The Right To Lead

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:

1. 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."

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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".

Building Meaningful Relationships

As social animals, eighty percent of life's satisfaction comes from meaningful relationships with others.

So here's the question: If your relationships are the most important part of your life, what are you doing to make them all they can be?

In his book "The 100/0 Principle" Al Ritter provides us a road map. An excerpt follows.

Click here to learn more

An Excerpt from
The 100/0 Principle
by Al Ritter

What is the most effective way to create and sustain great relationships with others? It's The 100/0 Principle: You take full responsibility (the 100) for the relationship, expecting nothing (the 0) in return.

Implementing The 100/0 Principle is not natural for most of us. It takes real commitment to the relationship and a good dose of self-discipline to think, act and give 100 percent.

The 100/0 Principle applies to those people in your life where the relationships are too important to react automatically or judgmentally. Each of us must determine the relationships to which this principle should apply. For most of us, it applies to work associates, customers, suppliers, family and friends.

STEP 1 - Determine what you can do to make the relationship work...then do it. STEP 2 - Do not expect anything in return.
STEP 3 - Do not allow anything the other person says or does (no matter how annoying!) to affect you.
STEP 4 - Be persistent with your graciousness and kindness. Remember to expect nothing in return.

At times (usually few), the relationship can remain challenging, even toxic, despite your 100 percent commitment and self-discipline. When this occurs, you need to avoid being the "Knower" and shift to being the "Learner." Avoid Knower statements/ thoughts like "that won't work," "I'm right, you are wrong,"

Instead use Learner statements/thoughts like "Let me find out what is going on and try to understand the situation," "I could be wrong, let’s talk some more" In other words, as a Learner, be curious!

Principle Paradox

When you take authentic responsibility for a relationship, more often than not the other person quickly chooses to take responsibility as well. Consequently, the 100/0 relationship quickly transforms into something approaching 100/100. When that occurs, true breakthroughs happen for the individuals involved, their teams, their organizations and their families.

Seven Strategy Questions: A Simple Approach for Better Execution

Successful business strategy lies not in having all the right answers, but rather in asking the right questions, says Harvard Business School professor Robert Simons. In an excerpt from his new book, Seven Strategy Questions, Simons explains how posing these questions can help managers make smart choices. Here are the seven questions Professor Simons suggests:

1. Who Is Your Primary Customer? He emphasizes the adjective "primary". These are the customers to whom you should devote most of your company's resources.

2. How Do Your Core Values Prioritize Shareholders, Employees, and Customers?

Real core values indicate whose interest comes first when faced with difficult trade-offs.

Prioritizing core values should be the second pillar of your business strategy. Most companies with whom I deal would answer "Customers of course". But in practice, it is often not the case.

There is no right or wrong, but choosing and consistently sticking to your choice is necessary.

3. What Critical Performance Variables Are You Tracking? It's your job to ensure that your managers are tracking the right things by singling out those variables that spell the difference between strategic success and failure. Like the preceding two questions, the focus in this question is again on the adjective "critical". These variables should tell where the company is going, unlike your accounting statements that tell you where you've been.

4. What Strategic Boundaries Have You Set? Strategic boundaries, which are always stated in the negative, ensure that the entrepreneurial initiative of your employees aligns with the desired direction of the business. I prime example of failing to do this was the Enron experience.

5. Are You Generating Creative Tension? Sustaining ongoing innovation in organizations is notoriously difficult. People fall into comfortable habits, sticking with what they know and rejecting things that cause them to change their ways. Yet without innovation in a world characterized by rapid change, the company will eventually wither and die.

To overcome such inertia, you must push people out of their comfort zones and spur them to innovate. The author shows how to accomplish this.

6. How Committed Are Your Employees to Helping Each Other? This is a lot of what teamwork is all about. If your organization requires teamwork to succeed (and I believe that most do), then it's critically important to build norms so that people will help each other succeed—especially when you're asking people to innovate.

7. What Strategic Uncertainties Keep You Awake at Night? No matter how good your current strategy is, it won't work forever. So adapting to change becomes imperative. Adapting is critical to survival, but it's extremely difficult to do. With change constantly surrounding us, employees often do not know where to look or how to respond.

Your personal attention is the critical catalyst to focus your entire organization on the strategic uncertainties that keep you awake at night. After all, everyone watches what the boss watches.

Please click here to see the complete article that was published by the Harvard Business School on November 22, 2010. You may want to read Professor Simons complete book, "Seven Strategy Questions"

What Do You Think?

In this month's Corporate Report Wisconsin, Editor Laurie Arendt polled CRW's subscribers about the political environment and its effect on business. This lead to five questions that have been asked of the two Senate candidates, Senator Feingold and Mr. Johnson. Surprisingly, neither has responded. So my questions is "what do you think?"

Here are the five questions:

• Our readers, all of whom are business owners and executives in the state of Wisconsin, are very concerned about the spending that is going on by our federal government. What is your opinion of the current federal spending levels and what must our country do to reduce our debt burden?

• In your opinion, has the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act been a success or a failure? Why?

• What is your opinion of cap and trade and similar type of policies? What do you believe is the real impact on American businesses if this type of mandate is implemented in the United States?

• Many of our readers have responded to the current economy by hunkering down. They have stopped hiring because they are concerned about the cost of mandated health care coverage; they are concerned about the effects and costs of cap and trade. What do you believe our country’s leaders need to do to get business running again?

• What defines a Wisconsin pro-business candidate, and which candidate comes closest to this definition?

So what do you think? Keep these questions in mind when you select a candidate and vote on November 2.

Click here for the link to the editorial.

Sustainable Recovery?

The Institute for Trend Research, headed by Brian and Alan Beaulieu and Jeff Dietrich, has long been recognized by TEC as an accurate source of economic forecasts.

Recent poor economic news has once again fueled speculation that we may be headed for a "double dip" recession. Alan Beaulieu disagrees. In an article published in the August 2010 issue of Automation World, Alan states that the U.S. and global recovery is sustainable.

He says a sustainable recovery "... has been our outlook and that remains our outlook going forward, despite the increasing clamor of the double-dip alarmists. Yes, there are real dangers out there that threaten our well being, but we have taken them into consideration when putting together our forecast."

"However, it is expected that the rate of recovery in the United States will be milder than most of us would like and milder than we had anticipated 15 months ago."

While the news is not great, there does seem to be a light at the end of this long tunnel we are now in.

Click here for the complete article.

Getting Constructive Solutions from Front-Line Employees

Well run manufacturing companies have long known that some of the best ideas for process improvement come from front line employees. Many, if not most successful companies have a process that takes a quality, safety or customer service problem or incident, finds the root cause and takes preventative measures that ensure that the issue does not occur again. A key part of the success of this process is having a culture in place that encourages participation throughout the organization.

Harvard Professors Julia Rose Adler-Milstein, Sara J. Singer, and Michael W. Toffel, recently completed a study titled "Speaking Up Constructively: Managerial Practices that Elicit Solutions from Front-Line Employees".

The authors report "This study is among the first to develop and empirically test theory about how specific management practices can encourage employees to speak up about operational problems they witness. Our findings provide evidence that (a) employees speak up more often and offer more solutions when managers promote this behavior through information campaigns and through their own engagement in problem-solving activities and (b) these managerial behaviors may be considered substitutes." In other words, either an information campaign or managerial engagement will work.

The authors further state that "By identifying specific managerial behaviors, this study empowers managers to adjust their approaches to engaging workers in problem solving, which in turn can provide them with new sources of information about opportunities to improve work systems. In organizations that can learn from mistakes, this information can spark a virtuous cycle of performance improvement."

These results are no surprise to us in manufacturing. I found it interesting that the study was of the health industry, suggesting that practices common to manufacturing have much broader application.

Click here for the complete text of the study.

Leadership Characteristics

Jeff Blackman, TEC/Vistage Resource Speaker and business growth specialist, listed in his July 2010 Newsletter, 12 characteristics that are shared by great leaders. I wanted to share them with you.


Great leaders:

1. create a culture of trust and integrity

2. are flexible and willing to change, improve, enhance and upgrade

3. make tough decisions...knowing some folks "ain’t gonna like it"

4. value their people and their knowledge, creativity and enthusiasm

5. challenge the status quo

6. are highly disciplined, especially about time or self-management

7. delegate to others who can “do it” faster, better or smarter (and then get out of their way)

8. make today meaningful, yet always have a vision for tomorrow

9. seek honest and hard-hitting outside counsel, (they know what they don’t know...and want to hear what they haven’t heard)

10. are focused on the acquisition, satisfaction and retention of quality clients, customers and employees

11. listen, listen, listen

12. ask intelligent questions...to generate significant results

Click here to visit Jeff's web site.