Leadership is above all, courageous

For all those involved in training Leaders here is further 'Leadership Gold' (via Leadership Now )

• Leadership is the willingness to put oneself at risk.
• Leadership is the passion to make a difference with others.
• Leadership is being dissatisfied with the current reality.
• Leadership is taking responsibility while others are making excuses.
• Leadership is seeing the possibilities in a situation while others are seeing the limitations.
• Leadership is the readiness to stand out in a crowd.
• Leadership is an open mind and an open heart.
• Leadership is the ability to submerge your ego for the sake of what is best.
• Leadership is evoking in others the capacity to dream.
• Leadership is inspiring others with a vision of what they can contribute.
• Leadership is the power of one harnessing the power of many.
• Leadership is your heart speaking to the hearts of others.
• Leadership is the integration of heart, head, and soul.
• Leadership is the capacity to care, and in caring, to liberate the ideas, energy, and capacities of others.
• Leadership is the dream made reality.
• Leadership is above all, courageous

Also see my previous post on this book

Leadership Gold

Here is the Table of Contents from Leadership Gold the latest book from 'leadership guru' John C. Maxwell.


Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Searching for Gold

1. If It's Lonely at the Top, You're Not Doing Something Right
2. The Toughest Person to Lead Is Always Yourself
3. Defining Moments Define Your Leadership
4. When You Get Kicked in the Rear, You Know You're out in Front
5. Never Work a Day in Your Life
6. The Best Leaders Are Listeners
7. Get in the Zone and Stay There
8. A Leader's First Responsibility Is to Define Reality
9. To See How the Leader Is Doing, Look at the People
10. Don't Send Your Ducks to Eagle School
11. Keep Your Mind on the Main Thing
12. Your Biggest Mistake Is Not Asking What Mistake You're Making
13. Don't Manage Your Time-Manage Your Life
14. Keep Learning to Keep Leading
15. Leaders Distinguish Themselves During Tough Times
16. People Quit People, Not Companies
17. Experience Is Not the Best Teacher
18. The Secret to a Good Meeting Is the Meeting Before the Meeting
19. Be a Connector, Not Just a Climber
20. The Choices You Make, Make You
21. Influence Should Be Loaned but Never Given
22. For Everything You Gain, You Give Up Something
23. Those Who Start theJourney with You Seldom Finish with You
24. Few Leaders Are Successful Unless a Lot of People Want Them to Be
25. You Only Get Answers to the Questions You Ask
26. People Will Summarize Your Life in One Sentence-Pick It Now

Conclusion
Notes


With the clarity of the titles to each chapter - and the powerful insights they convey - I wonder if there is any need to read the rest of the book !

The End of Decision-Making - The Start of Judgment ?

Anyone involved with Leadership & Management training will probably view 'Decision-making' as a key cabability/competency to be developed.


Consequently, I'd like to suggest that the latest scholarship from Noel Tichy & Warren Bennis should be essential reading for L&D Consultants (and our HR colleagues).


Judgement - How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls provides a wealth of ideas & information.



"With good judgment, little else matters. Without it, nothing else matters"



So how do they define Judgment ?

"It is a contextually informed decision-making process encompassing three domains: people, strategy and crisis. Within each domain, leadership judgments follow a three-phased process: preparation, the call, and execution. Good leadership judgment is supported by contextual knowledge of one's self, social network, organisation and stakeholders."


This succinctly captures the rich framework provided by the book.



The framework is brought to life by reference to stories from the authors work with world-class leaders and organization. As to be expected from Tichy, GE provides many of these insights.

A bonus is provided in the form of a 'Handbook for Leadership Judgment' (co-written by Chris DeRose & Noel Tichy). This provides a comprehensive diagnostic & self-help guide for leaders willing to take the next step in their personal learning of this subject.

If working through this self-directed learning proves too much of a challenge for the reader - I hope readers don't miss the table on page 292 that compares 'Decision-Making' (a single-moment, analytic, top down process) with 'Judgment' (a dynamic unfolding process, balancing rational & emotional influences, where execution influences how judgments are reshaped).

... and maybe in a few years time the lasting legacy of this work will be the replacing of 'Decision-Making' with 'Judgment' in lists of Leadership Capabilities !

[NB: to see further reviews of this book, you may find it helpful go to the US Amazon site]

People Styles at Work (book review)

I recently read People Styles at Work by Robert & Dorothy Bolton.

This is not a new publication - rather it is the text that supports our basic Interpersonal Skills training in the US.

[this model seems to have attracted more interest in the US than the UK ... and while not particularly robust evidence - it is interesting to see that the US Amazon.com site carries customer reviews of the book, while in the UK they await the first review to be added !]


People Styles (also referred to as The Social Styles Model') was developed ca. 40 years ago by Dr. David Merrill (an industrial psychologist).


'A person's style is his or her pattern of assertive and responsive behavior. The pattern is useful in predicting how the person prefers to work with others.'


While most models of 'psychological types' can be traced back to the foundational work of Carl Jung, the differentiating factor claimed for Social Styles is that it focuses on differences between people's outer behaviours rather than differences in their inner states.


As the quote above highlights - the model (as used by Bolton & Bolton) suggests that this can be focused down to just two dimensions of ASSERTIVENESS and RESPONSIVENESS. Consequently, the Behavioral Inventory (Questionnaire) is a very simple self assessment comprising of 9 questions on each dimension. From this the reader can identify their style as either:

• ANALYTICAL (less assertive, less responsive)
• DRIVER (more assertive, less responsive )
• AMIABLE (less assertive, more responsive)
• EXPRESSIVE (more assertive, more responsive)

As with other tools such as MBTI there is no 'best' style. Each style has characteristic strengths and weaknesses not shared by the other styles.

As the authors state:

'Whether at work or at home, success and happiness involve relating to others across a chasm of significant behavioural differences. Clearly, if you could figure out how to bridge the gap between yourself and others, you could make your own life - and theirs - much easier, happier, and more productive. That in a nutshell is what this book is about.'


In my view, the authors do a good job in clearly communicating the model, and helping the reader understand some key concepts, such as:

• how the specific 'Strengths' for each style become specific 'Weaknesses' when overused
• the different 'Back-up Styles' that tend to emerge in response to excessive stress (typically these behaviours becoming more extreme and inflexible)

The first part of the book focuses on promoting understand of the model and these core concepts. The second part of the book provides clear, step-by-step advice on how to flex your style ('as the key to productive relationships').

In summary, a book of this nature will naturally draw critique of both the author's structuring of information and the model itself. Bolton & Bolton have created a practical and accessible handbook for the Social Styles (People Styles) Model. The value for the reader will however depend on the level of prior exposure to psychological types and related work used in the workplace (be it MBTI, DISC, FIRO, Transactional Analysis, etc). The simplicity of Social Styles provides a helpful starting point to help colleagues understand that not everyone sees the world from the same frame-of-reference as they do ! (ie to build so-called Emotional Intelligence)

As the authors quote:

'The ability to relate well to people has become a critical factor for success in nearly every position in the modern organization'

Speed Lead (Book Review)

I recently received a copy of the book Speed Lead by Kevan Hall (http://www.speedleading.com/).

This is cited as ‘The practical antidote to corporate complexity’. Hall is the founder & CEO of Global Integration Ltd (http://www.global-integration.com/) . Hence this book incorporates the experience of ‘consulting and training more than 35,000 people in over 200 of the world’s leading companies in 40+ countries.’

The book explores four areas where simpler ways of working can speed up results:
Ø Cooperation
Ø Communication
Ø Control
Ø Community

The over-riding message in each of these areas is one of needing to ‘unlearn traditional management skills’. This includes:

Ø ‘deciding when not to be a team’
Ø ‘helping people communicate less’
Ø manager success linked to giving up control, and
Ø avoiding ‘too much investment in the wrong types of community’

‘We came to realise that the traditional line management skills that had made us successful early in our careers were holding us back in a more complex world. We learnt new skills ourselves and by working with hundreds of real teams, we evolved different ways of working to reduce and cope with complexity’


The book is indeed a collection of practical ‘common-sense’ (but often not ‘common practice’) advice, and the author highlights that ‘all of the value is in the implementation – it’s not what you know that counts in management, it’s what you do’.


Memorable descriptors and metaphors bring the concepts to life. In the chapter on Coordination, Hall talks about ‘spaghetti teams’ to illustrate the complexity of co-ordinating interconnected work involving eight or more colleagues. This complexity slows down co-ordination, vs. organising work using ‘star groups’ (in situations where interconnectivity of issues can be minimised).

For those seeking ideas relating to promoting increased empowerment within their organisation, the chapters on Control will be interesting reading. A powerful metaphor is offered for ‘breaking the chains of command’.

‘We use the metaphor of a waterline in working with teams to get them to diagnose the balance of control and autonomy that is right for them.’

On ships the waterline represents a clear point at which risk increases. This is variable depending on the conditions, for example: if the cargo is particularly heavy, or the weather becomes much rougher. Hence the point is made that ‘it is even more important to lower the waterline when you can than to raise it when you must.’

The section on Community covers several themes, particularly the balance of ‘loyalty to the centre’ vs. ‘loyalty to the local’; and also the impact of working with a mix of cultural values. Hall emphasizes that ‘understanding that community is different in complex companies can help you stop investing in unnecessary community and focus your time and effort on where it really adds value’.

My main criticism of the text is the narrow focus of the ideas explored in the section on Communication. In my view Hall rightly emphasizes communication as a ‘major time stealer’. As he states:

‘Communication technology has massively amplified our ability to miscommunicate and given us the ability to confuse far larger groups of people in more varied locations. Its immediacy also makes it too easy to fall into the trap of micro-management.’

Unfortunately the book focuses almost exclusively on achieving an appropriate balance between e-mail, phone and face-to-face communications. No mention is made of Web 2.0 technologies – and the speed advantages of appropriately using blogs, wikis, RSS readers etc. in workplace communications.

Given the breadth of advice being provided, I anticipate that all managers will find new ideas to implement within their organisations. The topic of ‘Speed’ is highly relevant in today’s workplace and the concepts presented are highly practical. The book describes the learning journey of the Global Integration Ltd consultants in their unlearning of (over-emphasising) traditional management skills to better cope with the complexity of modern multi-site companies. Consequently, this book will be particularly helpful for challenging the assumptions of leaders who have also relied on a mix of command and team-working in the past.

A Worthwhile Read

Anyone following this blog, is likely to find value from reading the following book:

'The Changing World of the Trainer - Emerging Good Practice' by Martyn Sloman of CIPD

(published by Elsevier - Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford, UK; 2007; ISBN-13 978-0-7506-8053-0)

The central premise of this text is that:

'A shift is taking place from training, an instructor-led content-based intervention, to learning, which is a self directed work-based process, leading to increased adaptive capacity.'


I would agree with this, and have found that the following quote (that I often refer to in my conference presentations) makes the case for why increased adaptive capacity is so critical.

'At times of change the learner will inherit the earth, while the learned will be equipped for a world that no longer exists' (James Thurber, humorist)