The five messages leaders must manage

If you want to know why so many organizations sink into chaos, look no further than their leaders' mouths. Over and over, leaders present grand, overarching-yet fuzzy-notions of where they think the company is going. They assume everyone shares their definitions of"vision;" "accountability," and "results". The result is often sloppy behavior and misalignment that can cost a company dearly. Effective communication is a leader's most critical tool for doing the essential job of leadership: inspiring the organization to take responsibility for creating a better future. Five topics wield extraordinary influence within a company: organizational structure and hierarchy, financial results, the leader's sense of his or her job, time management, and corporate culture. Properly defined, disseminated, and controlled, these topics give the leader opportunities for increased accountability and substantially better performance. For example, one CEO always keeps communications about hierarchy admirably brief and to the point. When he realized he needed to realign internal resources, he told the staff: "I'm changing the structure of resources so that we can execute more effectively." After unveiling a new organization chart, he said, "It's 10:45. You have until noon to be annoyed, should that be your reaction. At noon, pizza will be served. At one o'clock, we go to work in our new positions." The most effective leaders ask themselves, "What needs to happen today to get where we want to go? What vague belief or notion can I clarify or debunk?" A CEO who communicates precisely to ten direct reports, each of whom communicates with equal precision to 40 other employees, aligns the organization's commitment and energy with a well-understood vision of the firm's real goals and opportunities.     

Stop holding yourself back

After working with hundreds of leaders in a wide variety of organizations and in countries all over the globe, the authors found one very clear pattern: When it comes to meeting their leadership potential, many people unintentionally get in their own way. Five barriers in particular tend to keep promising managers from becoming exceptional leaders: People overemphasize personal goals, protect their public image, turn their competitors into two-dimensional enemies, go it alone instead of soliciting support and advice, and wait for permission to lead. Troy, a customer service manager, endangered his job and his company's reputation by focusing on protecting his position, not helping his team; when a trusted friend advised him to change his behavior, the results were striking. Anita's insistence on sticking to the tough personal she'd created for herself caused her to ignore the more intuitive part of the leadership equation, with disastrous results--until she let go of the need to appear invulnerable and reached out to another manager. Jon, a personal trainer who had virtually no experience with either youth development programs or urban life, opened a highly successful gym for inner-city kids at risk; he refused to be daunted by his lack of expertise and decided to simply "go for it." As these and other examples from the authors' research demonstrate, being a leader means making an active decision to lead. Only then will the workforce--and society--benefit from the enormous amount of talent currently sitting on the bench.     

Discovering your authentic leadership

The ongoing problems in business leadership over the past five years have underscored the need for a new kind of leader in the twenty-first century: the authentic leader. Author Bill George, a Harvard Business School professor and the former chairman and CEO of Medtronic, and his colleagues, conducted the largest leadership development study ever undertaken. They interviewed 125 business leaders from different racial, religious, national, and socioeconomic backgrounds to understand how leaders become and remain authentic. Their interviews showed that you do not have to be born with any particular characteristics or traits to lead. You also do not have to be at the top of your organization. Anyone can learn to be an authentic leader. The journey begins with leaders understanding their life stories. Authentic leaders frame their stories in ways that allow them to see themselves not as passive observers but as individuals who learn from their experiences. These leaders make time to examine their experiences and to reflect on them, and in doing so they grow as individuals and as leaders. Authentic leaders also work hard at developing self-awareness through persistent and often courageous self-exploration. Denial can be the greatest hurdle that leaders face in becoming self-aware, but authentic leaders ask for, and listen to, honest feedback. They also use formal and informal support networks to help them stay grounded and lead integrated lives. The authors argue that achieving business results over a sustained period of time is the ultimate mark of authentic leadership. It may be possible to drive short-term outcomes without being authentic, but authentic leadership is the only way to create long-term results.     

Making yourself indispensable

Peter Drucker and other leadership thinkers have long argued that leaders should focus on strengthening their strengths. How should they do that? Improving on a weakness is pretty easy and straight forward: You can make measurable progress by honing and practicing basic techniques. But developing a strength is a different matter, because simply doing more of what you're good at will yield only incremental improvements. If you are strong technically, becoming even more of a technical expert won't make you a dramatically better leader. If, however, you use what the authors call "nonlinear development"--similar to an athlete's cross-training--you can achieve exponential results. Your technical expertise will become more powerful if, for instance, you build on your communication skills, enabling you to explain technical problems both more broadly and more effectively. The authors, all from the leadership development consultancy Zenger Folkman, present a step-by-step process by which developing leaders can identify their strengths (through either a formal or an informal 360-degree evaluation), select appropriate complementary skills (the article identifies up to a dozen for each core strength), and develop those skills to dramatically improve their strengths--making themselves uniquely valuable to their companies.     

What's your personal social media strategy?

Social media are changing the way we do business and how leaders are perceived, from the shop floor to the CEO suite. But whereas the best businesses are creating comprehensive strategies in thi area, research suggests that few corporate Leaders have a social media presence--say, a Facebook or Linked in of page--and that those do don't use it strategically. Today's leaders must embrace social media for three reasons, First, they provide a low-cost, highly accessible platform on which to build your personal brand, communicating who you are both within and outside your company. Second, they allow you to engage rapidly and simultaneously with peers, employees, customers, and the broader public--in order to leverage relationships, show commitment to a cause, and demonstrate a capacity for reflection. Third, they give you an opportunity to learn from instant information and unvarnished feedback. To formulate your personal social media strategy, it helps to clarify your goals (personal, professional, or both), desired audience (private or public), and resources (can you justify using your company's?). You must also consider the risks of maintaining a large number of connections and of sharing content online. Active participation in social media can be a powerful tool--the difference between leading effectively and ineffectively, and between advancing and faltering in the pursuit of your goals.     

Four lessons in adaptive leadership

The armed services have been in the business of leadership development much longer than the corporate world has. Today's military leaders need tools and techniques to face a fast-changing and unpredictable type of enemy--so the armed services train their officers in ways that build a culture of readiness and commitment. Business leaders need to foster an adaptive culture to survive and succeed, given that they, too, face unprecedented uncertainty--and new types of competitors. Michael Useem and his colleagues at the Wharton School incorporate exposure to military leadership into MBA and executive MBA programs. Highlights include direct contact in the classroom with leaders in the U.S. Army, the U.S. Marine Corps, and the Department of Defense, along with field-training exercises and battlefield visits. The programs are designed to help students connect viscerally to essential leadership lessons. Four are featured in the article: Meet the troops. Creating a personal link is crucial to leading people in challenging times. Make decisions. Making good and timely calls is the crux of leadership. Mission first. Focus on common purpose and eschew personal gain. Convey strategic intent. Make the objectives clear, but give people the freedom to execute on them in their own way.     

Developing your leadership pipeline

Why do so many newly minted leaders fail so spectacularly? Part of the problem is that in many companies, succession planning is little more than creating a list of high-potential employees and the slots they might fill. It's a mechanical process that's too narrow and hidebound to uncover and correct skill gaps that can derail promising young executives. And it's completely divorced from organizational efforts to transform managers into leaders. Some companies, however, do succeed in building a steady, reliable pipeline of leadership talent by marrying succession planning with leadership development. Eli Lilly, Dow Chemical, Bank of America, and Sonoco Products have created long-term processes for managing the talent roster throughout their organizations--a process Conger and Fulmer call succession management. Drawing on the experiences of these best-practice organizations, the authors outline five rules for establishing a healthy succession management system: Focus on opportunities for development, identify linchpin positions, make the system transparent, measure progress regularly, and be flexible. In Eli Lilly's "action-learning" program, high-potential employees are given a strategic problem to solve so they can learn something of what it takes to be a general manager. The company--and most other best-practice organizations--also relies on Web-based succession management tools to demystify the succession process, and it makes employees themselves responsible for updating the information in their personnel files. Best-practice organizations also track various metrics that reveal whether the right people are moving into the right jobs at the right time, and they assess the strengths and weaknesses not only of individuals but of the entire group. These companies also expect to be tweaking their systems continually, making them easier to use and more responsive to the needs of the organization.     

What to ask the person in the mirror

Every leader gets off track from time to time. But as leaders rise through the ranks, they have fewer and fewer opportunities for honest and direct feedback. Their bosses are no longer monitoring their actions, and by the time management missteps have a negative impact on business results, it's usually too late to make course corrections that will set things right. Therefore, it is wise to go through a self-assessment, to periodically step back from the bustle of running a business and ask some key questions of yourself. Author Robert S. Kaplan, who during his 22-year career at Goldman Sachs chaired the firm's senior leadership training efforts and cochaired its partnership committee, identifies seven areas for self-reflection: vision and priorities, managing time, feedback, succession planning, evaluation and alignment, leading under pressure, and staying true to yourself. The author sets out a series of questions in each of the areas, illustrating the impact of self-assessment through vivid accounts of real executives. Although the questions sound simple, people are often shocked-even horrified- by their own answers. Executives are aware that they should be focusing on their most important priorities, for instance, but without stepping back to reflect, few actually know where they are allocating their time. Kaplan advocates writing down what you do every working hour for a week and checking how well your actions match up with your intentions. As for feedback, managers should ask themselves whether they're getting truthful evaluations from their subordinates. (In all likelihood, they aren't). It takes time and discipline to persuade your employees to tell you about your failings.     

Reclaim your job

Ask most managers what gets in the way of their success, and you'll hear the familiar litany of complaints: Not enough time. Limited resources. No clear sense of how their work fits into the grand corporate scheme. These are, for the most part, excuses. What really gets in the way of managers' success is fear of making their own decisions and acting accordingly. Managers must overcome the psychological desire to be indispensable. In this article, the authors demonstrate how managers can become more productive by learning to manage demands, generate resources, and recognize and exploit alternatives. To win the support they want, managers must develop a long-term strategy and pursue their goals slowly, steadily, and strategically. To expand the range of opportunities, for their companies and themselves, managers must scan the environment for possible obstacles and search for ways around them. Fully 90% of the executives the authors have studied over the past few years wasted their time and frittered away their productivity, despite having well-defined projects, goals, and the necessary knowledge to get their jobs done. Such managers remain trapped in inefficiency because they assume they do not have enough personal discretion or control. They forget how to take initiative--the most essential quality of any truly successful manager. Effective managers, by contrast, are purposeful corporate entrepreneurs who take charge of their jobs by developing trust in their own judgment and adopting long-term, big-picture views to fulfill personal goals that match those of the organization.     

Managing authenticity: the paradox of great leadership

Leaders and followers both associate authenticity with sincerity, honesty, and integrity. It's the real thing--the attribute that uniquely defines great managers. But while the expression of a genuine self is necessary for great leadership, the concept of authenticity is often misunderstood, not least by leaders themselves. They often assume that authenticity is an innate quality--that a person is either genuine or not. In fact, the authors say, authenticity is largely defined by what other people see in you and, as such, can to a great extent be controlled by you. In this article, the authors explore the qualities of authentic leadership. To illustrate their points, they recount the experiences of some of the authentic leaders they have known and studied, including the BBC's Greg Dyke, Nestlé's Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, and Marks & Spencer's Jean Tomlin. Establishing your authenticity as a leader is a two-part challenge. You have to consistently match your words and deeds; otherwise, followers will never accept you as authentic. But it is not enough just to practice what you preach. To get people to follow you, you also have to get them to relate to you. This means presenting different faces to different audiences--a requirement that many people find hard to square with authenticity. But authenticity is not the product of manipulation. It accurately reflects aspects of the leader's inner self, so it can't be an act. Authentic leaders seem to know which personality traits they should reveal to whom, and when. Highly attuned to their environments, authentic leaders rely on an intuition born of formative, sometimes harsh experiences to understand the expectations and concerns of the people they seek to influence. They retain their distinctiveness as individuals, yet they know how to win acceptance in strong corporate and social cultures and how to use elements of those cultures as a basis for radical change.     

The young and the clueless

It's natural to promote your best and brightest, especially when you think they may leave for greener pastures if you don't continually offer them new challenges and rewards. But promoting smart, ambitious young managers too quickly often robs them of the chance to develop the emotional competencies that come with time and experience--competencies like the ability to negotiate with peers, regulate emotions in times of crisis, and win support for change. Indeed, at some point in a manager's career--usually at the vice president level--raw talent and ambition become less important than the ability to influence and persuade, and that's the point at which the emotionally immature manager will lose his effectiveness. This article argues that delaying a promotion can sometimes be the best thing a senior executive can do for a junior manager. The inexperienced manager who is given time to develop his emotional competencies may be better prepared for the interpersonal demands of top-level leadership. The authors recommend that senior executives employ these strategies to help boost their protégés' people skills: sharpen the 360-degree feedback process, give managers cross-functional assignments to improve their negotiation skills, make the development of emotional competencies mandatory, make emotional competencies a performance measure, and encourage managers to develop informal learning partnerships with peers and mentors. Delaying a promotion can be difficult given the steadfast ambitions of many junior executives and the hectic pace of organizational life. It may mean going against the norm of promoting people almost exclusively on smarts and business results. It may also mean contending with the disappointment of an esteemed subordinate. But taking the time to build people's emotional competencies isn't an extravagance; it's critical to developing effective leaders.     

A smarter way to network

The adage "It's not what you know, it's who you know" is true. The right social network can have a huge impact on your success. But many people have misguided ideas about what makes a network strong: They believe the key is having a large circle filled with high-powered contacts. That's not the right approach, say Cross, of UVA's McIntire School of Commerce, and Thomas, of the Accenture Institute for High Performance. The authors, who have spent years researching how organizations can capitalize on employees' social networks, have seen that the happiest, highest-performing executives have a different kind of network: select but diverse, made up of high-quality relationships with people who come from varying spheres and from up and down the corporate ladder. Effective networks typically range in size from 12 to 18 people. They help managers learn, make decisions with less bias, and grow personally. Cross and Thomas have found that they include six critical kinds of connections: people who provide information, ideas, or expertise; formally and informally powerful people, who offer mentoring and political support; people who give developmental feedback; people who lend personal support; people who increase your sense of purpose or worth; and people who promote work/life balance. Moreover, the best kind of connections are "energizers"--positive, trustworthy individuals who enjoy other people and always see opportunities, even in challenging situations. If your network doesn't look like this, you can follow a four-step process to improve it. You'll need to identify who your connections are and what they offer you, back away from redundant and energy-draining connections, fill holes in your network with the right kind of people, and work to make the most of your contacts. Do this, and in due course, you'll have a network that steers the best opportunities, ideas, and talent your way.     

Work and life: the end of the zero-sum game

Most companies view work and personal life as competing priorities in a zero-sum game, in which a gain in one area means a loss in the other. From this traditional perspective, managers decide how their employees' work and personal lives should intersect and often view work-life programs as just so much social welfare. A new breed of managers, however, is trying a new tack, one in which managers and employees collaborate to achieve work and personal objectives to everyone's benefit. These managers are guided by three principles. The first is to clearly inform their employees about business priorities and to encourage them to be just as clear about personal priorities. The second is to recognize and support their employees as whole people, not only acknowledging but also celebrating their roles outside the office. The third is to continually experiment with the way work gets done, looking for approaches that enhance the organization's performance and allow employees to pursue personal goals. The managers who are acting on these principles have discovered that conflicts between work and personal priorities can actually be catalysts for identifying inefficiencies at the workplace. For example, one manager and his staff found a way to accommodate the increased workload at their 24-hour-a-day command center while granting the staff more concentrated time off. So far, these managers have usually been applying the principles without official sanction. But as the business impact of their approach becomes better appreciated, the authors predict, more and more companies will view these leaders as heralds of change.     

Leadership run amok. The destructive potential of overachievers

The desire to achieve is a major source of strength in business, and it is on the rise. The authors' consulting firm has seen a steady increase in the extent to which achievement motivates managers. There's a dark side to the trend, however. By relentlessly focusing on tasks and goals, an executive or company can damage performance. Overachievers tend to command and coerce, stifling subordinates. Psychologist David McClelland identified three drivers of behavior: achievement, meeting a standard of excellence; affiliation, maintaining close relationships; and power, having an impact on others. He said the power motive comes in two forms: personalized, in which the leader draws strength from controlling people, and socialized, where the leader derives strength from empowering people. Studies show that great charismatic leaders are highly motivated by socialized power. To look at how motives and leadership style affect a group's work climate and performance, the authors studied 21 senior managers at IBM.The leaders who created high-performing and energizing climates got more lasting results by using a broad range of styles, choosing different ones for different circumstances. Rather than order people around, they provided vision, sought buy-in and commitment, and coached. If you're an overachiever seeking to broaden your range, you can study your actions and ask your team, peers, and manager to give you honest feedback. You can adopt specific new behaviors, such as engaging your team in a discussion of how to achieve goals, rather than issuing a set of directives. The company as a whole can play a part, too: Organizations must learn when to draw on the achievement drive and when to rein it in.     

The new leader's guide to diagnosing the business

Incoming CEOs and general managers don't have much time to show what they can do to improve a business's performance. (In 2006, for instance, about 40% of CEOs who left their jobs had lasted an average of just 1.8 years--and many of them were ushered out the door.) Within a few years at most, leaders must find ways to boost profitability, increase market share, overtake a competitor--whatever the key tasks may be. But they can't map out specific objectives and initiatives until they have accurately assessed their companies' distinctive strengths and weaknesses and the particular threats and opportunities they face. In this article, Bain consultants Gottfredson, Schaubert, and Saenz provide a diagnostic template to help organizations figure all that out so they can decide which goals are reasonable and where to focus performance-improvement efforts. The template is built on four widely accepted principles. First, costs and prices almost always decline; second, your competitive position determines your options; third, customers and profit pools don't stand still; and fourth, simplicity gets results. Along with each principle, the authors offer diagnostic questions and analytic tools. Of course, each manager will emphasize certain elements of the template and de-emphasize others, based on his or her business situation. This process will show incoming CEOs and general managers where they are starting from (their point of departure) and help them establish their performance objectives (their point of arrival) as well as the change initiatives that will take them where they want to go.     

Ways women lead

Women managers are succeeding not by adopting the traditional command-and-control leadership style but by drawing on what is unique to their experience as women. According to a study the author conducted for the International Women's Forum, men and women in similar managerial jobs make the same amount of money and experience roughly the same degree of work-family conflict. But when they describe their leadership styles, vast differences arise. Men are much more likely than women to view leadership as a series of transactions with subordinates, and to use their position and control of resources to motivate their followers. Women, on the other hand, are far more likely than men to describe themselves as transforming subordinates' self-interest into concern for the whole organization and as using personal traits like charisma, work record, and interpersonal skills to motivate others. Women leaders practice what the author calls "interactive leadership"--trying to make every interaction with coworkers positive for all involved by encouraging participation, sharing power and information, making people feel important, and energizing them. In general, women have been expected to be supportive and cooperative, and they have not held long series of positions with formal authority. This may explain why women leaders today tend to be more interactive than men. But interactive leadership should not be linked directly to being female, since some men use that style and some women prefer the command-and-control style. Organizations that are open to leadership styles that play to individuals' strengths will increase their chances of surviving in a fast-changing environment.     

Realizing what you're made of

A ruptured disk pressed against Glenn Mangurian's spinal cord several years ago, leaving the lower half of his body permanently paralyzed. One minute, Mangurian was healthy and secure in his career as a management consultant; the next, his life was transformed and filled with uncertainty. The injury has taught him volumes about resilience and leadership. In this first-person account, he explains how people can create a new future after a crisis hits--and how, even if they're simply tackling everyday challenges, they can prepare themselves for the worst. Mangurian identifies resilience as one of the key qualities desired in business leaders today, but he says that many people confuse it with toughness. Toughness certainly can be an advantage in business, because it enables you to separate emotion from the negative consequences of difficult choices. But it can also be a disadvantage, because it can cut you off from many of the resources you'll need to bounce back after a crisis. Resilience, by contrast, is mostly about absorbing challenges--not deflecting them--and rebounding stronger than before. The author has learned a number of lessons about leadership in the face of adversity. For instance, although crisis distorts reality by reinforcing your fears, it also puts an emphasis on what matters right now; it highlights what's important to you and what you're capable of. Another major lesson is that loss amplifies the value of what remains, pushing you to take stock of what you have and to celebrate your assets. Perhaps most important, you can't know what will happen tomorrow--and it's better that way, because it's far more rewarding to engage with the present than just to prevent bad things from happening.     

How to build your network

Many sensational ideas have faded away into obscurity because they failed to reach the right people. A strong personal network, however, can launch a burgeoning plan into the limelight by delivering private information, access to diverse skill sets, and power. Most executives know that they need to learn about the best ideas and that, in turn, their best ideas must be heard by the rest of the world. But strong personal networks don't just happen around a watercooler or at reunions with old college friends. As Brian Uzzi and Shannon Dunlap explain, networks have to be carefully constructed through relatively high-stakes activities that bring you into contact with a diverse group of people. Most personal networks are highly clustered--that is, your friends are likely to be friends with one another as well. And, if you made those friends by introducing yourself to them, the chances are high that their experiences and perspectives echo your own. Because ideas generated within this type of network circulate among the same people with shared views, though, a potential winner can wither away and die if no one in the group has what it takes to bring that idea to fruition. But what if someone within that cluster knows someone else who belongs to a whole different group? That connection, formed by an information broker, can expose your idea to a new world, filled with fresh opportunities for success. Diversity makes the difference. Uzzi and Dunlap show you how to assess what kind of network you currently have, helping you to identify your super-connectors and demonstrating how you act as an information broker for others. They then explain how to diversify your contacts through shared activities and how to manage your new, more potent, network.     

Building a leadership brand

How do some firms produce a pipeline of consistently excellent managers? Instead of concentrating merely on strengthening the skills of individuals, these companies focus on building a broad organizational leadership capability. It's what Ulrich and Smallwood--cofounders of the RBL Group, a leadership development consultancy--call a leadership brand. Organizations with leadership brands take an "outside-in" approach to executive development. They begin with a clear statement of what they want to be known for by customers and then link it with a required set of management skills. The Lexus division of Toyota, for instance, translates its tagline--"The pursuit of perfection"--into an expectation that its leaders excel at managing quality processes. The slogan of Bon Secours Health System is "Good help to those in need." It demands that its managers balance business skills with compassion and caring. The outside-in approach helps firms build a reputation for high-quality leaders whom customers trust to deliver on the company's promises. In examining 150 companies with strong leadership capabilities, the authors found that the organizations follow five strategies. First, make sure managers master the basics of leadership--for example, setting strategy and grooming talent. Second, ensure that leaders internalize customers' high expectations. Third, incorporate customer feedback into evaluations of executives. Fourth, invest in programs that help managers hone the right skills, by tapping customers to participate in such programs. Finally, track the success of efforts to build leadership bench strength over the long-term. The result is outstanding management that persists even when individual executives leave. In fact, companies with the strongest leadership brands often become "leader feeders"--firms that regularly graduate leaders who go on to head other companies.