What I Read – McKinsey Quarterly, January 2016 Issue.

Tags

Bazigos, Gagnon, health, leadership, McKinsey Quarterly, organization, Schaninger

I read somewhere, that I should make notes of what I read and review them from time to time. I decided to give it a try, since I read a lot and I think making such notes will be for me a way of remembering best ideas, quotes, or whatever from my books and magazines. I also decided to share those notes with you, in edited form as some have gotten pretty long. In many cases I copied whole passages without noting the page numbers, which is against good reference practices, but of course I will list title and author of a book (or article) where I got the notes from.

I do that with hope that at least some of you will reach for mentioned magazine or book when you will find my notes interesting. Ach, one more thing: small number of notes do not mean that the book or magazine was not good…

Here is what I noted from the article “Leadership in context” by Michael Bazigos, Chris Gagnon, and Bill Schaninger:

“Great leaders complicate leadership development […] as the lessons that emerge from one leader’s experience may be completely inapplicable to another’s.”

Agree. Leadership is not a set of universal traits one can copy.

“…If only we had a clear set of keys to effective organisational leadership – a “decoder ring” to understand which practices produce the best outcomes. Our latest research […] does point to one major element of the equation: organizational health.”

“…Organizational health changes over time. Effective situational leadership adapts to those changes by identifying and marshalling the kinds of behaviour needed to transition a company from its present state to a stronger, healthier one.”

“…When we examine survey data through the lens of the different levels of an organization, we find that leading executives typically have more favourable views of its health than do its line workers.”

“…In ailing organizations, for example, the leadership tends to rely on very detailed instructions and monitoring […] A healthier organization’s leadership […] shows greater support for colleagues and subordinates, and sensitivity to their needs […] Leaders at elite organizations challenge employees to aspire higher still by setting stretch goals that inspire them to reach their full potential.”

“…analysis yielded what we call a leadership staircase – a pyramid of behaviour analogous to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In our hierarchy […] some kinds of behaviour are always essential. As organizational health improves […] additional behaviours become apparent.”

“…The following practices are appropriate no matter what a company’s health may be: effectiveness at facilitating group collaboration, demonstrating concern for people, championing desired change, and offering critical perspectives (all of them represent baseline behaviour). The absence of such fundamentals of healthy interpersonal interaction invites disorder […]”

“Companies in the lowest health quartile confront stark […] challenges, such as low-level of innovation, declining customer loyalty, wilting employee morale, the loss of major talent, and critical cash constraints […] these companies lack some or even all of the baseline forms of behaviour […] under trying conditions, the most effective forms of leadership behaviour are making fact-based decisions, solving problems effectively, and focusing positively on recovery (digging out behaviour)”

“…major differentiating leadership characteristic of companies on the upswing is the ability to take practices that are already used at some levels of the organization and use them more systematically, more reliably, and more quickly. This shift calls for behaviour that places a special emphasis on keeping groups on task and orienting them toward well-defined results. Such situations also favour leaders who embrace agility and seek different perspectives to help ensure that their companies don’t overlook possibly better ways of doing things (moving on up behaviour).”

Motivate and bring out the best in others, and Model organizational values – to the top behaviour.

“…Emphasising kinds of behaviour that are not attuned to an organization’s specific situation can waste time and resources and reinforce bad behaviour […] it can make an upgrade to a higher health quartile even more difficult.”

Connecting organizational health to leadership is for me a chicken and an egg problem. In my opinion, organizational health is a result of leadership. If leadership is bad, health of organization is bad. Leadership – or people in position of leaders – affect everything. Sometimes even without knowing about it. Bad leaders will quickly destroy the best and healthiest organization. Therefore before you will be able to somehow use above research results, you need to get rid of bad people first. Good luck in that – before it will be too late.

What I Read – McKinsey Quarterly, January 2015 Issue.

Tags

character, experience, leadership, learning, McKinsey Quarterly

Recently I read somewhere, that I should make notes of what I read and review them from time to time. I decided to give it a try, since I read a lot and I think making such notes will be for me a way of remembering best ideas, quotes, or whatever from my books and magazines. I also decided to share those notes with you, in edited form as some have gotten pretty long. In many cases I copied whole passages without noting the page numbers, which is against good reference practices, but of course I will list title and author of a book (or article) where I got the notes from.

I do that with hope that at least some of you will reach for mentioned magazine or book when you will find my notes interesting. Ach, one more thing: small number of notes do not mean that the book or magazine was not good…

Here is what I noted from the article “Decoding leadership: What really matters” by Claudio Feser, Fernanda Mayol, and Ramesh Srinivasan:

Telling CEOs these days that leadership drives performance is a bit like saying that oxygen is necessary to breathe. Over 90 percent of CEOs are already planning to increase investment in leadership development because they see it as the single most important human-capital issue their organizations face.

Our most research suggests that a small subset of leadership skills closely correlates with leadership success, particularly among frontline leaders.

What we found was that leaders in organizations with high-quality leadership teams typically displayed 4 of the 20 possible types of behaviour. […]Those 4 explained 89 percent of the variance between strong and weak organizations in terms of leadership effectiveness:

• Solving problems effectively. The process that precedes decision-making is problem solving, when information is gathered, analysed and considered.
• Operation with a strong results orientation. Leaders with a strong results orientation tend to emphasise the importance of efficiency and productivity and to prioritize the highest-value work.
• Seeking different perspectives. This trait is conspicuous in managers who monitor trends affecting organizations, grasp changes in the environment, encourage employees to contribute ideas that could improve performance, accurately differentiate between important and unimportant issues, and give appropriate weight to stakeholder concerns.
• Supporting others. Leaders who are supportive understand and sense how other people feel.

For organizations investing in the development of their future leaders, prioritizing these four areas is a good place to start.

I personally find that leadership many parts experience, some patience, some character and only a little training. Unless that training was done in form of mentoring by someone already possessing qualities we seek. I also think that not everyone can be a good leader, despite notion that it can be learned. First item in the list above is grounded in experience, third in part as well. Second and fourth is a character trait. Look for people who already have those things and let them work. Teaching someone to be result oriented when he is process oriented makes not that much sense… at least to me. I guess that this is why most of the funds spent on leadership courses are wasted.

Custom Made Leaders

Tags

Buckingham, custom made, Harvard Business Review, HBR, leadership, leadership type, program

In June issue of Harvard Business Review I have found an article by Mr. M. Buckingham called “Leadership Development In the Age of The Algorithm” (link to it here). It is an article I was waiting for – I knew it must be out there somewhere, and sha-bum, here it is!

All the schools and scholars all over the world are trying to drop every conceivable leadership quality into one pot, stir it and cook a cake which is then fed to every business (or other) school student. We all knew that this approach did not (as it could really not) work – because people are different. We all like (or prefer) different things, in turn feeling better – or feeling ourselves – when doing those things. Author of mentioned article correctly noticed that and asked himself a question: if we are different, why not tailor leadership training to a particular leadership type? He and his company did some tests and came up with 9 different leadership categories, called “strength roles” (some of them are Adviser, Connector, Creator or Provider) with distinctive differences as per leadership concepts used. Those concepts (not techniques, as the article correctly pointed out) can be shared and used by leaders of the same category. So if we know a good leader from Adviser category, his concepts can be useful (and feel naturally when used) by all other Advisers. If though Adviser will be taught to use concepts of Creator, this may feel unnaturally and so come across to led people. And they will notice.

I like that concept of custom, tailor made leadership program. We should introduce it at schools and workplaces. All of us have some strengths and weaknesses, we should build and reinforce those strengths, not force people to act unnaturally. New leaders would be all that much credible to all of us.

The Progress Principle

Tags

Amabile, catalyst, inhibitor, Kramer, leadership, nourishment, The Progress Principle, toxins

“The Progress Principle” by T. Amabile and S. Kramer book reads a little as a forcefully extended magazine article. Authors introduced their – admittedly good – idea and presented research methods used for its confirmation. This was sprinkled with stories made up to protect identities of actors participating in real events, based on which those stories were created. This resulted in above book.

The idea is very simple but in that simplicity also great. Instead of managing people, you should manage progress in order to get more of it. What denotes progress principle? According to the book, those are “…events signifying progress, including:

• small wins
• breakthroughs
• forward movement
• goal completion” (p85)

That is achieved with help of  The Catalyst Factors (events supporting work) and The Nourishment Factors (events supporting the person). What those exactly are can be found in the book, but you can expect such obvious things there as resources, setting clear goals, respect etc. Of course Progress is hindered by setbacks, inhibitors and toxins, which consist of things opposite to above mentioned positive factors.

What did I learn from that book? Two things, which were not so obvious to me before I started reading it. The first is that negative factors at work carry approximately three times more weight than positive factors. In other words, if I will be disrespectful towards my employee, it will take at least three positive events involving that same employee to balance that blunder out. Secondly, the importance of paying attention to even small wins (progress) is difficult to overestimate.

All in all, the ideas could be familiar to good and experienced project managers. Experienced and wise, as human factor (empathy, compassion, social intelligence, respect) came through as well. But voicing them and presenting them in form of a tool which any manager can use every day is something new, which authors managed to do very well.

The Only Discipline

Tags

leadership, mind set, organisation, Peter M. Senge, systemic view, The Fifth Discipline

I am about to finish “The Fifth Discipline” by Peter M. Senge and I have to admit that this is the best management book I have read so far. It is in fact so good, that if I had to give just one book to every manager in any organisation, this would be my choice. It is missing all the theories behind the “five forces”, “chi-square”, “balanced scorecard” and other smarty stuff, it does not even have accounting principles or any “four ways” or “ten tips”. Instead it presents basic ideas as per how to really lead the organisation you work for, how to solve problems it encounters and how to learn on the way. Leading idea of this book is a systemic view of organisation and generally life as we know it, supported by the organic view on all enterprises.

He confirms what we already know – that putting down the fires serves nothing else except supporting our egos, or egos of our executives, who by solving every day problems can then demonstrate how useful for organisations they are. This “fireman” approach does present short-term results which only reinforce similar behaviour. But in the long run the underlying issues are not being solved, because that would require longer term thinking, systematic analysis and maybe even admission that the source of the problem lie in part in us.

The second idea goes hand in hand with the first – as with any living organism, many functions do not require control or conscious thinking about performing certain basic tasks. Too much control (or concentration of thought) in one area leaves the other areas open. Let the brain set the course, legs will know how to walk there and ands will know how to balance that walk. Extrapolate this onto organisations and you should let the HQ set the course, but at the same time allow your units to be self responsible and independent in getting there.

Lastly, what really is important, is the fact that we do operate through mind-sets of which we are not even aware of. Discovering them through proper dialogue may give you an enlightening experience. Have enough courage to open yourself up and give an example to others, who knows where this will take you.

All in all, a collection of great ideas. But as with any ideas, all of them will remain subjects to talk about if no one will use them. Here though it really is worthwhile to explore them and stay committed. Peter M. Senge’s fifth discipline may as well be the only one you really need.