Fresh on the heels of my remarkably fun and productive collaboration with Mary Jo Asmus of Intentional Leadership on “The Words of a Leader,” I feel duty bound to remind you that while words are indeed powerful tools for creation or destruction, it’s your actions that will seal your fate as a leader. Or rather, how well your actions and your words match.
Like bad coffee, I’m not particularly fond of leading by consensus or even seeking consensus as a decision-making tool. I’ve long viewed managing by consensus as a “Tyranny of Mediocrity” approach to leading and making decisions. In seeking consensus, compromises are made that eliminate the more radical, revolutionary innovations and settle on solutions that make as many parties as possible happy.
I often look through the lens of history for lessons in leadership and strategy that can be applied in business. Unfortunately, it seems as most of the pivotal events of human history involve wars. And while war is an odious event, there are many lessons to learn—both good and bad from the leaders that give birth to the events as well as from the leaders and followers that prosecute them.
The passion that a leader brings to his or her work is the secret sauce in a winning recipe for creating an effective working environment and developing a high performance team. Good leaders understand their role, work hard on developing credibility, listen and ask questions and provide coaching and mentoring. Great leaders do all of that and they infuse everyone around them with a sense of excitement for the adventure.
There is a fascinating article on Change Management in a recent issue (Issue 2/2009) of the McKinsey Quarterly (subscription required) by Carolyn Aiken and Scott Keller, entitled: “The Irrational Side of Change Management.” And while much has been written over the years on this important and vexing topic, the authors offer some insights and ideas that they describe as counter-intuitive, but potentially helpful in improving your odds of success with these initiatives. This article alone was for me worth the hefty annual subscription price.
Whether you are a first-time leader, an experienced manager taking over a new team or an informal leader such as a project or product manager, you will be as successful as you are credible. Your credibility is your professional bedrock. Build on it carefully and constantly.
While there is no doubt that strategic planning done right is a valuable management process and tool, in my opinion, we need to change both the vernacular and the approaches to move from strategic planning to conducting strategic conversations. Frankly, I want everyone in my firm thinking, talking and relating their work activities to the firm’s strategies for creating customer value and thumping competitors.
Most of us can recall working with someone that had such a strong, negative impact on the work environment that you could literally feel the emotional mood swing when this person walked into a meeting. For some unknown reason, perhaps a karmic-imbalance in the universe, these toxic characters have the unnerving and disconcerting tendency to be great survivors. While it is easy to intuit that toxic employees are value destroyers, we’ve been short on hard data about the true impact that these individuals have on the work environment. Until now.
Sometimes we learn lessons in interesting ways. I learned the power of "keeping things simple" in an amusing but instructive manner from an early mentor at Panasonic. For leaders looking to manage complexity during these difficult times, I offer my own Six Power Tools for keeping things simple and driving high performance.
Your weekly dose of Leadership Caffeine offers reminders and tips for improving communications, engaging your team members and helping knock down obstacles. Oh, and take a second sip of the iced coffee and spend a few minutes thinking about how you might leverage your firm's values as powerful leadership tools.
