Want to know where to find your best and brightest emerging leaders? Here’s a hint, you’ll have to use your peripheral vision to see them, because they are moving sideways at a high rate of speed. Here are 7 ideas for cultivating Informal Leaders in your organization.
Note: this post is an update on new offerings from Art Petty. It’s been a busy time for new program development, with more to come this spring. Here’s a snapshot of the latest workshops (decision-making, feedback mastery) and a quick peek at some early summer offerings, including a new book, and new on-line course content and coaching offerings:
Your decisions define you as a leader and a manager, yet we spend very little time in our busy lives finding ways to improve our abilities in this area. This Management Excellence Toolkit Series will help you recognize the challenges and pitfalls of individual and group decision-making and offer ideas on improving performance for you and your co-workers. In this segment, I focus on the issues surrounding forecasting and estimating errors, and I offer a number of ideas to improve performance for these important activities.
There’s no doubt we live in interesting times…a true Dickensian Best of Times, Worst of Times environment, filled with remarkable opportunities and equally remarkable personal, competitive, societal and global challenges. Over the past few years and few thousand contacts with professionals on the topic(s) of developing as a professional and developing as a leader, a number of key “capabilities needed for success in these times” have emerged as recurring themes in discussions and group settings. Importantly, these themes or as I describe them, Capabilities, Attributes & Behaviors (CABs) are essential for success at both the individual and organizational levels.
I confess to focusing a great deal recently on the future of leadership. This was evident in my guest post, “The Great and Perilous Leadership Journey Ahead,”at Tanveer Naseer’s site, and in today’s essay, “Leadership Guidance for Our Children.” at the Lead Change site. And while you’re visiting Lead Change, be certain to check out the many great blog posts from some truly outstanding leadership writers and thinkers.
My guest post at Tanveer Naseer’s blog, The Great and Perilous Leadership Journey Ahead, reflects my perspective on the rapidly and radically changing nature of leadership in our emerging environment. Perhaps my subhead says it best: “Welcome to the Leadership Blender.”
By now, most of us have seen or heard news footage of the Carnival Splendor stranded at sea after suffering an engine room fire and a subsequent loss of core systems including most power and importantly, the plumbing. Thankfully, no one was reported injured, but that’s about as good as the news gets in this situation. The fact that something went wrong at sea on one of those floating Mall of Americas is not surprising to me. What is surprising and disconcerting about the situation, is the apparent complete and utter lack of a risk response plan.
Spend enough time writing, speaking and thinking about management and performance, and you’re likely to find yourself looking for lessons in all of your dealings. This certainly held true for me this past weekend, as I engaged in the annual fall ritual of cleaning up the leaves at the northwoods home. While the management guidance here might not make the next issue of HBR, if you ever face several hilly acres of ankle deep leaves, this might just save your back from breaking and your relationships from crumbling!
Over the past several years beginning with the work for Practical Lessons in Leadership with my co-author, Rich Petro, I’ve made a professional hobby out of exploring the fascinating and very real fear that so many people have for delivering constructive feedback. One of my favorite interviews for the book was with a retired CEO who when I posed the question on whether he had any regrets, without hesitating, responded: “I really regret that I never learned how to have the tough discussions with the people that worked for me.” He quickly added, “To this day, I wonder how much money that I cost my companies.”
This most difficult of human interactions in the workplace is also one of the most important. The fear, much like the fear of public speaking is mostly in our minds, and with some deliberate practice, all of us are capable of improving our skills, and as a result, improving our performance, the performance of our teams and of our organizations.
I’ve written on the topic of Strategy Fueled Leadership several times, and fresh off of a great podcast interview with Gary Harpst, author of Six Disciplines Execution Revolution (stay tuned for my posting) and my recent interview with Jocelyn Davis for Strategic Speed, I am on my soapbox again. It is critical to link leadership with strategy and vice-versa and the failure to do this is one of the root causes of strategy and execution failure in organizations.
