Positive Leadership™ values when aligned with a Game Plan for Winning will deliver sustained high performance, even under pressure. 

You can find out more about the Positive Leadership™ consulting approach at www.positiveleadership.co.uk or via e mail: graham.watson@positiveleadership.co.uk

Happy Birthday!