The Practice of Leadership

Book Review: Leadership is Dead

George Ambler — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 18:05:03 +0000

Leadership is Dead: How Influence is Reviving It is by Jeremie Kubicek (@jeremiekubicek), President and CEO of GiANT Impact, a leadership development organisation involved in the Chick-fil-A Leadercast, as well as other leadership initiatives and programs.

Overview

The book’s structure is fairly straightforward. Chapters one through four provide context and theory, and then chapters five through nine provide practical steps and applications.

Why the title “Leadership is Dead”? This is the question that comes to the minds of many who read the book’s title. The best way of answering this is in the works of the author.

“In my view, leadership as we have known it is dead because far too many leaders have abused their positions and lost their moral bearings.
From the banking industry collapse to corporate greed, these leaders have abandoned all long-term responsibility and discipline in favor of short-term gains.
The runaway greed of Wall Street’s leadership, skyrocketing salaries for corporate executives, and unkept promises from political leaders have left most people feeling betrayed and jilted. Not only do we not trust our leaders, but in many cases, employees are becoming victims of these unresponsive leaders.
Consequently, most leaders are now viewed with cynicism and skepticism, and many have lost the trust of those they are supposed to inspire and motivate.”

It’s not that leadership is dead, it’s the way in that many choose to lead that is dead. Realizing that command and control styles of leadership don’t work anymore, Kubicek sees leadership as influence, “I realized that positive leadership occurs not by ‘leading’ others but rather by influencing them.” The leadership theory presented in the book is based on what Kubicek calls, “The Influence Model”, which describes how leadership is a process of influence, where influence occurs through…

“…a hunger to serve others and the willingness to self-assess and self-motivate through the process to maintain healthy, authentic relationships.”

The book goes on to explore the enemy of influence, self-preservation. Kubicek posits, the instinctual need to protect the self is why leadership is dead. To rise above self-preservation and to be effective, the influence model is supported by seven leadership actions, that are important for leaders seeking to exert influence in the lives of others. These seven actions are as follows:

Give trust to become trustworthy
Become credible, not just smart
Be intentional in your influence
Break through your walls of self-preservation
Pursue relationship before opportunity
Give yourself away
Become significant in your impact.

These seven action lead to influence and to have influence, is to have power. You cannot talk about leadership as influence without touching on the use of power.

“Influence is about power. Before you can become a leader, you need to determine how you will use your power…. Leadership is influence. Influence is power. In wielding that power, a leader can choose to use it in one of two ways: To empower and liberate or To overpower and dominate”

So, the choice by leaders on how they use power is critical. Are you as a leader using power to dominate or to liberate? The best leaders use power to liberate!

The book ends with a challenge, with the chapter titled, “Why You Probably Won’t Do This.” In this chapter, Kubicek makes the following observation.

“Most leaders never reach the levels of significant influence because their instincts for self-preservation are too strong…. True influence comes when you change yourself to change the world.”

Analysis

The book is very well-written, primarily from a business perspective and remains engaging from beginning to end. Kubicek does not use research or other well-known leadership authors in support of the his leadership ideas. Given this, much of the ideas and concepts presented in the book seems to be largely influenced by Kubicek’s personal and business experience.

Kubicek is not the first leadership author to advocate, leadership as influence and that we need an alternative approach to the out-dated, but still very much practiced, command and control leadership style. Many of the themes and ideas seem to be strongly influenced by a servant leadership approach, which is not a new idea. For those who want to explore the idea of servant leadership more deeply I would recommend reading Robert Greenleaf’s book “Servant Leadership.”

If not new, the book is timely, written as a wake up call to leaders, in a time when much of society is disillusioned and sceptical of most leaders. In this respect the book has a very relevant and important message for leaders today.

The book makes for a convincing argument for a leadership style focused more on influence. However, I would have like to have seen more emphasis on providing the reader with tools to help people move towards becoming more influential leaders.

In summary, although there is little new in the book, it’s message this is a timely, especially in the current environment of economic, political and social uncertainty.

Recommendations

This is a great business book, well-written, that speaks to the heart rather than the head.

One of the central principles I subscribe to is: “If you want to change the world, you need to start by changing yourself. Specifically, you need to change yourself in ways that increase your influence with those around you. This book provides a great catalyst to this process of explaining how become a leader of influence by overcoming the desire for self-preservation, a tendency that derails many leaders.

This book is challenging as it asks uncomfortable questions about your intent and motivation for being a leader. In this respect, I think the book will be more challenging to those leaders who are leveraging the power of their position’s to lead, rather than leading through influence. So why not give a copy of this book to one command and control type leader you know!

I was personally challenged by this book. It caused me to reflect on my motivations for leading. The author comes across authentic and real, this moved me emotionally and caused me to reflect deeply as to my leadership intent and motives.

I would highly recommend this book to those aspiring to or who an already in a leadership position. Especially those who have not been exposed to the ideas and concepts of servant leadership or leadership as influence before. It’s a great leadership book.

The Current State of Leadership – Research Findings

George Ambler — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 17:50:59 +0000

Development Dimensions International (DDI) a respected, global talent management company recently published their Global Leadership Forecast 2011. This report is one of the largest leadership studies of it’s kind, with more than 2,600 participating organizations. The research provides some interesting perspectives on the current state of leadership and future leadership needs. Specifically, the report looked to uncover the answers to the following questions:

What is the overall quality of leadership in organizations today? How does it compare to previous years?
Do organizations have a sufficient supply of capable leaders to meet tomorrow’s business challenges?
What can HR professionals do to revolutionize the development of their leaders?
Is it time to radically innovate not only products and business models, but also the very way we manage?
What impact can we have by moving the needle on leadership quality?

The research defined a leaders as “someone who manages the performance or responsibilities of individuals in an organization.”

Research Findings

This research study produced interesting findings I have extracted some of the research findings I found interesting, those that stood out and caught my attention.

Effective Leadership Matters

The research demonstrated that organizations with the highest quality leaders were 13 times more likely to outperform their competition in key bottom-line metrics such as financial performance, quality of products and services, employee engagement, and customer satisfaction.

Leaders who reported that their organization’s current leadership quality as poor, only 6% of them were in organizations that outperformed their competition.
Organizations with higher quality leadership were up to three times more likely to retain more employees than their competition.

Future Leaders Are Few

Only 38% of the 12,423 leaders in the study reported that the quality of leadership in their organization is very good or excellent.
According to both leaders and HR professionals, leadership quality was rated highest in North America (52% of leaders and 30% of HR rated it highly) and lowest in Europe and Asia (33% of leaders rated it high, as did only 21% of Asian HR professionals).

Leadership Development Needs

Only 33% of leaders and HR professionals rated their leadership development efforts as highly effective.
Driving and managing change will remain the number one priority for leaders over the next three years, see illustration below.

About 50% of leaders are currently ineffective in the skills critical for the next three years.
The most common personality derailers of leaders in their organization were risk aversion, distrust, and approval dependence (58% selected risk aversion and 44% selected distrust and approval dependence).

Leadership Development Effectiveness

Only 18% of HR professionals surveyed reported strong bench strength to meet future business needs.
Research into the use and effectiveness of leadership development methods is illustrated below.

Only 31% of leaders and HR professionals rated the effectiveness of leadership selection as high.
Only 26% of organizations have effective programs to ensure smooth leadership transitions.

The Importance of Culture

“Right now, your company has 21st-century, Internet-enabled business processes, mid-20th-century
management processes, all built atop 19th-century management principles.” – Gary Hamel

DDI partnered with Gary Hamel and his Management Lab to identify the key factors that either facilitate or hinder the way in which the work of management is carried out, these are illustrated below.

Organizations with effective management cultures were more than 2½ times more likely to have
highly passionate leaders.

Wrapping Up

I found this report provided interesting insight into the current state of leadership. Within this research report are some insights that will help improve the effectiveness of leadership in your team and organisation, consider the following:

Do you have a strategy and plan for improving your organisations leadership effectiveness?
What are you doing to improve your ability to drive and manage change?
What are you doing to develop future leaders?
What is the state of your organisations culture? How are you planning to change it?

A Powerful Source of Employee Inspiration

George Ambler — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 15:18:36 +0000

Photo by lululemon athletica

An important part of a leaders job is to provide and environment that helps to inspire and motivate the people around them. Inspired, motivated and passionate employees lead to improved results and higher levels of innovation.

This is why the June 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review article “How Customers Can Rally Your Troops” caught my attention. The article describes how…

”a growing body of research shows that end users—customers, clients, patients, and others who benefit from a company’s products and services—are surprisingly effective in motivating people to work harder, smarter, and more productively.”

It seems that when employees understand and experience the impact that the company products and services on customers it serves to inspire and motivate. It seems that the reason feedback from customers is so effective in motivating is because employees see customer feedback as more credible and instils a sense of meaning.

Customer Feedback is Seen as More Credible

Customer feedback is seen, by employees as more credible than feedback from company managers.

“Organizational psychologist David Hofmann and I have found that employees generally see end users as more credible than leaders as sources of inspiration. When leaders attempt to deliver inspiring messages, many employees react with skepticism, questioning whether leaders are just trying to get them to work harder.”

Customer Feedback Instils a Powerful Sense of Meaning

The most powerful source of motivation occurs when we are doing work that gives meaning and a sense of purpose. One powerful source of meaning comes from how we are contributing to improving the lives of others.

“In national surveys over the past three decades, the vast majority of Americans have identified meaningful work as the single most important feature that they seek in a job. And numerous researchers have found that people are concerned not only about themselves but also about doing work that benefits others and contributes to society.”

This insight also provides further support for the John Kay’s concept of obliquity and it’s importance when setting company vision and strategy.

How Companies Are Using Customer Feedback

The article provide the following interesting examples of how companies use customer feedback to motivate and and inspire their employees:

“Facebook flies in users from around the country to meet with engineers and share how the site has reconnected them to family and friends”
“At a Merrill Lynch branch, weekly team meetings begin with stories about how the team has made a difference in customers’ lives.”
“At Wells Fargo, for instance, managers show bankers videos of people describing how low-interest loans rescued them from severe debt—a vivid reminder to the bankers that they are striving to serve their customers, not their managers.”
“At Medtronic’s annual holiday party, for instance, patients are invited to share their stories about how the company’s medical technologies helped them. The stories humanize the work for the engineers and technicians behind the scenes.”

This insight also provides further support for the John Kay concept of obliquity and it’s importance when setting company vision and strategy.

What are you doing to leverage customer feedback to motivate and inspire employees?
What can you do to find and share inspiring customer satisfaction stories within your company?

Executives Say They’re Pulled in Too Many Directions

George Ambler — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 15:17:42 +0000

The Booz & Company is the one of the oldest management consulting firms which completed a survey of more than 1,800 executives. According to the survey:

A great majority of executives (64% of the survey respondents) say that their biggest frustration factor is “having too many conflicting priorities.”
Executives report that their biggest challenges are (a) ensuring that day-to-day decisions are in line with the strategy (56%) and (b) allocating resources in a way that really supports the strategy (56%).
Half of the executives (50%) consider setting a clear and differentiating strategy a significant challenge.
In fact, most executives (52%) do not feel their company’s strategy will lead to success. Only 21% say their company has a right to win in all the markets in which it competes.
Most executives (81%) say growth initiatives lead to waste, at least some of the time.
The vast majority of executives (82%) say functional departments in their companies get competing demands from different business units.

The Bottom Line

The research seems to highlight short coming in how companies go about creating and setting strategy.

“The root of the problem is that too many companies grab too hastily for what seems like the next answer to growth. They don’t have a solid framework to decide which set of opportunities will lead to sustainable success.”

Effective strategy is developed using a well proven approach that results in a clear focus on a limited set of opportunities. Trying to be all thing to all people, avoiding making important trade offs usually results in a weak strategy and very poor execution.

American Companies Are the Best Managed in the World

George Ambler — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 15:17:22 +0000

A recent post on Harvard Business Review, “Why American Management Rules the World” discusses research from a group of European researchers which found that on average American firms are the best managed in the world.

“Over the past decade, a team from Harvard Business School, London School of Economics, McKinsey & Company, and Stanford has systematically surveyed global management. We have developed a tool to measure management practices across operational management, monitoring, targets, and people management. We scored each dimension on a range of practices to generate an overall management score, surveying over 10,000 firms in 20 countries. This has allowed us to create the first global database of management practices.”

The mean management score for the countries that participated in this research is illustrated in the chart below.

Some of the findings from this research include:

Well managed firms thrash their poorly managed competitors.
Good management appears to be so strongly linked with good performance that it might be reasonable to expect all firms to make better practices a priority.
More intense competition is clearly associated with better management practices
Management practices vary much more within than across countries
American firms outperform all others
U.S. dominance occurs in the manufacturing, retail, and healthcare sectors
Japanese, German, and Swedish firms follow closely behind.
The middle stand countries like the UK, France, Italy, and Australia, which have reasonable but not brilliant management practices.
Every country has some world-class firms, individual companies are not trapped by the national environments in which they operate — there are top performers in all countries surveyed.
Being in a world-class environment like the U.S. does not guarantee success. Even in America, more than 15% of firms are so badly managed that they are worse than the average Chinese or Indian firm.
Multinational companies perform well wherever they are in the world, even in areas where overall management practice scores were particularly low.
Managers are poor at assessing their own performance.
Countries with more flexible labour markets have better people management.
Better management is linked with higher skills

What is the secret of management success?

When examining what makes for management success on of the biggest drivers is due to differences in people management practices.

“American firms are ruthless at rapidly rewarding and promoting good employees and retraining or firing bad employees. The reasons are threefold.

The U.S. has tougher levels of competition. Large and open U.S. markets generate the type of rapid management evolution that allows only the best-managed firms to survive.

Human capital is important. America traditionally gets far more of its population into college than other nations.

The U..S has more flexible labor markets. It is much easier to hire and fire employees.”

For more on this interesting research and related work, go to the World Management Survey.