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Leadership

Can Leadership be Measured?

Leadership matters. Any one person may have an effect on the behavior of others at any time. The nature and intent of that effect determines the influence, direction and outcome of leadership. Organizations depend on leadership for direction, momentum and a plan for sustainable success. How do we recognize leadership exists? How do we develop leadership? How can leadership be measured? These are questions this article seeks to explore.

How do we recognize leadership or know that it exists? Generally, leadership is defined by characteristics and results. Yet formal leadership development nearly always focuses exclusively on characteristics, relying on hope that results will ensue. Unfortunately, leadership is seldom really measured beyond an intuitive or anecdotal approach.

For example, a person in a leadership role is deemed “successful.” We want to replicate the leader’s success, so we try to replicate the characteristics, skills, values, competencies, actions and behaviors of the leader. We edify and attempt to emulate these qualities in others, but we seldom get the same results. Corporate America is full of “competency-based” leadership development programs, what one might call the “injection-mold” approach. Competency-based leadership development has an effect on organizational culture, no doubt, but not always the desired effect. Leaders who somehow “measure up” to the desired competencies do not always produce desired results.

Ultimately, producing results is the reason we study leadership, the reason we seek to develop leaders, the very reason we need leaders. So it stands to reason that leadership also has been measured based on the results produced, regardless of how those results were achieved. We need look no further than Richard Nixon or Kenneth Lay to recognize the down side of such one-dimensional measures.

The leader’s role is to establish the conditions (the culture, the environment) under which others can take right action to achieve desired results. “Desired results” are best defined by the vision, mission, values and goals of the team or organization. Therefore, leadership is best measured by the how well followers execute the vision, mission and goals while “living out” the desired values. This leads us to a new premise: that leadership should be measured by the results produced and how they are produced, as so often stated. However, there is a critical third element, that is, by whom are the results produced. If it is the leader that produces the desired results, then this should rightfully be attributed to individual action without any contributing effect from the behavior of others.

There is an obvious link between communication and leadership — the basic reason for communication and for leadership is to prompt some form of behavioral response or action. Leaders must communicate by speaking, listening, reading, writing and action. Leaders produce results and as other authors have stated, “Leaders get results through people.” Follower behavior, not leader behavior, defines leadership. This might lead one to argue, wrongly, that there is little difference between leadership and coercion. Coercion, or creating an environment using fear or incentives as motivational tools, may work temporarily yet is seldom sustainable. Performance declines, conflict ensues or people leave.

Ultimately, the brand of leadership we seek in contemporary life is best defined, developed and measured based on whether intended results are achieved, how they are achieved, the value of these results to others, and whether followers take discretionary action to achieve the leader’s vision, mission and goals. Leadership depends on the achievements of followers. Leadership development must be tied to intended results of those who are lead more than competency sets of those who lead. Evidence of effective leadership can be found in the daily attitudes and habits of followers. Ultimately, leadership can be measured by the achievement of discretionary goals by followers.

Mark A. Sturgell, CBC, is a Certified Business Coach and president of Performance Development Network. Mark helps build the capacity of individuals, teams and organizations ranging from small non-profits to global 100 corporations by helping them achieve the measurable results they really want. Mark helps individuals discover their own potential and achieve more. He helps organizations develop cultures where continuous learning and improvement, higher levels of achievement, standards of excellence and exceeding customer expectations prevail…because organizations don’t fail, people do.

Visit http://www.pdncoach.com to learn more about how Mark can help you. Typical clients include growth-oriented individuals, domestic and global businesses (or business units), non-profits and government agencies. Services vary depend on customer needs, but generally involve customized solutions, goal achievement and problem-solving strategies that improve management, team, individual or organizational performance.

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Mark_Sturgell/97023

 

Leadership

Thoughts on Leadership

Today, modern corporate organizations face compound pressures driven by competition, talent finding and retention, globalization, financial expectations, technology innovation, energy trends, diverse workforces, environmental sustainability, corporate responsibility, the proliferation of the Internet, etc. The bottom line is that maintaining the status-quo or doing marginally better is not a formula for success. Change management and adaptation is ever more necessary to be able to set direction, to identify priorities, to manage complexity, and to deliver exceptional results.

John Kotter, Konosuke Matshushita Professor of Leadership at Harvard maintains that “Most US corporations are over managed and under led.” In essence, today’s managerial jobs require management and leadership skills with varying degrees of focus. The higher we go on the corporate ladder, the greater the demand for leadership ability. Thus, the increasingly fast changing environment we face requires more leadership from more people. To cope with these forces good mastery of leadership and management skills is essential in order to marshal and manage any organization effectively. Hence, the great need to institutionalize leadership development. “Institutionalizing a leadership centered culture–where the business rewards people who successfully develop leaders–is the ultimate act of leadership.” (Kotter 51-65, 1999).

Leadership Differs from Management

Webster’s Third New International Dictionary defines leader as “a person who by force of example or qualities of leadership plays a directing role, wields commanding influence, or has a following in any sphere of activity.” The strength of leadership comes from the enrolment of minds to a common cause or vision, and the release of intrinsic motivation to achieve extraordinary results. This means that anyone in an organization can be a leader, whether or not that individual is formally identified as such. Indeed, informal leaders are extremely important to the effectiveness of most organizations.

Allen Scherr and Michael Jensen (2-4) offered in their recent Barbados Group Working Paper that “a leader is an ordinary human being with both a commitment to deliver a result–whose realization would be remarkable and visionary given the current circumstances–and the integrity to execute on this commitment to accomplish the desired results.” One key idea of this definition is that “integrity” in the sense of leadership includes honoring your word–and that means either keeping your word or acknowledging that one will not be keeping it, and cleaning up any mess that causes for those who were counting on that word being kept.” (Erhard et al. 36).

Kotter defines management as being about coping with complexity, planning and budgeting, organizing and staffing, controlling and problem solving. To this end, he asserted that management involves setting targets and goals, establishing detailed plans for reaching goals, allocating resources, establishing organizational structure, delegating authority and responsibility, monitoring results vs. plan, identifying deviations from plan, and planning and organizing solutions (51-65, 1999). Consequently, what great managers have in common is an appreciation of their strengths as well as an understanding of their limitations. Being aware that performance hinges on how well they figure out the pressures and priorities of their particular job, they find a course that works for them. According to Sternberg “finding this individual path to success is the hallmark of managerial intelligence.” (314-315).

Management is fundamentally about minimizing risk and maximizing adherence to plan and predictability. In comparison, leadership copes with the unknown, the dreams, and the vision that generates breakthrough performance. Accordingly, what one person views as possible may be a pipe dream to another. The subject of leadership is one where the results to be produced are accompanied by greater risk and uncertainty than what is normally considered to be acceptable in the realm of management. A scholarly gem of the Renaissance was Machiavelli’s The Prince (1513/1962). Machiavelli’s thesis is as good today as it was in 1513. It declared that “there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”

Obviously, both leadership and management are vital for a well-functioning organization. It is critical to emphasize and understand Kotter’s incisive conclusion about the tensions between leadership and management: “. . . even more fundamentally, leadership and management differ in terms of their primary function. The first can produce useful change, the second can create orderly results which keep something working efficiently. This does not mean that management is never associated with change; in tandem with effective leadership, it can help produce a more orderly change process. Nor does this mean that leadership is never associated with order; to the contrary, in tandem with effective management, an effective leadership process can help produce the changes necessary to bring a chaotic situation under control.” (Kotter 7, 1990). This conflict can be useful; however, it is not a trivial exercise. Proper balance is essential for both short-term and long-term success of any business.

Leadership is about being comfortable with change, and understanding that the status quo works against progress in most cases. Every quarter and every month, there is change–things are in constant motion. While others may not be aware of this, leaders assume it. In knowing that change is inevitable, the true leader seeks positive change for a purpose and for the better. Kotter defines leadership as consisting of the following three elements: 1) establishing direction, 2) aligning people, and 3) motivating and inspiring them. This is a great definition but the paper of Allan Scherr and Michael Jensen, adds further insight into the domain of leadership by agreeing with Kotter’s work but adding two more elements: “Communicating breakdowns, and managing breakdowns.” (Scherr, Jensen 4).

Legendary leader, Jack Welch remarked in a WSJ editorial (2004) that after 30 years of leading he knows what leaders look like and act like. His process assesses four essential traits (each one starting with an E, a nice coincidence): 1) great positive Energy, 2) ability to Energize others, 3) Edge or the courage to make tough yes-or-no decisions, and 4) Execution follow through to get the job done. He concluded his assessment with an observation about integrity and general intelligence as necessary attributes to complete the profile of a strong leader type.

As we gather, there is no shortage of leadership definitions. The many dimensions into which leadership has been cast can make the subject ambiguous. Nevertheless, there is adequate similarity among definitions to find common ground. Leadership has been conceived as the exercise of influence, as a function of personality, as a mode of persuasion, as particular behaviors, as a means to achieve future visions, as an approach to induce commitment, as a creative mind set, as an achievement instrument, and as a mixture of such conceptions.

Situational Theories of Leadership

The inability of researchers to recognize conclusively all the dimensions of leadership resulted in the development of four popular situational theories of leadership. These theories propose that the most effective leadership style depends upon situational variables, especially the characteristics of the group and the nature of the task.

Hersey and Blanchard developed a “Situational Leadership” model that harmonized different combinations of task behavior and relationship behavior with the maturity of the followers. Depending on the readiness of the subordinates, the appropriate leadership style is first telling; then selling; then participating; and finally, for highly mature followers, delegating (Vecchio 334-350).

The most extensively researched situational leadership theory is Fred Fiedler’s “Contingency Theory” of leadership. Fiedler used the LPC scale to measure the leader’s orientation toward either the task or the person. The most appropriate leadership style was then determined by assessing three situational variables: whether the relationships between the leader and the members were good or poor, whether the task was structured or unstructured, and whether the power position of the leader was strong or weak. When these three situational variables created an extremely favorable or extremely unfavorable situation, the most effective leadership style was a task-oriented (low LPC) leader. However, a leader with a high concern for interpersonal relationships (high LPC) was more effective in situations where there were intermediate levels of favorableness (Ayman et al. 351-377).

The “Path Goal” model is another situational leadership theory. This theory is derived from expectancy theory and suggests that effective leaders must clarify the goal paths and increase the goal attractiveness for followers. Four distinct leadership styles are proposed in the model: directive, supportive achievement-oriented and participative leadership styles. The most appropriate style depends upon two types of situational factors: the characteristics of the follower and the characteristics of the environment. Three of the most important follower characteristics include the locus of control, authoritarianism, and personal abilities. The three environmental factors include the nature of the task, the formal authority system within the organization, and the group norms and dynamics (House et al. 259-273).

Vroom and Yetton’s “Normative Decision-Making” model is also a situational leadership theory since it identifies the appropriate styles leaders should use in making decisions. The three leadership styles include autocratic decision making, consultative decision making, and group decision making. The decision titles determining which style is most appropriate include such questions as whether the leader has adequate information to make the decision alone, whether the subordinates will accept the goals of the organization, whether subordinates will accept the decision if they do not participate in making it, and whether the decision will produce a controversial solution (Vroom 278).

Although most of the literature on leadership emphasizes the influence of the leader on the group, the influence of the group upon the leader should not be overlooked. The relationship between the leader and the group implies a reciprocal influence. Groups have the capacity to influence the behavior of their leaders by responding selectively to specific leader behaviors. The influence of a leader can also be constrained by several external factors, such as organizational policies, group norms, and individual skills and abilities. Other variables have been found to neutralize or substitute for the influence of a leader, such as the skills and abilities of followers and the nature of the task itself.

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Leadership

How Can the Role of Leadership Be Best Understood in Organizational Change?

Leadership as the Head

The Head offers a prescriptive long-range strategic framing of the role of leadership in organisational change, common in bureaucratic approaches to organisational theory. The Head may take a normative re-educative approach influencing bodily reactions to stimuli; asserting power with mind over matter to affect change in a power-coercive approach; or making decisions to improve the wellbeing of the body to perform better by employing an empirical-rational leadership approach.

In this context the role of leadership relies heavily on the bureaucratic position, political power, authority and an implicit assumption that all change is a result of a planned change strategy, whether continuous or episodic. It also assumes that it is driven from the top in a linear way influencing how the Body responds. This enables the change process to be modelled, simplified and implies that the Head knows what is going to happen and can control events and how the Body changes based on rational decisions-making. Thus the Head offers a normative approach, which can determine the beginning, middle and end of the change process and the Body is a socially constructed entity regulated by domination, control and power.

The biology of the Human Body exposes the limitations of this perspective. Bodily responses to circumstances are often subconscious. Mind over matter does not account for the complexity of system responses. Leadership as Head does not account for context or causality and implies organisations operate in a vacuum. It also concentrates the power to drive change programmes on senior management without recognizing minority influence, the reality of incremental strategy and ignores success achieved from mistakes and high level of failure in planned change programmes.

Leadership as the Heart

The Heart positions the role of leadership as the change agent. Focusing on charisma and leadership traits the Heart delivers organisational change through individual power and adaptation more often associated with emergent change and an interpretative paradigm. The Heart positioned at the centre of the Body remains sensitive to the environment, connected and responding to the needs of each member part of the Body. Although the Heart provides support for followers, it may put concern for itself above others metaphorically withdrawing support from extremities to protect the core organs.

The term ‘raison d’etre’ is often used to describe the vision, values or purpose of an organisation. The Heart has its own rules, draws strength from within and uses discourse to create desire for or a fear of organisational change. Adopting the tenets of Human Relations and post Bureaucratic Theory Heart as Leadership humanizes and individualises organisational change to include notions of fairness and consistency reducing resistance. However the Heart may resist change and it is difficult to evidence the interactions and processes between Heart and Body.

The physiology of the Body demonstrates the difficulty of the post Bureaucratic argument. The Heart is still in a position of power and control. The Heart assumes that charisma provides energy for change and suggests Heart failure results in failure of the vision expounded by the Heart. But a charismatic leader may only be able to lead because the followers share the vision, values and purpose in the first place. If the change the Heart wants does not fit the Body, failure will occur despite the charisma of the Leader. Unlike the Head that changes methods of control to gain acceptance, the Heart’s role as leader may, like a donor organ, be accepted or rejected by the Body.

The Body

It is the sum of the parts of the Body operating together that delivers healthy organisational change, every part an equal part of a system that relies on and impacts other elements of the Body. The Body represents a socio-technical approach to organisational change requiring consideration of not just the role of Leadership but its affect and impact of and on the organisation’s stakeholders, processes, context, leadership and employees. But this panoramic framing can make the study of organisational change abstract and impractical.

Positivist approaches to the role of Leadership rely on the Body remaining constant, enabling a mechanistic method of control that can be cloned. However a determinist view of the Body suggests it has its own DNA, system interactionism, controls and capability that create a unique context for organisational change.

Invoking an OD perspective, every element of the Body is part of, a determinate of and a product of the system. Change any one part of an organisation, deliberately or by accident, and the organisation changes. Work against the Body and resistance, drag and natural barriers affect the opportunity for healthy change. Work with the Body and participative change becomes self-sustaining.

Like the Body changes occur both inside and outside the control of the organisation. Organisational change happens by planning for the changes that can be controlled and adjusting to unplanned changes.

Rather than fighting against organisational context, trying to impose unnatural order, the role of Leadership seeks to find balance and use naturally occurring resources, cycles and controls in driving organisational change.

Headless or Heartless

The metaphor of the Human Body uses a unitarist construct of the organisation and a realist assumption that organisational change is inevitable, continuous transformation is necessary for organisational health and that the momentum of change will continue. But organisational change, like leadership, is a social construction. Without knowledge of whether organisational change would have occurred anyway it is difficult to understand what influence the role of leadership does or does not have on its significance, explanation or cause. Identifying organisational change as healthy assumes there is evidence that no change would be more or less healthy, than the organisational change that results from Leadership actions.

A Body needs both a Head and Heart to survive. Power and politics are often portrayed as bad rather than appreciating that politics and power help address the competing demands for stability and change.

The role of Leadership in directing and managing organisational change necessitates both Head and Heart. Heart without Head may result in unsuitable or unnecessary change but Head without Heart may result in resistance.

The metaphor of the Human Body accepts Leadership rationality and control are important, which is more appropriate to classical approaches to organisational change and Leadership.

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Leadership

The Fundamental Purpose of Leadership

It’s time to question the traditional assumption of leadership’s fundamental purpose. The textbook account focuses on the leader’s role in maximizing employee performance. All the decades of writing about leadership style beginning over 50 years ago focuses on how different styles affect the motivation and productivity of employees. When we question the conventional purpose of leadership and offer a different foundation, we get a very different conception of leadership. Until we recognize the need for a radical shift in perspective, our vision of leadership will remain stuck in the past.

Having an internal focus on employee performance was acceptable for leadership prior to the 1970’s. But since the success of the Japanese commercial invasion, business has increasingly operated in an era of hyper-competition where rapid innovation changes whole markets overnight. In the old days of leadership theory, business was not so competitive. Then, business’s only task was to execute as cost effectively and profitably as possible. Today, there is also the need for businesses to be constantly re-inventing themselves, to be continuously creating new futures. For leaders to be successful now, they must have an external focus.

The new purpose of leaders is to ensure that new futures are created as rapidly as their external markets evolve. All organizations now have two equally important tasks: to deliver today’s results and to create the future. The principle of division of labor suggests that we need two separate functions for these very different tasks. Management needs to be upgraded from a narrowly controlling, mechanistic function to take care of today’s business, leaving leadership to champion changes to enhance competitive advantage.

So, what are the implications of this shift in emphasis? Well, if your sole reason for being is to maximize employee productivity, you need to be in charge of the people whose performance you want to improve. You need a formal position of authority over them. You need the authority to promote, move, develop, train and pay in accordance with merit. People can be motivated by informal leaders but none of the other productivity-enhancing decisions can be made without formal authority.

Not so with the new leadership. Promoting new products, services or better processes can be done by anyone, regardless of their formal roles. Even a consumer group criticizing an existing product line could show leadership from the outside to the organization. This new conception of leadership is the only way to make sense of bottom-up leadership. If leadership is merely the successful promotion of new products, then front-line employees can do it. The Sony employee who invented PlayStation is a good example. He showed bottom-up leadership to the senior executives at Sony whose initial reaction to the idea of PlayStation was to protest that Sony doesn’t do toys.

The role of senior executives is now more multifaceted. They need to both lead and manage. But leadership, as conceived here, has nothing to do with motivating employees to perform better, contrary to the textbook account. So-called transformational leadership became popular because it was felt that employees needed to be really inspired to give of their best. But now, we need to shift everything to do with motivating employees to management, leaving leadership free to promote enhancements to competitive advantage. Why? Because we need a definition of leadership that makes sense of how leadership can be shown bottom-up which has nothing to do with motivating employees to work harder. The sole purpose of leadership, therefore, is to promote new directions. It is management’s job to execute them.

Leaders must have an external focus to be effective; managers can focus internally. Both leadership and management are equally essential organizational functions, but only management is a formal role. Leadership is an informal, occasional act, like creativity, not a role. Senior executives are managers by virtue of their roles, not leaders. If their businesses are operating successfully and don’t need innovation or process improvements to succeed, then these organizations don’t need any leadership. This is a second radical implication of the new vision of leadership, the first one being that leadership has nothing to do with managing people or getting things done through them.

Keep in mind that, if leadership equates to the successful promotion of new products, services or process improvements, and if anyone can do it regardless of position, then employees with no one reporting to them can show leadership. This is a liberating conclusion, but one that has revolutionary implications for our understanding of leadership.

See http://www.leadersdirect.com for more information on this and related topics. Mitch McCrimmon’s latest book, Burn! 7 Leadership Myths in Ashes was published in 2006.

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Mitch_McCrimmon/79532

 

Leadership

Why Our Concept Of Leadership Needs To Change

Leadership theory is confused at the moment. It’s at a crossroads. Being a leader used to mean providing direction, but this idea is waning in popularity. Why? Because the world is changing:

o The boss no longer has all the answers; the world is too complex.

o Knowledge workers want to have their say, not be told what to do.

o The power of position and respect for authority are receding.

o We are into an era of partnership where hierarchy is downplayed.

o Loyalty is gone. Ordering people around only motivates them to leave.

Two ways to respond to the leadership crisis

1. We can say that leadership no longer involves providing direction. Instead it facilitates, empowers, develops, nurtures and inspires others to find their own directions. The new leader is a coach or supporter of others, not someone who calls the shots.

2. We can hold onto the idea that leadership indeed does point to new directions but say that leadership can be as much bottom-up as top-down. This means that bosses are doing something different when they support others. Dare we call this simply good management?

Pros and cons of these two ways of viewing leadership

The first option has the advantage of preserving the idea that people in charge of groups are leaders. They just have to behave differently. The disadvantage is that such a minor tweaking of the status quo does not do justice to an uncomfortable fact:

The power to move an organization in new directions is shifting from positional authority and the force of personality to the power of ideas. Because of innovation, business today is a war of ideas.

This fact suggests that leadership is becoming divorced from position, that anyone with a good idea for a better product or service who successfully promotes it to the organization-at-large is showing leadership. The second option accounts for our inconvenient truth a lot better. Hence, we need to say that leadership promotes new directions while management focuses on getting things done.

To make this view credible, however, we need to upgrade management. Instead of seeing management as a mechanistic controlling function, we need to see it as an inspiring, liberating, facilitative and supportive function. This is closer to reality. Facilitation is just facilitation. It does not somehow mysteriously become leadership just because someone in charge of a group is doing it.

If you have people reporting to you, showing leadership means promoting a better or new way of doing things. When you draw solutions out of your team, develop, coach and support them, you are wearing a management hat. In short, leadership sells the tickets for the journey; management drives the bus to the destination. It is not this simple, however. During major change, leadership will be needed on a continual basis to keep selling the advantages of the journey. But management is also necessary – good skills for motivating and coordinating the diverse inputs of a wide range of stakeholders.

Why is this important?

People in charge of organizations or large teams are overloaded with an excessive share of ownership for organizational success. Everyone else depends on them far too much. Empowerment was a small step in the direction of sharing ownership. If we want to engage and retain top knowledge talent and win the innovation war, we need to go much further and recognize that leadership is no longer about managing a team but a matter of promoting new ways of prospering in the fierce war of ideas regardless of who is doing it.

Implications

If you think these ideas are straightforward, check out a few of their implications:

– Leadership has nothing to do with getting things done or managing people. This is a management function.

– Leadership is not a role, only management is, hence there are no such things as formal leadership positions.

– Leadership can come from outside the organization as well as bottom-up. Anyone, inside or outside the organization who champions a new way forward is showing leadership if the organization follows.

– It is more important for management to be emotionally intelligent than it is for leadership. Front line knowledge workers who promote new products in an insensitive manner could still show leadership if they can make a sufficiently strong case for their ideas.

Conclusion

We need to revolutionize our thinking about leadership for a digital world where no one can monopolize it simply because no one has a monopoly on good ideas.

See http://www.leadersdirect.com for more information on this and related topics. Mitch McCrimmon’s latest book, Burn! 7 Leadership Myths in Ashes was published in 2006.

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Mitch_McCrimmon/79532