Four Laws of Effective Leadership

We are always looking for leaders in our business.  This post from Bill Zipp concisley explains four basic laws for effective leadership.  

There are laws that run the universe. Not civil laws, but physical laws like the law of gravity.

In the same way there are laws that run the universe of effective leadership. Not management laws, but principles that determine our influence with

people.

It doesn’t matter if you’re the CEO of a large multi-national corporation or a single mom of three, the laws of effective leadership impact you. This is true whether you believe in them or not, just like gravity.

Fortunately, these laws are few and accessible to everyone.

We’re not talking about turning you into the next President of the United States (God forbid!). We’re talking about making you a person of influence with your staff, your vendors, your community, your colleagues, your family and friends.

I’ve summarized these in the following four laws of effective leadership:

1. The Law of Credibility

Like oxygen for breathing, leaders cannot lead without credibility. You cannot influence people who do not trust you. End of discussion. You may be able to order them around or manipulate them to do things for you, but that’s not leading and will not bring out their very best.

“We trust–and follow–people who are real, who are consistent, whose behavior, values, and beliefs are aligned,” write Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee in Resonant Leadership. “We trust people whom we do not constantly have to second-guess.”

So this is where effective leadership begins. Being real. Being consistent. Having our values define who we are, not just in our words but also in our actions. That’s the meaning of credibility. And credibility allows for trust and respect, the oxygen of leadership, to even exist.

2. The Law of Clarity

Based on credibility, you’re beginning to build effective leadership. Congratulations! Most leaders never get this far with their people.

Are you ready for the next law? Now you must know where you’re going. This is the law of clarity.

Clarity in leadership must exist on two levels for it to be effective: vision and execution. Or, as I like to refer to them, the forest and the trees. In other words, you must be able to see the forest, the big picture, to be able to lead.

But you must also be able to execute day to day, working in the trees, or you’ll never get anything done.

Vision (the forest) without execution (the trees) fails to deliver any of its promise. It paints a picture of glorious blue skies, but lacks the hard work of digging in the dirt.

Execution (the trees) without vision (the forest) is all hard work with little insight or inspiration. It doesn’t have a broader context with which to frame that work or a higher cause that work is serving.

You can motivate people through vision, but without execution even the most inspiring motivation will wane as people get the distinct feeling that the dream will never actually become reality.

You can organize people through execution, but without vision even the best organization fails to cross the finish line. This is because humans beings, who are creatures of emotion, need a sense that what they are doing actually makes a difference.

In other words, every plan needs a dream to empower it, and every dream needs a plan to complete it. You can’t choose between heads or tails on this one. You’ve got to have them both for effective leadership. That’s how the law of clarity works.

3. The Law of Collaboration

“Does not play well with others,” is a troubling epithet on any first-grader’s report card. We’re adults now, though. We’ve grown up. We know how to get along with people. Right?

Essential to effective leadership is “playing well with others.” What I mean by that is the ability to give and take, to speak and listen, to assemble a team that works together and not act like the Lone Ranger.

What I find happens with most leaders is that they swing between two extremes when it comes to working with people: confrontation and accommodation. In an attempt to get things done, many leaders assert themselves and become confrontative at every turn.

Then, awash with waves of guilt or just exhausted from the stress of confrontation, they back way off and let people do their own thing, accommodating every whim. That, of course, doesn’t work either, so they return to confronting, then accommodating, then confronting, then accommodating. This pendulum swing seriously undermines any sense of effective leadership.

Collaboration is different and delivers very different results. With collaboration a leader is fully engaged with the issues at hand, but also fully engage their people on those issues.

They speak up and assert their point of view, but let others speak up as well in open dialogue, discussion, and even debate. There is mutual respect and mutual give and take. This collaboration builds consensus, and consensus builds the camaraderie that any team needs to win in a competitive environment.

At the end of the day, better decisions are made and a better business is built because other people have a role in the process, not just one person. As the Bible puts it, “Iron sharpens iron.” That’s the collaboration that leads to more effective leadership.

4. The Law of Encouragement

For those of you who don’t like headings that all begin with the same letter, you’ll like like the fact that this fourth law starts with an E. But look again, encouragement simply means “to fill another person with courage” (And yes, courage starts with a C).

In other words, effective leadership attends to the inspiration, motivation, and emotional well-being of the people being lead. In short, effective leadership gives people courage.

A survey of millions of American workers conducted by the Gallup Corporation discovered that 65% of them received no praise or recognition for the work they did in the past year. That’s right, for two-thirds of the workforce a whopping 52 weeks went by without any affirmation. It’s like we’re saying to our employees, “I told you I loved you when I married (hired) you. If it changes I’ll let you know.”

Is this what it’s like working for you? No praise given for work well done? No thanks offered for extra effort? No recognition awarded for accomplishment? No wonder your leadership effectiveness is waning with your people.

Here’s the crazy thing: praise is free! Bootstrapping entrepreneurs working on a limited budget have just as much access to this resource as the largest corporation.

It costs you nothing to thank someone and merely a stamp to send them a hand-written note. Giving a team member a standing ovation at a weekly staff meeting for going the extra mile doesn’t waste a single dollar. Yet all of these things are very, very powerful means of encouraging your people, and the lack of them undermines effective leadership.

“Because of its power, ridiculously low cost and rarity,” Gallup researchers Rodd Wagner an James Harter write in 12: The Elements of Great Managing, “praise and recognition is one of the greatest lost opportunities in the business world today.”

Credibility. Clarity. Collaboration. Encouragement. Get the laws of effective leadership working for you.

An interesting article from HBR.org explaining why sales experience is helpful for women to reach top levels of management.  View the original article here.

Women Who Sell Get Promoted

by Jill Flynn, Kathryn Heath, and Mary Davis Holt  |   7:00 AM September 13, 2012

 

It's no great revelation that women have exceptional selling instincts. In fact, Tom Peters has said that women make better salespeople than men. What we've found in coaching senior-level women, however, is a dichotomy of sorts: Women working in sales jobs are the best-in-class at what they do — and they love it. Yet, women in non-sales roles tell us they would prefer a trip to the dentist over selling.

Unfortunately, sales is just one of those things — like haggling and public speaking — that we avoid at our own peril. When we hear a woman say that sales is outside of her job description, we always beg to differ. Selling needs to be a part of every woman's career tool kit. After all, sales experience feeds the types of line jobs — where individuals have P&L accountability — that are a pipeline to the C-suite. And that is where women are at a disadvantage.

According to McKinsey & Company, research of the largest US corporations shows that 62% of women are in staff jobs — positions that provide service and assistance but don't directly generate revenue. These roles very rarely lead to major jobs in senior management. In contrast, 65% of men on executive committees hold line jobs. This helps explain why the number of women CEOs in Fortune 500 companies appears stuck around 3%.

What this really calls for is a mind shift. We've seen some of the best salespeople in action — and they are women. Just ask IBM's Ginni Rometty. As IBM's global sales leader before landing the Chief Executive role, Rometty lived and breathed sales. She was a leader of several important diversity initiatives at IBM as well — but it was likely Rometty's sales experience that opened the door to the C-suite.

And closing deals is eminently possible even if you, like Rometty, are not much of a golfer. One of our clients is always on the lookout for other types of social venues to host clients. After a night of dancing at a concert she said: "I knew these clients would be with me for life when we were jumping up and down together to Jimmy Buffett."

Selling is about making connections, using one's passion and gaining trust. As the consensus builders, the nurturers of relationships, and the well-networked passionate persuaders, women have all of the essential skills to bring in clients, money and monster deals. If you manage key relationships or even lead a team of customer-facing contributors, you can use the skills you are already comfortable with to become visible within your company by bringing revenue and customers into the organization. We've heard this called "Dancing close to the revenue line."

Another women we know told us very recently about a major deal she closed. She won a new account and went on to grow the revenue significantly in year one. She said, "My company is paying a lot of attention to me now." No big surprise. Rainmakers get noticed — and promoted.

New Dance Challenge for the Office!

Whichever person/team loses the challenge, they must do a public dance of this at the next team night!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEWVwgDnuzE

Quote

"Habits are powerful factors in our lives.  Because they are consistent, often unconscious patterns, they constantly, daily, express our character and produce our effectiveness...or ineffectiveness."

--THe 7 Habits of HighlyEffective People, page 46

Leading in Emotional Times

Written in 2002 from Boston Consulting Group, this article on managing during a recession continues to be relevant for today's leaders.   During unceratin times, managers should reach out to individuals on an emotional level to increase confidence and hope for the future.

Leading in Emotional Times

Emotions and values drive behavior. They are the fuel of human performance. In these tumultuous times, spiraling emotions and a hunger for values are providing leaders with the opportunity of a lifetime to create change—whether that change is to chart new directions, establish new priorities and work practices, or inspire their organizations to achieve unprecedented levels of performance.

Since September 11, the longing for community and purpose has been intense. The job losses and insecurity generated by the current recession have only magnified those feelings. People in all walks of life yearn for leaders to provide context, meaning, and direction—as well as opportunities to make positive contributions. Now it’s up to business leaders to step up and provide their followers with a sense of purpose and a chance to make a difference.

The Personal Touch

As always, the right strategy for change is critical. Equally important, however, is the way the organization is led to embrace and then to execute that change. In a period of uncertainty and high anxiety, six fundamental tenets of leadership are particularly crucial.

Be highly visible. In times of stress, the more available and approachable leaders are the better. You need to be out and about. You need to interact constantly with employees, customers, and suppliers. Avoid communicating solely by memo—remoteness is not reassuring.

Provide relevant information. Everyone knows we’re in a recession. But they don’t know, and desperately need to hear, what their leaders think it means for them. People will not expect you to have definitive answers. But they will expect you to have contingency plans for different scenarios and to be able to explain what the different plans will require of them.

By telling employees and suppliers what you know, what you don’t know, and how you will make decisions—and by communicating that information frequently and in a personal manner—you will provide comfort while helping people feel in control of their own lives.

Ask for help and share the credit. Many leaders find themselves in unfamiliar territory: having to lead during a major recession and a new kind of war. No one expects a single person to have all the answers, but your employees and suppliers do hope you will have the wisdom to know when to ask for help from people inside and outside the company in order to get through these tough times. And, of course, share the credit. Making space for others to contribute and be recognized has enormous payoffs.

Be human. People want to think their leader is in control and in charge, but they won’t go the extra mile for someone who is all logic and no emotion. Especially in times like these, that kind of behavior is a turnoff. It makes people wonder, Doesn’t he care about what has happened or what we’re facing?In other words, it’s not just the information that you share that matters; it’s also how you communicate that information.

Speeches at large group meetings or videotaped addresses will not suffice. You should also talk individually to as many people as you can. Take the time to listen—to show that you genuinely care about how your employees, suppliers, and customers feel. Just as important is conveying how you feel. Authenticity, connection, and humanity are powerful aspects of leadership—and ones that cannot be faked. A major reason why Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was so effective in the wake of the terrorist attacks was his demeanor: he was calm and strong, while also being human and vulnerable.

Offer hope and a renewed sense of purpose. Business leaders need to put a stake in the ground for the future, to show the way to a better tomorrow. People can endure a lot when they believe that there will be an end to the turmoil and that the hardships and demanding initiatives are part of a credible strategy for creating a brighter future.

Encourage people to get excited. The events of recent months have been so depressing that people often feel shallow, disconnected, or even guilty if they are in a good mood. What people need now is permission to feel good, to be excited about their work and confident about the future. The challenge for leaders is not only to give direction and goals worth striving for but also to exemplify the energy and enthusiasm needed to get there.

Connecting Emotionally

The yearning for leadership has never been greater. Companies led by leaders who can connect emotionally to their employees, suppliers, and customers—and who can satisfy the hunger for direction and purpose—will emerge vastly stronger from these tumultuous times than they entered them.

Three Basics of Leadership

Three Leadership Traits that Never Go Out of Style

Click here for the original article on HBR.org.

When I was a kid, the children in our neighborhood would play in a nearby park every evening. Our undisputed leader was a boy barely a year older than I was, I think. He introduced the new kids to everyone, taught them the rules of games we played, and made sure no one felt left out. We also trusted him blindly because he had our backs whenever we messed up.

None of the leadership lessons that I have learned, unlearned, or relearned ever since have left as indelible an impact as the ones I learnt as a child. Three, in particular, stand out:

Trust: Do your team members trust you? Do they accept that you will, without doubt, stand up for them whatever the situation? Only that kind of trust makes people feel empowered, gives them the courage to innovate, take risks, and to push themselves beyond their comfort zones to find success.

David Maister, Charles Green, and Robert Galford, who wrote The Trusted Advisor, outline four attributes on which to assess your trust quotient: Credibility, reliability, intimacy and self-orientation. Take this online assessment to evaluate yourself on this parameter.

Empathy: Did you notice that look of anxiety as your teammate walked into office this morning? Or did you miss it because you were busy fretting about deadlines? Do you treat your team members as human beings, and not just as workers?

Emotional intelligence is widely recognized as a leadership quality, but being transparent about your emotions isn't. I'm puzzled by the fact that leaders are expected to maintain a stiff upper lip, as the British say, at work. Why can't we rejoice in our successes, or show concern about our setbacks rather than taking them in our stride? Why don't we laugh and cry with the highs and lows in the lives of our colleagues? We are human beings, and knowing that our bosses care for us is a fundamental human need.

Mentorship: No matter how talented we may be, we crave the guiding hand, the mentor who will teach us the rules of the game. Pat Riley, the widely respected NBA coach, once said that there was no great player who didn't want to be coached. The same holds true of work. Would you be where you are today if your first manager hadn't nudged you in the right direction? When people are perplexed about what the future holds for their organizations and themselves, mentorship is critical.

Little did I know when I was out playing in the shadows of the Himalayas that I was learning some principles that would never go out of fashion. At a time when people everywhere are questioning their leaders' values, those characteristics seem to resonate even more.

Read your way to leadership!

We completely agree with this article!   Talent is Overrated and 50 Success Classics are currently at the top of our managers' reading lists, and our library keeps on growing!

For Those Who Want to Lead, Read

by John Coleman  |  

When David Petraeus visited the Harvard Kennedy School in 2009, one of the meetings he requested was with author Doris Kearns Goodwin. Petraeus, who holds a PhD in International Relations from Princeton, is a fan of Team of Rivals and wanted time to speak to the famed historian about her work. Apparently, the great general (and current CIA Director) is something of a bibliophile.

He's increasingly an outlier. Even as global literacy rates are high (84%), people are reading less and less deeply. The National Endowment for the Arts (PDF) has found that "[r]eading has declined among every group of adult Americans," and for the first time in American history, "less than half of the U.S. adult American population is reading literature." Literacy has been improving in countries like India and China, but that literacy may not translate into more or deeper reading.

This is terrible for leadership, where my experience suggests those trends are even more pronounced. Business people seem to be reading less — particularly material unrelated to business. But deep, broad reading habits are often a defining characteristic of our greatest leaders and can catalyze insight, innovation, empathy, and personal effectiveness.

Note how many business titans are or have been avid readers. According to The New York Times, Steve Jobs had an "inexhaustible interest" in William Blake; Nike founder Phil Knight so reveres his library that in it you have to take off your shoes and bow; and Harman Industries founder Sidney Harman called poets "the original systems thinkers," quoting freely from Shakespeare and Tennyson. In Passion & Purpose, David Gergen notes that Carlyle Group founder David Rubenstein reads dozens of books each week. And history is littered not only with great leaders who were avid readers and writers (remember, Winston Churchill won his Nobel prize in Literature, not Peace), but with business leaders who believed that deep, broad reading cultivated in them the knowledge, habits, and talents to improve their organizations.

The leadership benefits of reading are wide-ranging. Evidence suggests reading can improve intelligence and lead to innovation and insight. Some studies have shown, for example, that reading makes you smarter through "a larger vocabulary and more world knowledge in addition to the abstract reasoning skills." Reading — whether Wikipedia, Michael Lewis, or Aristotle — is one of the quickest ways to acquire and assimilate new information. Many business people claim that reading across fields is good for creativity. And leaders who can sample insights in other fields, such as sociology, the physical sciences, economics, or psychology, and apply them to their organizations are more likely to innovate and prosper.

Reading can also make you more effective in leading others. Reading increases verbal intelligence (PDF), making a leader a more adept and articulate communicator. Reading novels can improve empathy and understanding of social cues, allowing a leader to better work with and understand others — traits that author Anne Kreamer persuasively linked to increased organizational effectiveness, and to pay raises and promotions for the leaders who possessed these qualities. And any business person understands that heightened emotional intelligence will improve his or her leadership and management ability.

Finally, an active literary life can make you more personally effective by keeping you relaxed and improving health. For stressed executives, reading is the best way to relax, as reading for six minutes can reduce stress by 68%, and some studies suggest reading may even fend off Alzheimer's, extending the longevity of the mind.

Reading more can lead to a host of benefits for business people of all stripes, and broad, deep reading can make you a better leader. So how can you get started? Here are a few tips:
Join a reading group. One of my friends meets bimonthly with a group of colleagues to read classics in philosophy, fiction, history, and other areas. Find a group of friends who will do the same with you.

• Vary your reading. If you're a business person who typically only reads business writing, commit to reading one book this year in three areas outside your comfort zone: a novel, a book of poetry, or a nonfiction piece in science, biography, history, or the arts.
• Apply your reading to your work. Are you struggling with a problem at work? Pick up a book on neuroscience or psychology and see if there are ways in which you can apply the lessons from those fields to your profession.
• Encourage others. After working on a project with colleagues, I'll often send them a book that I think they'll enjoy. Try it out; it might encourage discussion, cross-application of important lessons, and a proliferation of readers in your workplace.
• Read for fun. Not all reading has to be developmental. Read to relax, escape, and put your mind at ease.

Reading has many benefits, but it is underappreciated as an essential component of leadership development. So, where have you seen reading benefit your life? What suggestions would you have for others seeking to grow their leadership through reading?