|
|
|
7 Reasons Why Law Firm Diversity Initiatives Fail
Many law firms understand the importance of building a diverse workforce. The changing demographics within the United States have signaled to firms that diversity is an important goal that will affect the firm’s viability and ultimately the bottom...
Client Service as a Competitive Advantage
*My name is Susan Young and I am Doug Brown's publicist. If you have any questions, please feel free to call me at 732-613-4790.* (Do not include this in this article) As someone who has been heavily involved facilitating strategic planning...
Leverage
Leverage by Alvah Parker Cassy was an employee of a nonprofit who had been at her job 5 years. She came to me because she felt that the organization she was working for didn’t value her and was upset because others had been promoted but she had...
Nine Steps to Delegating Effectively as a Business Owner
If you’re a business owner, you can’t possibly handle all of your company's work directly. That’s why effective delegating is one of the most vital skills you can possess. In fact, it’s absolutely crucial to your success. Consider these words by...
Your Leadership Style
If you want to succeed as a leader, you need to be comfortable
with moving around the spectrum of leadership styles. Sticking
with just one style means that you become predictable and hence,
as a leader, dispensable. It also means that your style...
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
The "Greatest" Leaders Are Often The Worst Leaders
PERMISSION TO REPUBLISH: This article may be republished in newsletters and on web sites provided attribution is provided to the author, and it appears with the included copyright, resource box and live web site link. Email notice of intent to publish is appreciated but not required: mail to: brent@actionleadership.com
Word count: 860
===========================================
Summary: So called "great" leaders are often the worst leaders when they fail to leave a strong culture of leadership excellence behind after they depart the organization.
===========================================
The "Greatest" Leaders Are Often The Worst Leaders
by Brent Filson
It's a common occurrence, a CEO leads a company to record earnings, retires and in months, those once high-flying earnings are dropping like shot ducks.
Observers blame the new leadership team. But most likely the observers are wrong. It's not just the new leaders who are screwing up. Instead, it was most likely the former CEO. Yes, the former, supposedly great CEO. Look to him for what went wrong — and what went wrong provides lessons for leaders at all levels.
The reasons are clear but seldom recognized. They get back to the raison d'être of leadership — which is not the performance of the individual leader but the improved results of those being led. The problems lie in the definition of results. For when results are defined narrowly, i.e. in strict terms of share, margin, shareholder value, profits, organizations lose their elasticity.
And the quality of organizational elasticity is linked to its culture of leadership, leadership with a broader vision of results, encompassing the necessity to hire and develop people who lead others to get results.
So when decline follows the departure of great leaders, the safe bet is that those "great" leaders haven't hired and developed leaders — and so really weren't great at all, no matter what results they got. In fact, they were quite poor.
To paraphrase Vince Lombardi on winning, getting good leaders for your team isn't everything, it's the only thing. The moment that you decide to hire, that very moment, is the living, breathing future of your organization.
A curious chemistry takes place in the hiring process. We don't just reach outward, we also reach inward. In hiring leaders, we invariably hire ourselves — our strengths and weaknesses. So the hand we reach out to shake is not just the other person's hand, it's our hand. Hire to our strengths, we hire strong leaders. Hire to our weaknesses, we hire weak leaders.
I know a brilliant, young executive in a multimillion dollar manufacturing company whose ambition to become CEO of that company may founder on his maddening propensity to hire leaders who may be good but who are none-the-less not the very best.
That's because the leaders he hires must have what is an unstated but at the same time real skill: the ability to curry his favor. Those leaders are ostensibly qualified. But they are often not the very best of the pool because they come equipped with that extraneous skill.
Since results on his teams are
also defined as the care and feeding of his ego, that executive is hiring to his weaknesses, so he continually makes what may ultimately turn out to be garbage-in-garbage-out hiring decisions that can ultimately wreck his ambitions.
On the other hand, I know another young executive, not nearly as brilliant, but whose hiring dictum may very well get him farther along in life.
The dictum is: Hire leaders who can not only do well in this position but in the next position and maybe even the position beyond that.
In other words, he hires to his strengths, his inner sense of self-confidence, which allows him to surround himself with people who are smarter and in some ways more capable than he — and so is creating a rising tide of action and results that will further his career in powerful ways.
As Steven Jobs said, "I don't hire people to tell them what to do but to tell me what to do."
Yet hiring people who are capable of supplanting you isn't enough. Do more. Actively develop the knowledge, skills and careers of those leaders to give them the best possible chance of supplanting you.
An epitaph on a 1680 New England gravestone speaks to this:
What I gave, I have.
What I spent, I had.
What I left, I lost.
By not giving it.
That can be an epitaph for failed leaders. By not giving to your leaders, not developing their skills and careers, you lose them, lose the opportunity to have their riches enrich you.
Nobody is a success unless others want them to be. And when you have a passionate desire for their success, for helping them improve and achieve their goals, when they know that working on your team will be a defining experience of their career — then you will have people who want like hell for you to be a success.
The decline following the departure of "great" leaders indicates that those leaders were most likely control-monsters, commanders not convincers, great at getting jobs done themselves but not challenging others to do them.
And when those others are ignored, they become inept.
So let's take an additional yardstick to our leaders and measure their total value, both when they're there and after they have left. Link that value to deferred compensation, bonuses, stock options for executives and to partially-delayed evaluations for middle managers and supervisors — or whatever.
When leaders define their performance beyond their tenure, they will most likely pay more attention to those two factors that are absolutely necessary for any organization's continued well-being: getting and developing exceptional leaders.
=============================
2004 © The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
About the Author
The author of 23 books, Brent Filson's recent books are, THE LEADERSHIP TALK: THE GREATEST LEADERSHIP TOOL and 101 WAYS TO GIVE GREAT LEADERSHIP TALKS. He has worked with thousands of leaders worldwide during the past 20 years helping them achieve sizable increases in hard, measured results. Sign up for his free leadership ezine and get a free guide, "49 Ways To Turn Action Into Results," at www.actionleadership.com
|
|
|
|
|
| The Art and Science of Leadership |
| The very essence of leadership is that you have to have a vision. ... Leadership Development Outline - contains the leadership guide listed to the right, ... |
| www.skagit.com |
|
| LeadershipJournal.net | Church Leaders & Leadership Training |
| Leadership's award-winning and relevent editorial provides timely insights on critical issues facing today's pastors and church leaders. |
| www.christianitytoday.com |
|
| Leadership - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
| Leadership can come from an individual, a collective group of leaders, ... Though advocates of the "big man" school of visionary leadership would have us ... |
| en.wikipedia.org |
|
| Leadership - Forbes.com. |
| Careers, Jobs, Management, Money, Compensation, Salary, Bonuses, Corporate Citizenship, Corporate Responsibility, Corporate Social Responsibility, ... |
| www.forbes.com |
|
| LeadershipNow - Leadership Development - Main Page |
| A source for free articles and shopping for leadership resources. |
| www.leadershipnow.com |
|
| Leadership University |
| Collection of articles in PDF format for distribution to classes, leadership teams, or outreach audiences. Sponsored by Campus Crusade. |
| www.leaderu.com |
|
| Center for Creative leadership: leadership at CCL.org, leadership ... |
| leadership at CCL.org. Specializing in leadership development, leadership training, executive coaching at CCL. |
| www.ccl.org |
|
| U.S. Senate: Senators Home > Senate Leadership |
| It shows the Senate's relationship to other branches of the Federal government and provides a quick view of Senate leadership, officers, and committee ... |
| www.senate.gov |
|
| Leadership |
| Quick Search This Journal:. Leadership. Sign up for SAGE Email Alerts today! Select an Issue from the Archive February 2005—November 2006 ... |
| lea.sagepub.com |
|
| Leadership |
| Describes programs, products, and services of the Covey Leadership Center, The goal of which is to help solve personal, professional, and organizational ... |
| www.ncrel.org |
|
| Academic Leadership |
| Articles and Essays for those in academic leadership roles - from unit coordinators to university presidents. |
| www.academicleadership.org |
|
| United States House of Representatives, 109th Congress, 2nd ... |
| Leadership Offices. Office of the Speaker · Office of the Majority Leader · Office of the Democratic Leader · House Majority Whip · Democratic Whip ... |
| www.house.gov |
|
| Amazon.com: Leadership: Books: Rudolph W. Giuliani,Ken Kurson |
| Amazon.com: Leadership: Books: Rudolph W. Giuliani,Ken Kurson by Rudolph W. Giuliani,Ken Kurson. |
| www.amazon.com |
|
| Leadership.com |
| Welcome to Leadership.com: Shaping the leaders of the Internet era ... Leadership.com offers several modules that empower leaders to build more effective ... |
| www.leadership.com |
|
| Leadership Network |
| Identifies and connects innovative senior pastors in the US and Canada through Leadership Communities and other events. |
| www.leadnet.org |
|
| Educational Leadership |
| Selected responses will be included in either the print or online versions of Educational Leadership. The deadline for this special section is December 8, ... |
| www.ascd.org |
|
| The Leadership Trust - Excellence in Leadership Development |
| The Leadership Trust has launched a new leadership development programme specifically ... The Leadership Trust recently welcomed The John Smith Fellowship ... |
| www.leadership.co.uk |
|
| Progressive Policy Institute: Defining the Third Way |
| Progressive Policy Institute, Democratic Leadership Council Home ... It is time for progressives to fill the leadership void on energy policy by offering a ... |
| www.ppionline.org |
|
| Business Leadership Skills - Leadership Development Training ... |
| Inc.com's Leadership Resource Center covering topics such as leadership development training, business leadership training, and business leadership skills. |
| www.inc.com |
|
| Leadership |
| These pages aim to expand the readers knowledge and understanding of the continuing debate in management studies about the role of leadership in the ... |
| www.ee.ed.ac.uk |
|
|