Robert Kaplan is a Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School. In his new book, What to Ask the Person in the Mirror, he argues against the notion that great leadership is about having all the answers. He believes that leadership skills can be learned--and that many of these skills require executives to rethink their conception of what a superb leader actually does. Developing and practicing these skills requires hard work and may demand that talented executives overcome some degree of discomfort and even anxiety in order to raise their game.
When CEOs ask Rob Kaplan for answers, he responds "Most leaders spend a lot of their time looking for answers. Very often, they may feel isolated and alone. I want to help them refocus their attention on framing and then discussing the key questions that will help them regroup, mobilize their team, formulate a plan of action, and move forward." Not surprisingly, this is the focus of TEC as well.
Here are the key areas of inquiry that Kaplan suggests can help leaders improve the success of their companies:
1.Have you developed a clear vision and key priorities for your enterprise?
" The leader may have a clear vision in his or her head but has not communicated it effectively throughout the organization. Leaders need to ask whether they articulate a clear vision and, just as importantly, whether their key employees can re-articulate this vision in a consistent manner."
2.Does the way you spend your time match your key priorities?
“If you hate doing something, you are likely to avoid it. Conversely, if you love doing something, you are likely to arrange your time so you can do more and more of it."
The question then becomes, how do your passions coincide with the needs of the business? Have you reconciled your passions with these business needs? “
3.Do you coach and also solicit feedback from your key subordinates?
"Ironically, the executives most in need of feedback are very senior," and “may have become isolated or not realize that their direct reports have constructive advice regarding specific changes they need to make to improve their leadership effectiveness." If they become a TEC member, their peers will also provide this feedback.
When senior leaders ultimately do cultivate junior coaches and/or seek council from their TEC member peers, they may find that the criticism can feel "devastating at first because you realize it is accurate and that it is probably a widespread view within the organization.”
"Leadership is a team game," Kaplan says. "You have to solicit help from others or you're likely to under-achieve your potential."
4.Do you have a succession-planning process in place?
Kaplan stresses the importance of developing potential successors for key positions in your company-including your own.Then use this list up-and-comers to delegate more extensively to them. This also allows senior leaders more time to achieve a better match between their own time and key priorities. Leaders who fail to train successors risk not only doing too much themselves but also losing these valuable employees, who can become frustrated that they aren't being challenged to build their skills and careers at the company.
5.If you had to design your company today with a clean sheet of paper, what would you change?
It's natural for companies to fall out of alignment with achievement of key objectives in a rapidly changing world. Too often, leaders don't realize how off-track they are until serious damage has been done to the business Kaplan likens the situation to realizing your health is at risk only after you're stricken with a heart attack.
6.Do you act as a role model?
Leaders don't always realize that their actions set an example for the people who work for them.
7.Are you reaching your potential and being true to yourself?
"In the end, it's not about meeting everyone else's expectations," Kaplan says. "It's about reaching your unique potential and developing your own leadership style.”
Click here for the complete article in the July 18 issue of Working Knowledge from the Harvard Business School.
The Internet brings powerful tools to the workplace. It also brings powerful distractions - face book, personal shopping, games, videos, music or just surfing.
A number of studies have suggested that US workers waste between one and two hours a day web surfing, costing their companies billions in lost productivity. In response, some employers have banned private Internet use at the office. Sounds like a good idea on the surface. But this practice can result in other problems, perhaps more serious problems, according to new research.
The research paper "Temptation at Work", by Harvard Business School research fellow Marco Piovesan and colleagues, is believed to be the first study of the effects of temptation on work performance. The paper suggests that by banning web surfing, employers are essentially asking their workers to resist temptation until they can go home and surf on their own time. Yet people who are asked to resist temptation in anticipation of a later reward spend effort and energy resisting the temptation and actually become less productive and make more mistakes.
This conclusion is based upon laboratory tests on young people. These tests suggest to Piovesan that instead of a blanket policy prohibiting web use, employers should give workers periodic breaks for "personal communications". These frequent breaks, it is believed,would increase employee energy and relax them so their willpower comes back to the original level.
"They could go out for five minutes and check e-mail and still be able to concentrate on their jobs." In the future, Piovesan hopes to test that principle in an actual office environment. So stay tuned.
I often ask CEOs, "How do you think you should be spending your time?" with the follow up question, "How do you spend your time?" The two answers are almost always different. Most feel the should spend more time on strategy and planning but don't because of more urgent matters, i.e., fire fighting.
In his paper, "What CEOs Do, and How They Can Do Better", author Michael Blanding reviews the research conducted by Raffaella Sadun of the Harvard Business School, Luigi Guiso of the European University Institute, and Oriana Bandiera and Andrea Prat of the London School of Economics reported in their paper with the deceptively simple title "What Do CEOs Do?".
They studied how 94 Italian CEOs spend their time and came to the following correlations. (The emphasis here is on the term correlations as opposed to cause and effect.)
They found not surprisingly that the vast majority of a CEO's time, some 85 percent, was spent working with other people through meetings, phone calls, and public appearances, while only 15 percent was spent working alone. Of the time spent with others, chief execs spent on average 42 percent with only "insiders" (employees or directors of the CEO's firm); 25 percent with insiders and outsiders together; and 16 percent with only outsiders. (Exact numbers varied dramatically among the sample, with some CEOs spending more than 20 hours a week outside the office, while others spent almost none.)
They also found that time spent with insiders was strongly correlated with productivity increases. For every 1 percent gain in time spent with at least one insider, productivity advanced 1.23 percent. Less reassuring, however, was that the time CEOs spent with outsiders had no measurable correlation with firm performance.
This seemed surprising to me as I have always felt that time with customers was always time well spent as a CEO.
Regardless, the researchers were encouraged by the results of the initial study, so they are planning to continue along this line of research by expanding the data collection in other countries (India, China, and the US) in order to increase the sample as well as to take cultural differences into account.
Click here for the full article and stay tuned for the results of the expanded research.
Managers who inundate their teams with the same messages, over and over, via multiple media, need not feel bad about their persistence. In fact, this redundant communication works to get projects completed quickly, according to new research by Harvard Business School professor Tsedal B. Neeley and Northwestern University's Paul M. Leonardi and Elizabeth M. Gerber. At first blush, this redundant communication strategy may sound like nagging or a waste of time. But as it turns out, asking multiple times gets results.
Key concepts include:
Managers who are deliberately redundant as communicators move their projects forward more quickly and smoothly than those who are not.
Clarity in messaging matters less than redundancy. It's not the message; it's the frequency of the message that counts in getting the job done.
Managers without power (project team managers versus managers dealing with direct reports) were much more strategic, much more thoughtful about motivating their team. (Note that a lack of direct power is common in companies today, because so many people work on teams that form and disband on a project-by-project basis. Yet team leaders are still on the hook to achieve their business imperatives despite this absence of authority.)
Yet both managers with and without power met deadlines and budget goals with the same frequency, regardless of their communication strategy. However, managers without power got employees to move more quickly, and with less mop up needed later.
These results provide a concrete strategy for managers who are struggling with how best to communicate with workers. This is an actual strategy—a communication persuasion strategy.
After decades of outsourcing, America's ability to innovate and create high-tech products essential for future prosperity is on the decline, argue professors Gary Pisano, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and Willy Shih, Professor of Management Practice in the Technology and Operations Management Unit also at Harvard Business School. Yet they are cautiously optimistic that it is not too late to get it back. From HBS Alumni Bulletin. Click here for the full article.
Key concepts include:
There is a long standing misconception that manufacturing is kind of the brawn and not the brain, and that the country should focus on the brain, i.e., product design and innovation.
There is a role for public policy in terms of making sure the country is maintaining a broader set of manufacturing capabilities.
Manufacturing capability takes a while to erode, but the damage is almost irreversible. So now is the time to be doing something about it.
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
The authors argue that the United States is still an innovation powerhouse, but the problem comes about as more manufacturing moves offshore and commercialization capabilities diminish. This is true because exporting manufacturing ultimately drains away American innovation.
There has been a naive view that innovation is just about R&D and separate from manufacturing. People in the United States and other advanced industrialized countries say that the future is in innovation, not manufacturing, as if manufacturing is not part of the innovation process. In many sectors that's simply not true. The ability to develop very complex, sophisticated manufacturing processes is as much about innovation as dreaming up ideas.
In my own 30+ years in engineering design and manufacturing, product innovation and product design are only part of what’s needed to produce high quality, low cost products.Manufacturing processes are also key to success.Moreover, close collaboration between design and manufacturing are essential.I use the term “design for manufactureability”.This becomes problematic when the design engineer and the plant are 10,000 miles apart.
So here’s the problem.For any individual company, it is often better, in the short or intermediate term, to outsource production to an overseas supplier. The company can buy manufacturing services at a much lower rate if it goes to China or elsewhere, depending on the industry.
But if everybody is doing that, you get a general erosion in the ability to innovate - to increase quality, reduce costs and develop breakthrough products. This results in the long term erosion of the American economy. An individual company, though, can move assets anywhere. So companies can reward their shareholders regardless of what happens to the national economy. As a result, the interests of companies and the Country have diverged.
The authors point out that one of the issues in developing a national economic strategy has been confusion with the term "industrial policy," which “has been anathema in Washington”. "Industrial policy" suggests some degree of central planning. We don’t and shouldn’t do that.
They further point out that, unlike other nations, we don't currently have a national economic strategy. Note that strategy is different from policy, which is tactical. The authors think that we should develop a national strategy. I agree.
If you look at the United States in the post WWII period, there was a very strong national economic strategy around using science to drive economic growth. We created the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, among others, and the government invested dramatically in building a scientific and technical infrastructure needed to fuel growth. That was the national strategy, and it was not industrial policy.
Pisano and Shih conclude that there's an important need today for having a coordinated national manufacturing strategy at the highest level. I say that the need is more than important, it is critical in order to stop the erosion that we have been experiencing.
On the bright side, there are real reasons to be optimistic: The U.S. economy is quite resilient, and it's quite flexible. “We wouldn't want anybody to interpret what we are saying as the sky is falling. While there are some issues around policy, and there are some issues around management, it's time for executives to be leaders in terms of building the kind of capabilities that are going to make their enterprises great over a longer period of time.”
In his book, "The Essence of Leadership" Mac Anderson discusses many keys to being a great leader. Here are 13 of them:
Develop a service attitude – Service is the lifeblood of any organization.Everything flows from it and is nourished by it.Customer service is not a department, it’s an attitude!
Love what you do – Many things will catch your eye, but few will catch your heart. Pursue those.
Focus on priorities – Focus on the critical few, not the insignificant many.
Understand the soft stuff – “There are two things more powerful than money and sex – recognition and praise” Mary Kay Ash
Build your brand – In the race for quality, there is no finish line.
Embrace humor and optimism – “Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement”Helen Keller
Embrace excellence – “Excellence is not an act, it’s a habit”Aristotle
Take risks – Don’t be afraid to go out on a limb.That’s where the fruit is.
You’ll always miss 100% of the shots you don’t take
Reinforce core values – Things that matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least.
Earn trust – “Trust, not technology, is the issue of the decade”Tom Peters
Take action – You cannot discover new oceans if you don’t have the courage to lose sight of the shore.
Aim for the heart because they don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
I found these keys to being a great leader in 3 minute inspirational movie. Click here to view it. Mr. Anderson's book is available from Simple Truths. Click here for the link to order.
If you were asked "what gives a person the right to lead?", you may think the answer lies in position, rank, title, academic degrees, age, experience or ownership of the company. Author John Maxwell would disagree. In his book "The Right To Lead", he explains what gives a person the right to lead, a right that can only be earned. And that takes time.
The key to becoming an effective leader is not to focus on making other people follow, but on becoming the kind of person they want to follow.
To prepare to become a better leader, Maxwell suggests the following guidelines:
Let go of your ego.
The truly great leaders are not in leadership for personal gain. They lead in order to serve other people. Perhaps that is why Lawrence D. Bell remarked, "Show me a man who cannot bother to do little things, and I'll show you a man who cannot be trusted to do big things."
Become a good follower first.
Rare is the effective leader who didn't learn to become a good follower first. That is why a leadership institution such as the United State Military Academy teaches its officers to become effective followers first - and why West Point has produced more leaders than the Harvard Business School.
Build positive relationships.
Leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less. That means it is by nature relational. Today's generation of leaders seem particularly aware of this because title and position mean so little to them. They know intuitively that people go along with people they get along with.
Work with excellence.
No one respects and follows mediocrity. Leaders who earn the right to lead give their all to what they do. They bring into play not only their skills and talents, but also great passion and hard work. They perform on the highest level of which they are capable.
Rely on discipline, not emotion.
Leadership is often easy during the good times. It's when everything seems to be against you - when you're out of energy, and you don't want to lead - that you earn your place as a leader. During every season of life, leaders face crucial moments when they must choose between gearing up or giving up. To make it through those times, rely on the rock of discipline, not the shifting sand of emotion.
Make adding value your goal.
When you look at the leaders whose names are revered long after they have finished leading, you find that they were men and women who helped people to live better lives and reach their potential. That is the highest calling of leadership - and its highest value.
Give your power away.
One of the ironies of leadership is that you become a better leader by sharing whatever power you have, not by saving it all for yourself. You're meant to be a river, not a reservoir. If you use your power to empower others, your leadership will extend far beyond your grasp.
You can obtain a copy of "The Right To Lead" from Simple Truths. Click here for the link.
Other books by John Maxwell include "Today Matters" , "The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership"and "Thinking For a Change".
Sam has more than 25 years of leadership experience in manufacturing and engineering operations. He has served as a president and CEO for three companies and as Executive VP for a fourth. He brings a team-oriented approach to revitalizing companies by creating a shared strategic vision built around each individual's contribution.
Known for his knack for building high-performing management teams, identifying new profit opportunities, and balancing long-term solvency with near-term cash flow and profitability
TEC is an organization committed to the professional development of CEOs, presidents and business owners. Started in Milwaukee 53 years ago it has grown to be the largest CEO organization in the world with over 14,000 members in 13 countries. Its format is roundtable of Business Owners and CEOs who become a think tank for its members.
Visit TEC (The Executive Committee) to learn more.
RSS Feed