Category Archives: Leadership

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

Leadership

Leadership And Culture

It is the responsibility of leaders to bring about shifts in behavior by having both a vision of integrity for the organization and a strategic plan for ensuring such integrity. This vision must be articulated in a way that is relevant and actionable by employees. A vision that aims too high will not be taken seriously while one that is too pedestrian will not motivate employees. With the spectacle of court TV to avoid, what should a board of directors use to generate a proper picture? The style (or stance) of leadership the board wants to promote demonstrates a capacity to energize subordinates and the public to believe that the organization has risen above its singular contractual obligations and performs at the level for mutual benefit of civil society and stakeholder.

The principal finding of a McKinsey Quarterly survey of more than 1,000 board members is that having focused for a time on accounting-compliance issues, boards are now determined to play an active role in setting the strategy, assessing the risks, developing the leaders, and monitoring the long-term health of their companies.

At one level, the survey underlines the way the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is holding boards–not only in the United States, but also around the world–more responsible for meeting high standards in reporting and controlling the financial affairs of their companies. Yet the implications for governance are even far more reaching. To achieve as much involvement as directors say they want, they will have to use their time in meetings more effectively and develop a new understanding of their roles and responsibilities; otherwise, they will give management the impression they intend to take on day-to-day roles. Moreover, the composition and culture of boards, as well as the agendas of board meetings, will require fresh thinking.

Understanding and choosing the style of leadership necessary to create the desired environment for the organization begins with understanding the various leadership roles available to organizations today.

Leadership as Management: Developed by Friedrich Taylor, this is a managerial role that asks leaders to ensure group activity is timed, controlled, and predictable. This mind-set says little, if anything, about the leadership task of building shared values, trust, and vision. It is silent about the animating essence of business and business people. By relegating workers to the status of “cogs” in the corporate machine, it has scant appeal to the better educated, more aware, and ever-more-wanting people entering the workplace. The need to be rapidly responsive to changes in customer demand for products and services places a strain on the rigid, procedural, control mechanisms developed by this managerial mind-set — to produce traditional outputs with multiple units of the same product to high tolerances and low margins.

Leadership as Excellent (good) Management: This view of leadership, while maintaining the mechanistic operational inclination of the firm, changes the character of the core follower (responding to the pull of the quality movement) and enlarges the domain of the manager. Essentially it retains the idea that leaders and managers do much the same thing. It limits the scope of leadership to just one function — quality improvements — and ignores the full range of capacities of both leader and follower. It does not address the needs of the corporation beyond a focus on high quality.

Values Leadership: This conception of leadership is rooted in the reality of human nature and conduct. The essential human nature is simple; everyone has values and these values trigger behavior. Even as it recognizes the use and importance of values in shaping behavior, out of a false desire to let each person choose their own values, it refrains from advocating any values or even discussing relative merits of alternative value systems. Indeed, it teaches that any value is equal to any other. So it recognizes that values are shaping our lives but fails to address that we do not know how to consciously set our own values systems or evaluate the merits or results of those we see in others. Values leadership clearly has set aside a space to articulate values but seems too timid and unsure to make full use of the space.

Trust Leadership: This view sees its role not so much as a function of the individual leader but as a condition of the group culture. Leadership may be spontaneous at times. Most often, it is a result of specific, planned actions to create a culture conducive to internal harmony and interpersonal trust. The leader’s task is to build a culture of shared values where people can come to trust each other enough to sublimate their differing values so that they can work together. Those accepting this leadership reality see the need for a unified, effective, harmonious culture characterized by mutual trust that allows leadership to take place. It is a collective activity, shaped and controlled by the values-laden notion of harmony as defined by its history of domination by the majority culture. Without a broad and adroit set of critical skills, the trust leader’s search for unity will tend to exclude many important insights, tactics and especially people. This view is likely to accept conformity as consensus or, even worse; it needs conformity and needs to call it consensus.

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Leadership

What is Leadership Training?

The introduction of a successful leader into a management team is a good investment for any organization. Leaders visualize plans, inspire subordinates and plan the required course. Leadership skills comprise of various qualities such as optimism, commitment and the ability to use power effectively.

Leadership training is significant, not only in the world of business, but even in the worlds of sports and medicine. Leadership training is essential for the social and economical set-up of any business. Leadership skills in managers are important ingredients in company’s expansion. These skills are best acquired with the help leadership training. Democratic, autocratic and laissez-faire are the different approaches to leadership training. Each of these is unique and inculcates leadership skills based upon distinct operational patterns.

Training programs are tools that help in the application of leadership skills at work. These skills could have been acquired at leadership skills classes, seminars or read. Individuals as well as organizations specialize in offering leadership training in various fields. There are many organizations that offer online leadership training also. Some of these organizations are even willing to reimburse the money paid for a leadership seminar, if the result is not satisfactory. Leadership training programs are expected to use core and widely agreed upon features of leadership, to bring out the best in people. Leadership involves vision and the ability to influence people and motivate them to work towards it.

Leadership training can be profitable to businesses in a number of ways. It helps to educate the employees, improves their performances and reduces staff attrition. This is beneficial to organizations, as it reduces the cost involved in constantly hiring new employees. It also helps in developing high performance teams. The participants gain a sense of power, which is, the power to guide others and the organization in the right direction, successfully.

Leadership Training [http://www.WetPluto.com/Corporate-Leadership-Training.html] provides detailed information on Leadership Training, Leadership Development Training, Corporate Leadership Training, Leadership Skill Training and more. Leadership Training is affiliated with Leadership Development [http://www.WetPluto.com/Leadership.html].

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Thomas_Morva/44492

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Leadership

Leadership Training Concepts

Leadership training is imparted to individuals who wish to excel in their particular fields of business. There are many important ingredients of any leadership training. It aims to teach skills like time management, management assessment, management skill assessment, executive assessment, management consulting, and other such skills.

There are various leadership training concepts and methods that are employed by those who train people in leadership. Most of the methods are either devised by the faculty themselves for their own training courses or are common ones that are used everywhere. These common leadership training concepts include effective listening where the individuals are taught the benefit of improving their listening skills and building trust with all the parties concerned-including internal people as well as business partners. Other benefits include enlightened leadership skills, future trend analysis in order to stay ahead of the competition, integrated development to improve the functionality of the management, and the like.

Apart from this, various new and improved concepts about business and marketing are also discussed and shared in leadership training programs. These include concepts that involve organizational intelligence, a purpose-driven approach, strategic thinking, and debunking the leadership vision myth.

Many training institutes and courses develop their own leadership training concepts and methodology. The need for this arises because with the changing times since leadership trainings have to undergo certain changes so that they can keep pace with the needs and demands of a modern business and working environment.

Surveys and research conducted by various organizations have proved that leadership training concepts taught in the training programs have made a huge impact on the lives and behavior of the individuals and has meant the difference between success and failure for a lot of organizations.

It is for this reason that any organization that is serious about doing business and growing in the competitive environment cannot afford to ignore leadership training and the various concepts that they teach in such programs. The potential of every individual can be realized only through these programs.

Leadership Training [http://www.WetPluto.com/Corporate-Leadership-Training.html] provides detailed information on Leadership Training, Leadership Development Training, Corporate Leadership Training, Leadership Skill Training and more. Leadership Training is affiliated with Leadership Development [http://www.WetPluto.com/Leadership.html].

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Thomas_Morva/44492