Next Generation Leadership Community

Developing Leaders

Cindi Haworth

Back before Christmas, Bob Roberts had a great post about Developing Leaders. We think it is packed with great advice and wanted to point it out to you!

Link.

A Leader’s Legacy - Book Review

Linda Stanley

A Leader’s Legacy
by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner
Jossey-Bass publishers

Topic – exactly what the title says
Reading time: Quick – one airplane trip (a couple of hours to destination and back)

I just finished reading this one. Different than their last work, The Leadership Challenge, this work is a compilation of 22 essays on leadership. The essays are grouped into 4 categories: Significance, Relationships, Aspirations, and Courage. The authors consider a different leadership issue in each essay. My favorite essays were “It’s Not Just the Leader’s Vision” and “Failure Is Always an Option.” This is a great book to pass along to colleagues, protégés, family members and even those people who may be a bit challenging to work with at times (to put it diplomatically).

Here are a few excerpts from the book:

In the essay “It’s Not Just the Leader’s Vision,” the authors write:

What people really want to hear is not the leader’s vision. They want to hear about their own aspirations. They want to hear how their dreams will come true and their hopes will be fulfilled. They want to see themselves in the picture of the future that the leader is painting. The very best leaders understand that their key task is inspiring a shared vision, not selling their own idiosyncratic view of the world.

Maybe your constituents don’t tell you this quite so directly. Maybe they don’t tell you this at all. But we’re quite certain that very few adults like to be told in so many words, “Here is where we’re going, so get on board with it.” …most adults don’t like being told where to go and what to do. They want to feel part of the process.

In “Failure Is Always an Option,” they write:

“Failure is not an option,” we said, “is one of the dumbest cliches ever uttered. It ranks right up there with ‘get it right the first time,’ another well-intended nostrum that just encourages people to play it safe.”

Telling people that failure is not an option is just plain nonsense. Failure is always an option. In real life, when we’re trying to do something we’ve never done before, we virtually never get it right the first time. And if we do, it’s sheer luck. …In real life, failure is always an option.

The authors continue with a real life illustration from the great basketball legend, Michael Jordan.

Jordan once observed, “I’ve missed more than nine thousand shots in my career. I’ve lost three hundred games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

James E. West, research professor at Johns Hopkins University, who has secured fifty domestic and more than two hundred foreign patents. “I think I’ve had more failures than successes, but I don’t see the failures as mistakes because I always learned something from those experiences. I see them as having not achieved the initial goal, nothing more than that.”

The last chapter sums it up as the authors write that a leader’s legacy is in the making every day; that in leading we must also learn to serve, to teach, to sacrifice, to remain open to feedback, and most importantly, to never assume that leaders can go it alone. It takes courage to lead.

The last couple of paragraphs were some of the most encouraging written words I’ve read in a while:

Legacies aren’t the result of wishful thinking. They are the result of determined doing. The legacy you leave is the life you lead…It’s the sum of everything you do that matters, not one large bequest at the end of your tenure…the most important leadership actions are the ones you take today.

You just never know whose life you might touch. You just never know what change you might initiate and what impact you might have. You just never know when that critical moment might come. What you do know is that you can make a difference. You can leave this world better than you found it.

Organizational Transformation

Cindi Haworth

A couple of posts ago, we referenced an article in Fast Company about stress. Link.

This article had a link to another article that we thought deserved extra emphasis: The Science of Leadership, by David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz from Strategy+Leadership . It is about how recent breakthroughs in brain research can help in organizational transformation.

An excerpt from the article:

Managers who understand the recent breakthroughs in cognitive science can lead and influence mindful change: organizational transformation that takes into account the physiological nature of the brain, and the ways in which it predisposes people to resist some forms of leadership and accept others. This does not imply that management — of change or anything else — is a science. There is a great deal of art and craft in it. But several conclusions about organizational change can be drawn that make the art and craft far more effective. These conclusions would have been considered counterintuitive or downright wrong only a few years ago. For example:

• Change is pain. Organizational change is unexpectedly difficult because it provokes sensations of physiological discomfort.
• Behaviorism doesn’t work. Change efforts based on incentive and threat (the carrot and the stick) rarely succeed in the long run.
• Humanism is overrated. In practice, the conventional empathic approach of connection and persuasion doesn’t sufficiently engage people.
• Focus is power. The act of paying attention creates chemical and physical changes in the brain.
• Expectation shapes reality. People’s preconceptions have a significant impact on what they perceive.
• Attention density shapes identity. Repeated, purposeful, and focused attention can lead to long-lasting personal evolution.

The article is pretty complex, but we thought it was fasinating and might be valuable some of you in the midst of organizational change or thinking about it. Link.