What leaders really do.

I was inspired this past week with a new body of work when I discovered an insightful Harvard Business Review article and an extended body of work by former Harvard professor John Kotter.

Thanks to Jim Estill, CEO of SYNNEX Canada in his CEO Blog - Time Leadership blog for facilitating this discovery with his summary of the Harvard Business Review article, What Leaders Really Do.

In the HBR article, Kotter reflects on the difference between management and leadership. Although this topic is frequently explored as verified by a quick Google search, I appreciated a number of Kotter's insights on the role of leadership in a "managed" organization.

So what do leaders do:

They don't make plans; they don't even organize people. What leaders really do is prepare organizations for change and help them cope as they struggle through it.

Leadership isn't mystical and mysterious. It has nothing to do with having "charisma"or other exotic personality traits. It is not the province of a chosen few.

Leadership ... is about coping with change. More change always demands more leadership.

Since the function of leadership is to produce change, setting the direction of that change is fundamental to leadership. Setting direction is never the same as planning or even long-term planning.

The more that change characterizes the business environment, the more that leaders must motivate people to provide leadership as well. When this works, it tends to reproduce leadership across the entire organization, with people occupying multiple leadership roles throughout the hierarchy. This is highly valuable, because coping with change in any complex business demands initiatives from a multitude of people. Nothing less will work.

But perhaps the most aha moment for me started with this Kotter quote, "Most U.S. corporations today are overmanaged and underled." The organization that over focuses on budgets, plans, forecast and organization may miss the mark. I found his military analogy, written in 1991 before the Iraq war, very insightful,

Consider a simple military analogy:
A peacetime army can usually survive with good administration and management up and down the hierarchy, coupled with good leadership concentrated at the very top. A wartime army, however, needs competent leadership at all levels. No one yet has figured out how to manage people effectively into battle; they must be led.

The Kotter article is highly recommended for quiet leaders.

Thank for reading. Please lead quietly.
Don

And you thought leadership was hard.

Leadership doesn't have to be difficult. I have been studying, exploring, and communicating this hypothesis during the past few months. You might recall my simple strategies for building community using smiles, gratitude, and giving.

This past week while exploring for new quiet leadership insight, I encountered Dee Hock and the 60 Second PhD in Leadership.

My first encounter was a YouTube leadership video by Tom Peters where he quotes Dee Hock. I think the video is 90 seconds well spent.

I wasn't familiar with Dee Hock so I "Googled" and found the The 60 Second PhD in Leadership. I appreciated the simplicity as conveyed by the founder and former CEO of VISA.

1. Make a list of all things done to you that you abhorred.
2. DON’T DO THEM TO OTHERS. EVER.
3. Make another list of things done to you that you loved.
4. DO THEM TO OTHERS. ALWAYS.

This sentiment is brilliant but like many explorations, one discovery leads to another.

More from Dee Hock

The Google search also led me to a nice biography of Dee Hock the founder of Visa on the FastcCompany site in an article entitled, The Trillion-Dollar Vision of Dee Hock.

An interesting, albeit more complicated, insight from this article is related to organization. The insight was particularly relevant to me.

I work in an environment where focus on structure, organization, governance, budget, resources and funding seems to dominate the attention of our team. From this perspective, a Dee Hock quote in the Fast Company article was compelling,

The better an organization is, the less obvious it is. In Visa, we tried to create an invisible organization and keep it that way. It's the results, not the structure or management that should be apparent.

Our team got 15 seconds of attention this past week on great results in saving a client relationship through some last minute development adjustments.

Certainly, there was more than 15 seconds of effort during the days before. But interestingly during this effort, not once was there a question about estimates, funding, business requirements, project management, or process on this effort. Not once did any body ask who was going to fund this effort. Despite these organizational "deficits" the mission was accomplished and well done. The team seized the opportunity to just perform.

Once the fifteen seconds of accolades were over, we resumed our normal organizational processes where questions of estimates, priorities, funding, forecasts, and governance dominated much of the project discussion and effort. Is this they way things should be?

It's a rhetorical question but this led me to another Dee Hock topic to explore, that is, the notion of chaordic systems. The Wikipedia definition is a system that blends characteristics of chaos and order.

I'll leave this exploration for another post but I'm pretty intrigued that we as a team had this remarkable ability to self-direct and excel when the conditions were right. Why couldn't this be the norm? Anyone else with chaordic experience? I'm looking for comment and insight.

Thanks for reading. Please lead quietly.
Don

Building Community: Thank you, as a way of leading.

Gratitude is an easy and remarkably powerful step in building the type of community that is essential for successful teams. As I have written before, "Building community is hard. However, it is easy to start quietly and simply with thanks and smiles.

The power of gratitude was twice validated for me this past week.

First, I'd invite everyone to read the wonderful work of Rosa Say. I have employed Rosa's insight several times in the past including, 12 Rules for Leadership and It's All About Learning.

This week, her Managing with Aloha Coaching blog introduced me to the concept of "mahalo" which means thankful living. The most striking suggestion for a quiet leader is,

Say “thank you” often; speak of your appreciation and it will soften the tone of your voice, giving it richness, humility and fullness.

My second validation on the power of gratitude occurred this week during a family member's hospital stay. Nurses and care givers in any health care setting are asked to do a lot. Their role in recovery is huge and the responsibility ranges from comfort to advocacy, from medicine to management.

I had many opportunities this past week to look a nurse or care giver directly in the eye and say "thank you."

No two response were the same, but the power of the phrase was clear. In one case, my perception was that amidst the pain, groaning, expectations, and entitlement, gratitude wasn't expressed very often. In another case, the response led to a "I love nursing" conversation. In a third case the response suggested the partnership between patient and nurse. The responses, although varied, will forever etch the power of gratitude in my mind.

My suggestion to leaders; leverage this wonderful power. Look at your team members or coworkers directly in the eye and say thank you. I believe you'll instantly realize the power of gratitude.

Thanks for reading. Please lead quietly.
Don

Keep it balanced, in 3D

The concept of Quiet Leadership includes the the notion of "balance." My vision of balance is multifaceted where balance applies to many elements of life, work and leadership. This includes, for example, the balance of work and personal life, the balance between individual needs and organizational needs, the balance of opinions that needs to occur within teams, the balance required to moderate disagreement. A quiet leader strives to keep it balanced.

Jim Bolt recently wrote about balance on the Fast Company site. The article, Developing The 3-Dimensional Leader, describes the common absence of balance in leaders and the need for three dimensional leaders. As he writes, "Too many leaders today are one-dimensional, narrowly focused on business results."

Bolt's three dimensional leadership implores leaders to strike a balance between business needs, leadership, and personal needs. Here is his description of the three dimensions:

The three-dimensional framework calls for the development of an individual’s business, leadership, and personal effectiveness skills:

• Business Dimension: Mind-sets and capabilities needed to identify and address critical business challenges
• Leadership Dimension: Fully developed leadership capacity needed to lead the organization confidently into the future
• Personal Dimension: Personal effectiveness skills needed to achieve excellence, balance and ongoing renewal

This three dimensional framework perfectly depicts the balance required of quiet leaders. Please read Bolt's article.

Thanks for reading. Please lead quietly.

Don

Building Community with Giving

One of the principles of quiet leadership focuses on the need for leaders to build community. I've suggested in an earlier post that community building can start simply, with thanks, and smiles. One of my favorite Tom Peters pleadings, "It begets it." Smiles begets smiles, thanks begets thanks.

What follows after the simple start? I'd propose giving and service.

Consultant Michelle Kunz writes extensively about giving in her Power Energy Leadership blog. In Excellence is Giving she talks about the benefits of giving and quotes the creed of BNI, the global business networking group that "Givers Gain."

Consider these returns cited by Kunz in her post:

• Trust -- people trust those who have their interests truly at the center of all they do
• Admiration -- people admire those who commit their energies to advancing the common good
• Respect -- people respect those who dedicate their time to helping others win
• Wisdom -- when we listen deeply to what others need we learn more about ourselves and the world around us
• Humility -- giving to others shines a mirror back on all that we have and helps us feel grateful
• Authenticity -- giving deeply of ourselves removes the filters we keep in place when we withhold, requiring our true selves to come into focus
• Integrity -- aligning our values with principles which do not change greatly simplifies the challenge of walking our talk

This represents huge returns for the simple act of giving and serving. Maybe building community doesn't have to be hard. Start with smiles, thanks, and add a little giving.

Thanks for reading. Please lead quietly.
Don

Leadership in 60 Seconds or less

Don't have enough time to study leadership?

Leadership consultant Phil Dourado author of The 60 Second Leader: Everything You Need to Know About Leadership, in 60 Second Bites has posted an even shorter ebook available on his blog.

I've embedded the slideshow here:

| View | Upload your own

Among these gems there were numerous highlights. Here are a couple of my favorites:

“Leadership, like swimming, cannot be learned by reading about it.”

Henry Mintzberg

Make people feel an essential part of the story through the work they do every day…Remember this mythical JFK anecdote?
The president was visiting NASA headquarters and stopped to talk to a man who was holding a mop. “And what do you do?” he asked. The man, a janitor, replied, “I’m helping to put a man on the moon, sir.”

Phil Dourado

Thanks for reading. Please lead quietly.
Don

Learning to Use the Full Brain

I wrote in September about my development experiment Improve Your Brain Power - Use your right brain. In this post, I wrote about the suggestion that you could develop your brain by the simple act of moving your mouse to the opposite hand.

I continue to be fascinated with left brain/right brain differences.

This week, after a couple of weeks of pretty intense day-job work with no time for blogging or reading, my discretionary reading took me to the Freakonomics blog where I discovered the The Right Brain vs Left Brain test.

Try it. It's fascinating.

I can switch directions with a different focus. What does this mean? When you read the Freakonomics blog comments, it seems that most people get a single direction.

Thanks for reading. Please lead quietly.
Don