Leaders In London

The leadership guru Marshall Goldsmith has produced a list of 20 common failures in leadership behaviour. Spend a minute mentally ticking off which ones you are guilty of. Be honest. If you can’t be honest enough, ask someone else to do it for you:

• Winning Too Much: The need to win at all costs and in all situations—when it matters, when it doesn’t, and when it’s totally beside the point.
• Adding Too Much Value: The overwhelming desire to add our two cents to every discussion.
• Passing Judgment: The need to rate others and impose our standards on them.
• Making Destructive Comments: The needless sarcasms and cutting remarks that we think make us sound sharp and witty.
• Starting with “No,” “But,” or “However”: The overuse of these qualifiers, which secretly say to everyone, “I’m right. You’re wrong.”
• Telling the World How Smart We Are: The need to show people we’re smarter than they think we are.
• Speaking When Angry: Using emotional volatility as a management tool.
• Negativity: The need to share our negative thoughts, even when we weren’t asked.
• Withholding Information: The refusal to share information in order to maintain an advantage over others.
• Failing to Give Proper Recognition: The inability to praise and reward.
• Claiming Credit We Don’t Deserve: The most annoying way to overestimate our contribution to any success.
• Making Excuses: The need to reposition our annoying behavior as a permanent fixture so people excuse us for it.
• Clinging to the Past: The need to deflect blame away from ourselves and onto events and people from our past; a subset of blaming everyone else.
• Playing Favorites: Failing to see that we are treating someone unfairly.
• Refusing to Express Regret: The inability to take responsibility for our actions, admit we’re wrong, or recognize how our actions affect others.
• Not Listening: The most passive-aggressive form of disrespect for colleagues.
• Failing to Express Gratitude: The most basic form of bad manners.
• Punishing the Messenger: The misguided need to attack the innocent, who are usually only trying to protect us.
• Passing the Buck: The need to blame everyone but ourselves.
• An Excessive Need to Be “Me”: Exalting our faults as virtues simply because they exemplify who we are.

So, take the ONE thing that you know you do from that list…and stop doing it this week. If you are brave and disciplined enough, come back to the list next week and take another ‘habit’ and focus on undoing it. And so on…

Source: I spotted Marshall’s list on George Ambler’s excellent blog The Practice of Leadership:

Motivation and High Performance

Harvard Business Review’s ’summer reading’ (their big summer edition) has a big piece on motivation. Timely, as motivation can dip drastically in a downturn, with employees worried about their finances, their job and the future.The piece draws on the trendy ‘neuroscience of leadership’ - using MRI scanners to see which areas of the brain light up to show activity and engagement - and says that there are four key drivers of motivation:

1. The drive to acquire - rewards and experiences
2. The drive to bond - building a sense of belonging
3. The drive to comprehend - work must be meaningful
4. The drive to defend - fair play for all

Stefan Stern, in the FT today, points out that motivation remains a big headache for managers and leaders, regardless of the economic climate. A recent Hay Group survey of more than 3,100 organizations found that 41% of employees felt demotivated by their managers.

This reminds me of a true story my friend Henry Stewart, founder of Happy Computers, likes to begin his presentations with: a manufacturing company noted that its productivity figures went up on the weekend. It couldn’t figure out why, till it dug a little deeper and realized the obvious: the managers didn’t go in on the weekend.

Stern says that the ‘powerful new model’ trumpeted in the HBR doesn’t actually add anything to what we know already which, he says, can be summed up in this paragraph from Frederick Herzberg, author, ironically, of one of the HBR’s most widely-read articles, the 1968 piece “One more time: how do you motivate employees”.

Herzberg’s seminal paragraph is this:

“If I kick my dog…he will move. And when I want him to move again what must I do? I must kick him again. Similarly, I can change a person’s battery, and then recharge it, and then recharge it again. But it is only when one has a generator of one’s own that we can talk about motivation. One then needs no outside stimulation. One wants to do it.”

PS So what’s your role in motivating? Providing inspiration and getting out of the way (apart from stepping in to support and ensure people have the resources they need). Inspired leadership is the piece that is missing in most organizations. They have to want to follow you, and that comes from inspiration.

Phil Dourado

As we are trading through difficult times at the moment, here’s a reminder from the slightly abrasive (I think he was in a bad mood that day; you can hear it in his voice) Allan Leighton, on what you should STOP doing or watch out for in fellow leaders in your organization. Leighton was speaking at Leaders in London 2007. This is a less forgiving economic environment than we have had for a few years and, as Warren Buffet said, you never know who is swimming naked till the tide goes out. Make sure it isn’t you or other leaders in your organization.

Posted on behalf of
Leaders in London
by
Phil Dourado of
The Leadership Hub

Each year IBM surveys 400 business leaders worldwide and asks them what their top concerns are. And each year for the past three years, lack of effective leadership has been right up there at or near the top, as holding back growth. This year’s report (The Global Human Capital Study, 2008) was published this week and goes further than any previous reports in saying there is a leadership vacuum in large organizations. Here’s what the report says: 

Direction, feedback and clarity needed 

“Companies are finding themselves with a leadership vacuum, with fewer individuals who have the knowledge and experience to guide others through necessary business transformations. Without leaders who can provide the direction, feedback and clarity needed to navigate in a more complex world, companies will struggle to achieve business goals.” 

A significant barrier to growth 

“A lack of leadership capability has become a significant barrier to growth for many organizations… Without sufficient leadership talent, who will setthe direction? Who will paint the vision? Who will lead the change? It’s not only an HR issue. It is a business imperative….” When asked “What do you see as the primary workforcerelated issues facing the organization?”, the second highest answer was ‘lack of leadership’, coming second only to ‘inability to rapidly develop skills to address current/future business needs.’  

Inability to develop future leaders is a major problem 

The report goes on to highlight that most organizations are struggling to develop  future leaders. The report says:  “Not only are companies concerned with their current leadership capacity, they are confronted by their inability to develop future leadership talent …. Over 75 percent of companies indicate building leadership talent is a significant challenge. 

So, what do we do about it? 

We seem to learn best and be inspired by real leaders with real stories to tell, backed up with practical experience-sharing. Joining a community of practice – real leaders really doing the job in real time – and learning from each others’ experience, is likely to be an accelerant to any in-house leadership training and development initiatives. You could start by attending Leaders in

London at the end of this month, being inspired by the bank of world leaders on the stage, and networking with the hundreds of practising leaders among the attendees. And Leaders in

London attendees are entitled to free membership of www.TheLeadershipHub.com, the world’s online leadership community, where leadership practitioners and experts share experiences and learning. 

Good luck in dealing with that vacuum!