Why is effective leadership important? Perhaps not for when the leader is there, but rather when (s)he isn’t there. Is the vision and purpose of the organization embedded throughout the culture or is the work and the service delivery sporadic and inconsistent.
On a recent trip to Qatar, I met Stephen Kennedy who raved about a recent vacation experience in Malaysia – he couldn’t tell enough people how wonderful it was. And although he never met the manager, he absolutely knew what the manager’s values and priorities were, because they infused the culture of the resort. His leadership came alive in every experience at the resort.
Jim Clemmer, author of Growing @ The Speed of Change (www.JimClemmer.com), speaks of how, in today’s fast-changing times, leadership is required at all levels of the organization to move forward in this latest Leadership180.Net.
One of the most frequent questions I get is “What is this ‘Art of Hosting Meaningful Conversations’ that you use/” To some people, it’s just the techniques, but it’s really far more than that – it’s what makes those processes effective, and that’s what I explain in this latest Leadership180.Net.
As a leader, is it more important to you that people put in the hours they’re supposed to put in or produce their output on schedule? Your answer defines your leadership style.
I was once told of an incident where a team of people in an organization had worked long and hard over a week to complete a project. They had put in evenings and weekend time to finish – and do a great job – by the deadline by Thursday at noon. They were tired, but they pumped – really excited for all they’d accomplished. Because of all the extra time they had put in, they decided to leave Friday at 3pm to have a bit more time over the weekend.
Come Monday morning, their boss was waiting for them and gave them hell for cutting out early. They were supposed to be at work until 5pm and they weren’t there. It didn’t matter that nothing happened and they weren’t needed. They were supposed to be there and he watched the clock to make sure they were.
Well, they instantly went from being hyper-motivated and excited to being totally dejected and demotivated. In those few minutes, their boss killed everything that he had gained from their increased commitment the week before and guaranteed that when the next deadline came, they would never meet it, because they figured ‘why bother?’ And so from that point on, the productivity went down the tubes, deadlines weren’t met and morale was in the toilet because the boss got into a snit about 2 hours they weren’t at their desks when they had already put in 20 extra hours over the preceding week – that they weren’t paid for.
It is simple little choices like this, that every boss makes, that defines their leadership.
In tomorrow’s Leadership180.Net, featuring an interview with Terry Brock, we’ll see inside Skype and find out what choice they make in this type of situation – and what results they get as a result.
Here is the inaugural entry in the video blog, Leadership180.Net – The Global Warming of Leadership. In the past, autocrats and bureaucrats used to be able to run profitable or productive organizations. With the Global Warming of Leadership, that picture has changed, and the leadership that made you successful yesterday won’t keep your head above water today.
Leadership180.Net turns leadership 180 degrees on its head in 180 seconds or less.
70% or more of quality initiatives fail. 80% or more of reengineering initiatives fail. 70% or more of mergers fail to hit their desired financial targets. Could it be the criteria used to evaluate and prepare for these projects that caused this?
In my last post, I suggested five criteria I had discovered for selecting projects that were right-brained. Criteria like ‘passion’, ‘rave’, and ‘breakthrough’. These are not your typical project criteria. Normally, project evaluation is very thorough and left-brained, and should be enough, but is it?
After reading some of the responses to that posting on Facebook, I started thinking about the horrendous failure and abandonment rates for projects and initiatives, large and small (including those cited above). We spend so much time on anal-yzing, and so very little time on the human equation.
If you go back to W. Edwards Deming, the founder of the quality movement and truly understand his philosophy, you’ll realize that the quality philosophy is not about statistical anal-yses. It’s about engaging the human part of the equation. He truly believed that. And yet all that’s taught today is the anal-ytical side of the equation.
Take a look at the projects that have basically succeeded and those that are outstanding successes. What’s the difference? Passion. The human equation. And what’s missing in most projects that fail or are abandoned or go way over cost? The human equation.
Do you want to spend your life struggling or doing outstanding work? You have 29,000 days, give or take, in your life.
There are many criteria for selecting or evaluating projects, but most forget one key factor. I really like the five criteria suggested by Matthew E. May, which he evolved from Tom Peters‘ article, The Wow Project. May’s criteria truly capture what I feel is missing in most anal-yses like this.
The fact is that, no matter how logical your analysis, if there is no commitment or passion for the plan that you move forward on, you’re pushing uphill all the way. And that passion has to be in you and in others.
May’s five criteria are:
Passion (ie: is it meaningful and purpose-ful for you? Is it something you can be excited about?)
Impact (ie: does it have an impact? Will it make a difference?)
Rave (ie: does it create passion in others – create Raving Fans?)
Breakthrough (ie: does it create a breakthrough and greatly improve value?)
Visibility (ie: is it noticeable enough to get the people and resources you need?)
Yes, certainly, you can anal-yze the viability of a project and you have to, but if it’s viable and doesn’t meet these five criteria, is it worth investing time in it?
In a tough economy people are often looking for deals or ways to ‘trim the fat’ or get things for free. If you are looking at investing in where you are going to go strategically, this may be the absolute wrong thing to do.
Tom Peters, one of the most outspoken and flamboyant management speakers from the 80s and 90s once spoke of investing in management development and said you should pay so much that it hurts – because then you have a stake in making it work. My experience lines up with his thinking (and not just because I’m a consultant who earns his living from this work). I appreciate the need for investing wisely, and I seek to give my clients a fair deal and support them all I can. Nearly 20 years of experience have shown me, however, that if people don’t invest, they don’t have anything invested in it working.
Early in my career I worked with two organizations who had limited funds and helped them find government assistance for the work I provided. Those two contracts were the hardest of my career. You see, I guarantee results, and the challenge in that is that my clients need to do the work in the end to produce the results. Because these clients didn’t invest their own money – because it didn’t hurt – they had no vested interest in it, and I had to work 10 times as hard and as much to produce lasting results with them.
There are many other stories I can tell that support this, and the bottom line is that if you really want to make a lasting change, you need to invest. Then you are committed to making it work.
I had an unsettling conversation today with participants in one of my leadership courses. We were talking about mentors, and all those in the room said that they had found it virtually impossible to find a mentor – that nobody had time any more to mentor anyone because of the demands on their own time.
This was very disturbing to me. I know that I’ve had to invest time with coaching clients to strategize to find mentors and that it took some degree of work to do so, but I was not aware until today of how challenging it is to find a mentor. The people in this group said that with the movement to performance management in many companies and the focus on numbers, relationships and support have fallen by the wayside. Everyone is focused on delivering their own numbers and there’s little time left for the ‘luxuries’ of relationships that don’t produce results.
If this is true, this is a sad statement of things today, especially with the younger generation seeking coaching and mentoring on an ongoing basis.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=e554d759-6eb7-4892-964b-7c2393c3e4b3)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=d289bcb2-e1e0-457d-b7ec-970a9814b50e)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=f3866da8-8324-4e01-8878-bfd31069aefa)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=1d9361b7-cfc2-490b-a6c6-28bef5dc0d3b)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=e75b10d8-66a9-4a62-a882-79e17af6c32b)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=9dcd0030-b137-4eac-94c9-f37aab6f2cbd)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=afb41a40-3108-4793-a94f-af8c7e3dbf77)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=cfae73d0-29ec-4377-8647-9592ee4c7795)
