Why Leadership/Why
Now
By STEVE COATS |
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Leadership provides the foundation on which excellence
is built, so continuing to develop leaders in all areas must be
a first priority in business today.
Welcome to the "Nanosecond Nineties!"
It is a different world out there. Loyal customers
suddenly have higher expectations, and have become more fickle and
irrational in their demands. Your competitors have decided that
your customers should no longer buy your products and are going
after them in unprecedented ways. Your people probably wonder when
the constant state of change and confusion will end, or whether
they will survive the next reorganization, or the one shortly thereafter.
The marketplace is tumultuous and unforgiving.
It has forced organizations to think and act in fresh, perhaps even
radical ways. It has also resulted in some unusual strain on loyalty
and relationships in all aspects of business.
Today's organizations face some tough challenges
that are in fact, relationship oriented. Some of those are:
- How do we get people to become more willing
to take some risks or try new things?
- How do we generate more passion and commitment
toward our purpose and vision?
- How do we demonstrate that our values and principles
are not just "hot air?"
- How do we increase the faith the people have
in their leaders' abilities to take them successfully into the
future?
- How do we more fully enable people, and take
advantage of the talents they bring?
- How do we increase the loyalty and belief of
all our stockholders?
The Secret of Strong Relationships
For any relationship to succeed, whether it is
friendship, marriage, or team membership, there must be trust. Without
trust, there can be no leadership, no followership, no teamwork,
no customer loyalty. Building and sustaining trust is the single
most perplexing issue that organizational leaders face in these
contemporary times of tremendous change and constant upheaval.
People are very comfortable with and attached
to "the way things have always been done." With the marketplace
demonstrating that traditional ways are no longer good enough to
survive, people have become uncomfortable and reluctant. Unswerving
trust (sometimes called the leap of faith), is required for them
to be able to let go of the old and venture with confidence, into
the uncharted waters of the future.
If ever there was a time when exemplary leadership
was needed throughout organizations, it is now. Leaders bring the
issue of trust to the forefront, fostering better, more productive
relationships. Strong relationships produce synergy, and thus provide
far more innovations and solutions to the difficult challenges like
those listed above. They directly and positive impact the bottom
line.
One of the most important, highest leverage functions
of senior managers is to develop more leaders within their organizations.
In order to do this, they must continue to refine their own individual
and collective leadership abilities, and create an environment for
others to do the same.
Leadership Comes First
Companies are investing staggering sums of money
in quality initiatives, process and systems re-engineering, and
customer driven reorganization. Sadly, a large proportion of these
strategic overhauls have not lived up to their promises. The reason
is they desperately lack the visionary leadership required to strengthen
people's belief in a new future, and their confidence that the new
strategies will take them there. With no leadership, people get
exclusively focused (and easily swallowed) by the management directives
of streamlining the "hows" of the business. The meaning
of "why" the work is important, gets lost. With down sizing
a closely associated outcome of efforts like these, people quickly
become cynical about the future and turn away. When this happens,
disappointing results are inevitable.
Many companies have decided that the best way
to manage the challenges posed by these "re-everything"
efforts is to throw teams at them. The value of teamwork in today's
world is beyond question. It is a fact that more and better work
can be accomplished through teams. The world is just too complex
for even the best to fly solo any longer, thus high-performing teams
doing real work offer tremendous advantages. This is especially
true if the senior officers can find ways to work as a team, because
they too will be able to get more done, as well as visibly model
the value of teams for everyone else.
Interestingly enough, the nanosecond nineties
is throwing some fast curve balls at the traditional concept of
teams. People are portioned into teams without the opportunity to
learn what it means to be a good team member. So called empowered
teams, working within a command and control, hierarchical organization
seldom work. Teams today must serve specific purposes,
But, for any team to be successful, there must
first be effective leadership. Leaders provide vision, competence
and heart, enabling and inspiring members to want to achieve astonishing
performance results. In the very best teams, leadership "roves,"
meaning that practically all members will emerge at one time or
another to take on the responsibilities of leading. Simply stated,
without the shared responsibility of leadership, teams will never
be able to reach their full potential.
Leadership and teamwork are indeed closely linked.
In fact, it is through teams, that leaders are able to get extraordinary
work accomplished. Yet the fact remains that neither high performance
teams nor visionary leadership, by themselves, is enough to ensure
an organization's continued prosperity. But coupled together, they
become an unbeatable combination.
How much better would it really be for you if
your employees became much more inspired and excited about their
work? What would really happen if they became relentlessly motivated
toward providing astonishing service to the customers, other internal
divisions, and each other? What would it be like if everyone worked
like volunteers for a cause in which they truly believed, opposed
to showing up for work because they feel entitled to a job and a
paycheck. How far could you go, if each person became genuinely
more trusting of everyone else?
Idealistic, philosophical questions? Hardly. They
in fact, are the road map for prosperity in today's convoluted marketplace.
They also illustrate the personal and organizational power that
results from good leadership.
Steve Coats is a senior partner with International
Leadership Associates, a Cincinnati firm, dedicated to leadership
development.
Copyright 1996 International Leadership Associates
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