Leadership 21st Century

Posted by on January 16, 2009

There has been a tremendous amount of change in the area of leadership over the last twenty years.  We have moved from an industrial age to an information age to the present idea age.

People in the industrial age were primarily paid for what they did.  In the information age they will be primarily paid for what they know and in the idea age how well they think.

Add to this mix the power of technology and the rise of the ever changing and highly competitive global economy and you get the new realities for leaders in the 21st century.

The real tragedy is that most corporate cultures today are still leading and managing from an old positional leadership model rather than a new participative one.  Under this model the leaders at the top make all of the decisions and the followers at every level simply carry out their instructions.

These old models are designed around preventing failure rather than ensuring success.  The process is trusted and valued more than the people within the organization.

This core belief about leadership results in trying to manage people with a carrot and stick mentality instead of leading them as the most valuable part of your team.

All effective leaders in the 21st century will prioritize hiring great people and then empowering them to make decisions and take risks or they will absolutely fail in this new global economy.

 

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Character

Posted by on January 15, 2009

Simply put everything you eventually accomplish in life will be based upon you personal leadership DNA.  What you do is based upon who you are.

Someone has well said:  ability may get you to the top but it takes character to keep you there.  If you do not believe that then just ask the former governor of New York.

I had to learn the importance of this lesson very early in my career.  I changed jobs four times in five years right out of college because I did not realize that the major problem was not the company I was working for or the supervisor that I had, the problem was me.

All I did was move from company to company and take all of my unresolved character problems with me expecting different results.  I learned the hard way that if you are consistently failing where you are there is no real reason to believe that you will be successful somewhere else.

However, if you learn how to be successful where you are regardless of your circumstances and become an A Player then there is every reason to believe that you can be successful anywhere.

 

 

 

Categories: Core Values Personal Leadership | Comments Off on Character

Resignation

Posted by on January 12, 2009

If you are an A player as defined by Jim Collins in Good to Great you are a character driven leader.  This means that you are willing to set aside any personal agenda for the good of the team and the organization.

It also means that as a leader you are by nature a change agent.  You want to deal with the brutal facts facing your team and find new solutions to old problems.

In some situations the people that you report to are not as open to change.  This is where your character must lead you to deal with this situation in the right way.

The right way is to approach you boss directly and openly share what you are recommending to do and why.  The absolute wrong way is to talk about your superiors to someone else in any negative way that would be disloyal.

If after a long period of respectful dialogue you are not sensing any openness to change within the culture of the organization then your decision is clear.  What you must not do is to try to change your boss, that is not in your job description.

A players realize one fundamental truth about organizational culture.  You will over time help be a part of a team effort that will change it for good or if you stay too long in the wrong culture it will change you.  That is an unacceptable price to pay and that is why it’s time to leave.

 

 

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People Skills

Posted by on December 20, 2008

When you are evaluating any leader’s effectiveness you tend to look at two major categories that summarize everything else.  They are the character that defines the core values of the person and the competency or skill set that they bring to the position.

Marshall Goldsmith is one of the top Executive Coaches in the market. His latest book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There is a great read for all leaders who want to reach their maximum potential.  He identifies twenty habits that can completely destroy your influence as a leader.

The amazing thing that he confirms for all of us is that the most critical problems related to executive leadership have very little to do with core industry specific competency or even the expected qualities of productive leadership.

The overwhelming majority of smart, disciplined, experienced and passionate leaders are failing in the one major area of basic people skills.  They do not relate well to their superiors, peers, subordinates and sometimes even customers.

They do not listen, make negative comments about people when they are not in the room, and always tend to punish the messenger when bad news is delivered just to list a few.  Almost always these potential fatal flaws are obvious to everyone but the leader who does not even see them as an issue.

An absolute necessity for any effective leader is to establish a culture within their organization where the truth can be told and they will get the feedback they need or these extremely negative blind spots will never be revealed.

 

 

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Hire Winners

Posted by on December 18, 2008

In the old days of the Industrial Age model of leadership everything was pretty simple.  The leaders made all of the decisions and the followers did all of the work.  There were very clearly identified lines of authority and policies and procedures for everyone.

The major goal of the company culture at the end of the day was to prevent failure.  Therefore if you had a problem with two people that were chronically taking too long for lunch breaks then you would design a system where everyone would have to sign out and sign back in.

Then it became some middle managers job assignment to monitor the system until it became a part of the new and improved culture for the company and that would solve the problem with lunch breaks.  This cycle was repeated over and over again and the best people in the organization were always assigned the duty of cleaning up the mess produced by the worst ten percent of workforce.

Today you better have your best people working on your biggest opportunities or you competition will eat your lunch and you will not need to sign out and in anymore.  You must move from a culture that tries to prevent failure to one that ensures success.

This means that you define success not by how the process is managed by what type of results your people are achieving.  The leaders number one responsibility now is to hire great people and set the vision for the organization.

The winners will take care of the strategy and it will produce results but you will probably have to live without your weekly employee lunch report.  You will not need it any more they fired the two people.

 

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Pride

Posted by on December 16, 2008

Pride is a terrible thing.  It causes you to focus only on what is in your personal interest and blinds you to the reality of what you are doing to hurt other people.

The public spectacle that played out in the news concerning Reverend Wright and Barack Obama was been painful to watch. In this tragedy you have two people who once genuinely cared for each other now forced to publicly attack the other person because of what has been said.

Pride also causes you to lose touch with the truth about yourself and what you really believe.  You literally become like the thing you hate but you cannot see it.

The great irony about some of the positions being advocated by the Reverend Wright on the extreme right of black liberation theology is they are really no different than those of other hate speech being advocated by the leaders of the extreme right of white liberation theology.

The only difference between the two groups is literally the color of their skin and if they heard that they would deny it to the death.  What should we all take away from this?

This is not a story just about politics.  It is about every relationship we have in our lives.

When you think the other person is always wrong and you are always right be careful.  The reason you may be able to see their faults is because you are looking at them through the mirror of your own life.

We as Christians are told to always clean up our own issues before we  even begin to criticize someone else.  God does resist the proud but he will give His grace to the humble.

Categories: Personal Leadership Spiritual Growth | Comments Off on Pride

New Marketing

Posted by on December 15, 2008

A good friend of mine recently exposed me to Seth Godin who is the author of several incredible books on the subject of new marketing and how it is significantly different from the old models most of us know.  He has an incredible blog and I would encourage you to visit Seth Godin.com and click on Seth’s head to read his blog.

In his book Meatball Sundae he writes, “New marketing leverages scarce attention and creates interactions among communities with similar interests.  New marketing treats every interaction, product, service, and side effect as a form of media.  Marketers do this by telling stories, creating remarkable products, and gaining permission to deliver messages directly to interested people.”

One of his incredible insights is that Old Marketing was all about interrupting people with ads that may have no interest whatsoever to the person involved.  Can I hear click the remote control?

New Marketing is about connecting people with similar interests so that when they get your information there is already a high degree of buy in because of the products and services involved and the relationships that already exist within the community.

As a matter of fact, the relationships within the community will initially be a stronger selling point than any brand loyalty to your company.  Failing to see the power in this human dynamic will position you with a competitive disadvantage the in new economy.

Marketing has always been about knowing what people want and providing them a way to get it. That basic dynamic will probably never change.  What has changed forever is how and when people get their information and what they do with it to make sure their friends know about it as well.

 

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The Obama Factor

Posted by on December 11, 2008

I have been fascinated by the huge debate that was going on between the Clinton and Obama camps on what is more important inspiration or execution.  Just recently Hillary told us that she had a lifetime of experience and all that Obama had to bring to the discussion was one speech.  His camp then takes the bate and gets into a who is more qualified on experience back and forth.

What is missing here is the fundamental issues of being a Leader vs. being a Politician.  Politicians tend to tell people what they want to hear for self interest while leaders tell them what they need to hear for their own good.

 At the very core of leadership is the need to change the status quo so that we can personally and professionally move to something better. 

Change always requires people to be highly motivated to leave behind the familiar and move to the unknown.  Bottom line, if you can not inspire people to action then all the strategic planning in the world will not make any difference.

One of my favorite quotes is by Thomas Watson, “nothing so conclusively proves a person’s ability to lead others as what they do from day to day to lead themselves.”  So where are you in your personal journey?  Are you in reality a politician who is accepting a whatever works mentality about life or have you chosen to be a leader who inspires change not only in yourself but in others along the way.  

 

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Inbox

Posted by on December 8, 2008

Everyone knows that getting the important things done each and every day and walking away from everything else is the secret to success.  We all have to process tremendous amounts of information all the time and there are so many things we simply cannot fit into an already loaded schedule.

Sometimes we take relatively simple concepts and make them too complicated.  This is my conviction about the subject of personal productivity.  When something hits my “inbox”, regardless of its source: email, cell phone, mail, interruptions, there are only four possible things I am going to do.

DELETE—If it is not important, I immediately kill it as fast as possible.

DELAY—If if is not urgent that it be done now, I file it for later.

DELEGATE—If it is something someone else can do as well or better than I can, they own it.

DO—If the first three options do not work, then it has to fit into my daily plan.

I will admit this is a very simple process with the exception of one phrase:  IS IT IMPORTANT?

Technology  and productivity may increase your efficiency but they cannot tell you if what you are doing should be done at all.  Only your character and core values personally and professionally can do that.

 

 

 

Categories: Leadership Development Productivity | Comments Off on Inbox

Termination

Posted by on December 5, 2008

This is not a pleasant subject either for the person who needs to go or for the person who made the wrong decision to bring them on the team.  It requires courage and it must be done well or the moral of the entire organization can suffer.

I always feel to some degree as a leader that I have failed when we finally get to this point.  I want to make absolutely sure that I have given this person the right amount of leadership, specific feedback and the necessary resources and training to be successful.

After this due process, how do you know the timing is right?  The two questions that are listed in Good to Great offer some incredible perspective.

 The first is would you hire this person again?  If the clear answer is no, then you know it is time to act.  The second is if they were to go on their own would you be disappointed or relieved?  If the answer is relieved, then you know what you need to do.

Leaders must have the character to act and make the hard calls.  There is clearly one thing worse than  having to deal with an appropriate termination.  The later realization that your entire team had reached this  same conclusion six months ago and were beginning  to wonder why you could not see it.

 

 

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