Archives for November 2006

Leadership of the Future

The last 20 years has seen an incredible increase in technology. Most of the principles of good leadership remain the same, regardless of how technology changes. However, technology presents new challenges for leaders.

Virtual Contact Leadership

One of the benefits of modern technology is the ability to communicate with anyone anywhere in the world. While this is a benefit for businesses looking to expand, it presents unique challenges for leaders. Many leaders have a leadership skill set that relies heavily on their personality and “presence”. Many of these skills don’t translate well into electronic communication.

Leaders need to be aware of this and work to improve their skills in communicating and leading using modern tools. They can no longer rely on the power of their personality to give them an edge. One of the biggest areas leaders must develop is the ability to communicate well through the written word.

In the past, leaders were often able to rely on assistants for written communication. However, with the ubiquitous use of email, this is no longer an option. Leaders who cannot communicate well in writing will find themselves at a disadvantage.

Leaders preparing for the future should make a conscious effort in the following areas:

Developing strong writing skills.
Understanding different forms of electronic communication.
Understanding the culture of different forms of electronic communication.

Leading Outside the Organization

In the past, leaders generally led people who reported to them through the chain of command. As businesses become more focused on their core competencies, leaders are finding that many of the people they are leading are in other organizations. Leaders of the past who lead through position and title will find it difficult to lead in the future. Many of their old techniques will not work across organizations’ boundaries.

This shift will require that successful leaders of the future develop a greater degree of true leadership skill. The shortcuts used by many in authority will not work when trying to lead across organizational boundaries.

Leaders in future organizations will also require a better holistic understanding of the entire business ecosystem, not just their organization. Leaders who can successfully make this transition will be in high demand, not just by companies looking to hire their skills, but by organizations looking to partner with them for mutual benefit.

The Difficulty of Earning Leadership Trust

Some of the recent high-profile scandals in business will require some changes for leaders of the future as well. Subordinates are less likely to trust a leader because of position and title than they were 10 years ago. In the future, obtaining trust will require even more effort.

In the future, leaders must seek to actively measure the level of trust in their organization and take deliberate steps to improve the level of trust. Before making big changes leaders must gauge the level of trust in their organization to make sure they have built enough of a solid trust foundation to obtain successful buy-in.

While the core skills of leadership will remain the same over time, the leadership of the future will require a different emphasis on particular skills. By preparing for these changes ahead of time, leaders can ready themselves today for what organizations will need tomorrow.

Creating Confidence

By Mark Shead Leave a Comment

As a leader, you need to cultivate your team’s confidence. Your team should have confidence in themselves as well as confidence in your leadership skills. The best way to create confidence is through a series of victories. In general, people will judge the probability of future success based on past performance. As you work with your team you will build a history. If you maintain a good track record of success, you will create a sense of optimism that future, proposed projects will also be successful. If you have a record of failure, your team will probably view any new projects as having a high chance of failing.

To be effective, you need a team that is very confident in their abilities to achieve success and in your ability to choose projects that will be successful. If an individual doesn’t feel like what they are working on is going to be successful, it is very unlikely that they will invest themselves entirely in the project. Sometimes, they will even start trying to plan ahead in order to have a good excuse for the project’s demise. At times, this means ignoring obvious obstacles that will provide an excuse for their failure.

When an individual believes a project will be successful, they are able to put themselves behind it 100%. Instead of looking for obstacles that can function as excuses in the future, they are proactive in eliminating obstacles that would cause a failure of the project. A team full of people looking for solutions will have a much higher success rate than a team of people looking for things to use as excuses later on.

It is the job of the leader to select projects that will contribute to an overall sense of success within his team. By starting with projects that the entire team believes will be successful, a leader is able to raise the level of confidence for the next project. Over time, the confidence of a team can be built to a point that it can easily complete a project that would have been a failure previously. A series of projects can be completed easily and successfully when they are arranged in order to build confidence, while the same projects can all be complete failures when done in a different order.

When you need to develop confidence, you should arrange projects in an order that is similar to the way questions are asked on the game show “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.” The first project should very easy. So easy that no one will have any doubts that it can be completed successfully.

Historically, nations have built monuments in memory of their success. When the Israelites crossed the Jordan river into Canaan, they took 12 large stones from the river and stacked them on top of each other to remember their success in leaving Egypt.

The world is full of triumphal arches that were built to remind people of a war victory. These were built to remind people of their success in the past and encourage them in future endeavors.

When Yahoo completed a groundbreaking version of their web mail system, an artist was commissioned to create a sculpture celebrating the success of the developers who worked on the project. The statue is on display at the Yahoo headquarters.

While it might not be appropriate to create a sculpture or triumphal arch for every project, some projects serve as trophies themselves. The visibility of a project doesn’t always correspond with its difficulty. By picking a project that is easy to complete, but is also very visible, you will create a “war trophy” for your team—something that will regularly remind them of their success.

Once a team has had some success, the difficulty of their projects can increase dramatically. To continue the momentum, a leader should be careful not to break momentum by having a failure. However, a proactive leader should be able to turn an occasional failure into a positive learning experience. It is important to admit when something went wrong. When leadership attempts to cover a failure as if it were really a success or just ignore it completely, it often amplifies the failure instead of minimizing it.

There was a large organization that was beginning to saturate the market for its services at a particular location. The leadership decided that expanding to a branch office was the right decision. They leased a building, renovated it and began operations. It was soon apparent that there was a problem with the cost structure at the branch office. Many of the methods of doing business at the main headquarters were very inefficient when scaled down to the size of the branch office. To make matters worse, the branch office didn’t attract many new customers. Most of the clients were existing customers who had previously done business at the headquarters building.

After a few years, the main headquarters built a bigger building and the branch office was shut down. However, the organization told people that the plan had always been to shut it down once a larger headquarters was built, while much of the staff knew that this wasn’t the case. By trying to hide the fact that the branch office had been a failure, they were unable to learn from the failure in a way that could help enable successes in the future. Without this opportunity to learn, it is very likely that any future branch offices will suffer a similar demise–assuming that the organization even attempts another expansion.

Many of the team members who worked on creating the branch office left the organization. Others that stayed on staff carried the sense of failure with them as a lack of confidence on future projects.

Dealing with failure is one of the key skills a leader needs to develop. Failure does not have to be a big deal, but most people’s natural tendencies are the opposite of what needs to happen in order to turn a failure into a learning experience and not a confidence breaker.

A high level of confidence isn’t something that just happens naturally. It is something that develops over time. With a little care and planning, your team can grow in confidence. This leads to a momentum of success that will carry them over the inevitable rough places and occasional failures.

Vision and Efficiency

By Mark Shead Leave a Comment

In any organization, effort can be divided into two categories. Effort that helps achieve the vision and effort that does not. There is some work that is difficult to correctly categorize–especially in complex organizations with a great deal of complexity. However, most of the time there is a great deal of effort expended on items that are clearly not in support of the vision.

It is probably impossible for an organization to operate at 100% efficiency. In many cases, inefficiency results, not from natural organizational entropy, but because every person has a different view of the vision.

When information is lacking, the human mind becomes creative. There have been studies to determine the reliability of testimony by court witnesses. In the study, people were exposed to a situation in ways that certain details were intentionally unknowable. However, after repeatedly being asked about the unknowable details they began to “remember”. These memories didn’t come from their actual experience. The subject’s brains were filling in details purely from imagination.

Now think about an organization full of people with an incomplete understanding of the vision. Every day they are faced with situations where understanding the vision is required in order to make the correct choice. Over time, they will fill in the details themselves and create their own personal version of the vision.
Since a good deal of this personal vision comes directly from their imagination, it is not surprising that the vision they create often is more aligned with their personal vision than the actual vision of the organization. This isn’t their fault. It is the natural way the human mind works.

There was a large church that was trying to identify better with its congregation. During a meeting of some of the staff, one of the newer staff members asked, “Who is our target market?” to better understand exactly who the organization was trying to reach.

A pastor at the meeting responded to the question by saying that the target market was people who hadn’t ever been to a church. The other staff members pointed out that 99% of the sermons preached by the senior pastor were targeted toward people who were already churchgoers and often wouldn’t even make much sense to people who had never attended a church.

The fact that the staff had to ask who they were trying to reach was a clear indication that the vision was not being communicated clearly from the top leadership. This pastor had created his version of the vision based on his personal preferences. This wasn’t something that he was doing intentionally; it is just the way the human mind works.

If each individual in an organization is creating a separate version of the vision that is heavily influenced by their own personal preference, it is amazing that organizations can function at all. But remember that people are only going to use their imagination in the areas where information is lacking. If the vision is well defined and effectively communicated, the areas left to people’s imagination is minimized.

If half of an individual’s personal view of the vision is coming purely from their own imagination, it is likely that half of the effort they are expending is not in alignment with the true vision of the organization. If everyone in the organization is filling in holes in the vision, then it is likely that half of the organization’s effort is being expended toward the focused vision and the other half is pulling the organization in different, random directions.

Much of the benefit of a large organization in the first place, is the efficiency that comes from having many people all expending effort toward the same goal. When a significant portion of the effort is being expended in random directions, much of the value of having an organization is lost.

When a leader regularly communicates a clear vision, the amount of wasted effort is minimized. In addition, the more effort across the entire organization is focused in the same direction, the more synergy will exist between individuals and departments.