A Google search on the term leadership yields about 134,000,000 hits! An Amazon search yields over 112,000 results for books on the subject. Wow!

I have been writing this blog for some time and whilst I have explored how others have defined leadership. I have not taken time to define what I mean by leadership. The reason for my tardiness is that I have found defining leadership to be quite a daunting task. I have even asked myself if it’s possible to create a leadership definition? Despite these nagging concerns and against my better judgement I’m giving it a shot.

My definition for leadership is as follows:

Let me explain some of the underlying principles and ideas that are implied in this definition.

1. Leadership is a about change. It’s the purpose of leadership to bring change, to drive innovation, encourage people to do different things or to do things differently. If there is no need for change, there is no need for leadership.
2. Leadership happens through a social process of influence. Leadership is a social process. A process of influence resulting in the commitment by people to a vision and process of change. Leadership is not about authority or having a position and a title.
3. Leadership demands results. Leadership brings vision into reality, leadership demands results. Leadership is about making things happen.
4. Leadership is distributed. Leadership is not the responsibility of the person at the top. Leadership is not the responsibility of the person with the title, position or authority. We are all responsible to exercise leadership at all levels of an organisation and in all facets of our lives.
5. Leadership is personal. Leadership is an extension of who we are, an extension of our own personal purpose and vision. There is therefore no one right way to lead. You work with the abilities that you have to create change whilst working to learn and improve. Leadership begins with leading yourself.
6. Leadership is developmental. Leadership is about change and therefore requires learning, growth and personal transformation. Leadership requires you develop new abilities, those necessary to translate the vision into reality.

So there it is. Yet another definition of leadership! So in a nutshell leadership is about three things:

1. A Vision of the Future
2. The Alignment of people with that vision
3. The Execution of the vision

Please add your ideas and thoughts in the comments below.

Great leadership is based on five interrelated leadership capabilities, each supported by a number of leadership practices. Intime of uncertainty and turbulence times these five core capabilities will help you lead and grow your teams.

The five leadership interrelated capabilities provides a lens to assist a leader to develop a robust approach and guide for action.

1. Contextual Awareness

Contextual awareness is about making sense of the context in which leadership is being executed. It requires leaders develop an understanding of the situation and environment impacting their leadership choices and actions. Contextual awareness is an important capability as is creates a shared map of the environment. It ensures that leaders face reality and make sense of the world around them.

Leaders need a good grasp of how the world is changing around them and the implications of that change on their ability to achieve the vision and drive change.

2. Setting Direction

Setting direction is a capability that establishes shared purpose, vision, values and goals that provides clear direction. Direction implies change, a change from the current reality towards some future state.  Setting direction requires an answer to the question “What future do we want to create?” This supports the development of a compelling vision of the future that inspires others and is shared by the community. A clear and shared direction gives people a sense of meaning.

3. Building Capability

Building capability requires leaders develop and align the teams, processes, skills and technologies required to translate the future direction into reality. Bold vision and change demands a large amount of innovation to bring the vision into reality. It’s the recognition that you cannot keep doing the same things and expect different results. Vision demands innovation and a search for new and better ways of doing things.

4. Inspiring Commitment

Inspiring commitment is the capability to bring people to a place where that they willingly devote their time and energy to support the shared direction. This demands of leaders that they connect and develop authentic, trusting and caring relationships with others. To lead effectively in a distributed and interconnected world requires that we develop not only vertical but also horizontal relationships.

5. Personal Effectiveness

Personal effectiveness acknowledges the personal dimension of leadership, it’s about how effectively an individual leads oneself. This requires a personal understanding of who we are, our skills, values, character, strengths and weaknesses.

Personal effectiveness recognises that there is no one right way to lead and that to be effective leaders require the self-awareness and understanding of where they are effective and where they need to partner with others.

Summary

If we examine the elements it’s clear that each of these capabilities are interdependent, without vision it becomes difficult to build capability or to inspire commitment or about change. For leadership to happen each of the five capabilities  need to be addressed together and kept in balance. A focus on only one or two capabilities at the expense of others will yield poor results.

Please share your ideas, I'm always interested in seeing alternative points of view.

People often associate commitment with their emotions. If they feel the right way, then they can follow through on their commitments. But true commitment doesn't work that way. It's not an emotion; it's a character quality that enables us to reach our goals. Human emotions go up and down all the time, but commitment has to be rock solid.

There are some things every leader needs to know about being committed:
1. It usually is discovered amid adversity.
2. It does not depend on gifts or abilities.
3. It comes as the result of choice, not conditions.
4. It lasts when it's based on values.

Executives are not working together as a team? Is the team is struggling with their situation and are unable to come to agreement on an appropriate solution to their problems? Is the team dynamics erode into naming, blaming and shaming, no one is accepting responsibility, deadlines are being missed and moral is on the decline.…

The is know as a dysfunctional team.

“If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.”

To get the people in a team aligned and rowing in the same direction requires the CEO and the executives to address the following five dysfunctions of their team

Dysfunction 1: Absence of Trust

The first dysfunction is the absence of trust amongst team members. The type of trust we are talking about here is the ability of group members to show their weaknesses, to be vulnerable and open with one another. Trust is never generated in teams when the team members are not prepared to be vulnerable. Instead they feel the need to be right, to be strong and competent, so much that they are unable to be vulnerable and open with one another. 

Trust requires that team members have confidence in each other intentions, that they are good and therefore have no reason to be protective and careful in the team. The when I ‘m vulnerable it will not be exploited and used against me by the team. The lack of trust amongst teams is a huge waste of time and energy as team members invest their time and energy in defensive behaviours, reluctant to ask for help and to assist others.

The key to overcoming a lack of trust is shared experiences, multiple follow – throughs and integrity. A Myers Briggs assessment or a 360 degree assessment is a good way to get the team talking about one another’s strengths and weaknesses and so become comfortable with one another.

“…teamwork begins by building trust. And the only way to do that is to overcome our need for invulnerability.”

The primary role of the leader is to lead my example, be the first one to be vulnerable, and create an environment where it’s safe to be vulnerable. Building trust makes conflict possible!

Dysfunction 2: Fear of Conflict

Trust is the foundation of great teams and it’s trust that makes team conflict possible. Teams become dysfunctional when they are unable to productively deal with conflict. All meaningful relationships require productive conflict for them to grow. Healthy conflict occurs when people talk about the issue at hand avoiding personal attacks, looking for the best solution for the team. Teams tend to avoid conflict often replacing it with an artificial harmony.

“Harmony itself is good, I suppose, if it comes as a result of working through issues constantly and cycling through conflict. But if it comes only as a result of people holding back their opinions and honest concerns, then it’s a bad thing.”

We wear masks and focus on being nice to everyone. however, productive conflict is required for teams to become functional. This allows for meaningful dialogue where people are open to share, without feeling fearful of reprisal or criticism. One of the worst team dysfunctions is when you have a team of “yes men”.

Leaders need to encourage debate, support it and keep it productive. Teams who avoid conflict spend much time “off-line” never making decisions that the group can commit to. Healthy and productive teams accept that conflict is a normal part of being in a team to learn to deal with it productively.

“…meetings and movies have a lot in common…A movie, on average, runs anywhere from ninety minutes to two hours in length. Staff meetings are about the same…And yet meetings are interactive, whereas movies are not…And more importantly, movies have no real impact on our lives…. [and]…Every great movie has conflict. Without it, we just don’t care what happens to the characters.”

When working with teams a leaders need to understand the importance of conflict in teams, being careful not to try and steer the team towards premature resolution of conflict with the intention of protecting people. It’s important for leaders to help the team members to learn and develop positive conflict resolution skills. The beast way to do this is for leader to “lead by example”, modelling the appropriate behaviours, rather than trying to smooth over the conflict.

Dysfunction 3: Lack of Commitment

When teams engage in productive conflict they can confidently commit and buy-in to decisions. Commitment is a function of clarity and buy-in. Productive teams make clear decisions and are confident that they have the support from every team member. A lack of commitment usually arises from not hearing all the teams concerns before making a decision. There can be no commitment without debate. People will not buy into something when their opinions and thoughts on the matter were not included and discussed. “If they don’t weigh in, then they won’t buy in.” This is not as much about seeking consensus as it is about making sure that everyone is heard.

“The point here is that most reasonable people don’t have to get their way in a discussion. They just need to be heard, and to know that their input was considered and responded to.”

At the end of the day everyone needs to get to the point where they can say, “I may not agree with your ideas but I understand them and can support them.”

“When people don’t unload their opinions and feel like they’ve been listened to, they won’t really get on board.”

Leaders can help to facilitate commitment by reviewing all key decisions made at the end of team meetings, making responsibility and deadlines clear.

Dysfunction 4: Avoidance of Accountability

Without team commitment you cannot have accountability. If the team is to be accountable, everyone must have a clear understanding of what is expected of them.

“People aren’t going to hold each other accountable if they haven’t clearly bought in to the same plan.”

At the end of the day it’s about each team member being accountable to the team. This means that a team member never lets the team down when is comes to meeting commitments. The team needs to hold their peers responsible for achieving results and working to high standards. It’s the responsibility of each team member to hold one another accountable and accept it when others hold them accountable.

It’s often the case, that when teams are not holding one another accountable it’s usually because they’re not measuring their progress. It’s important to make clear what the team’s standards are, what needs to get done, by who and by when. Ambiguity is the enemy of accountability.

Dysfunction 5: Inattention to Results

When teams are not held accountable the team members tend to look out for their own interests, rather than the interests of the team. A healthy team places team results as the most important goal. When all team members place the team’s results first the team becomes results orientated.

“Our job is to make the results that we need to achieve so clear to everyone in this room that no one would even consider doing something purely to enhance his or her individual status or ego. Because that would diminish our ability to achieve our collective goals. We would all lose.”

Leaders need to make the teams results clear for all to see, rewarding the behaviours that contribute to the team’s results. It’s the responsibility of the leader to keep the teams focus on results.

Cohesive Teams

By addressing these dysfunctions, what results is a cohesive team….

“…and imagine how members of truly cohesive teams behave:

1. They trust one another. 
2. They engage in unfiltered conflict around ideas. 
3. They commit to decisions and plans of action. 
4. They hold one another accountable for delivering against those plans 
5. They focus on the achievement of collective results.”

Reference: Patrick Lencioni

"Commitment is what transforms a promise into reality. It is the words that speak boldly of your intentions. And the actions which speak louder than the words. It is making the time when there is none. Coming through time after time after time, year after year after year. Commitment is the stuff character is made of: the power to change the face of things. It is the daily triumph of integrity over skepticism."
-Shearson Lehman

Transforming organizational culture, building new competencies for leadership and communication, and coaching people to accomplish what they say they want to accomplish is a challenge to us all.

At the center of this is the notion of commitment—not just the word, the idea that commitment is a universal phenomenon and basic to all human coordination. Commitment is the foundation for any kind of intentional change.

From my perspective, there are two kinds of change in our everyday experience of living: that which we make happen (such as starting a business, creating a new market, producing unprecedented results or building a new product) and the kinds of change which seem to happen around us in the course of life itself (such as climate change, various “social” problems and shifts in fashion).

In the first instance, people are clearly committed to make something new happen. In the second instance, our choice is often to change ourselves in relationship to changes that we did not conceive or intend—to cope with or adapt to a “new reality”. In both instances, however, the key to accomplishment is our capacity to commit ourselves to creating something that did not exist for us previously—to invent new interpretations and practices for having our reality be consistent with our commitments.

On one hand, it can be argued that without commitment nothing will change, at least that we have anything to do with. We must accept whatever the circumstances of our lives give us and learn to cope effectively. For many, this leads to a kind of resignation and passive acceptance without real possibility for changing our world or ourselves.

On the other hand, if we only commit to what our common sense tells us is feasible and possible, we will, by definition, have more of the same because common sense is our collective understanding of the world based on past experience and practices.

Yet, anyone can identify dozens of examples of “realities” today that were unimaginable or made no sense only a few years ago and yet are becoming ordinary now. Consider the internet, cell phones, cloning, fax machines, the collapse of the Soviet Union, expanding political awareness, terrorism and the global economy as examples. Most of the people I meet in technological fields say they are working on solutions to problems that will be obsolete by the time they are implemented. At the current rate of knowledge expansion, we are rapidly approaching a time when almost anything we learn will be obsolete before we learn it.

In such a world, to organize our thinking and our actions around what has worked in the past—our common sense—is a formula for ever-increasing anxiety and failure to achieve our ambitions. I believe that some of the most pressing questions of our times relate to how to thrive and prosper in an increasingly unpredictable world.

Question’s we have about commitment:

• What is it?
• What does it mean to commit?
• How does our understanding of commitment shape our lives and possibilities?
• ·What are the consequences of making and keeping (or not keeping) commitments?
• What is our everyday relationship with commitments, our own and others?
• Most importantly, how can our commitments enhance our satisfaction in living, our effectiveness in accomplishing our ambitions and our capacity to empower ourselves and other human beings.

All human beings make commitments. Even the biggest procrastinator will recognize at some point he is committed to not making a decision. Sometimes we keep our commitments, and sometimes we don't. It has been argued that one of the things which distinguishes human beings from the rest of the animal kingdom is that we have the capacity to generate and act consistent with our commitments (while the behavior of animals is a function of instinct). Without commitment, we could not coordinate actions. We would not have institutions such as marriage; enterprises could not exist, even normal social interactions such as meeting someone for coffee would not occur. Life would be a random event. The future could never be more than a mechanistic extension of what has gone before and life, for the most part, would be circumstantially determined.

The capacity to commit may be the most distinguishing and constitutive aspect of our existence as human beings. In spite of this, the term ‘commitment' and what it refers to is transparent for most of us most of the time. Most of us agree that commitment is important, but live as though it is a mere convention and that outcomes are a function of forces and factors outside ourselves.

Commitment is an action. To commit is to bring something into existence that wasn't there before. At the moment of its coming into existence, a commitment is a creative act, distinct from whatever reasons or rationale we might have for making the commitment. This action is being taken by and between human beings all the time. Whether we are committing to meeting a friend or paying a bill or going to school, we are always moving within a fabric of conscious and unconscious commitments. The action of committing is also always connected to the future—to another action, event or result.

Commitment defines the relationship between a future that is entirely determined by historical circumstances and one that can be influenced, changed or created by human beings.   When we don't consciously commit or commit conditionally, we are in effect committed anyway—to the status quo.

The power of commitment is that it is the only action of which human beings are capable in which the future and the present appear in the same moment. When I promise to meet you, I am evoking the future time and circumstances of our meeting in the same moment as I speak the promise.

If we listen carefully to our own conversations and the conversations of others, we can notice that much of the time we are talking about our circumstances within the same perspective that we might observe a game or a movie. Our conversations are those of observers giving an account or telling a story about how we see or how we feel about our “reality”. We can often hear people speaking about “the way we are in Australia”, the problems of the economy or the society or within a particular company and why it is difficult to effect meaningful changes.

What is transparent, however, is that these conversations rarely result in new commitments to action. In other words, our conversations about what needs to be done or what needs to change don't, in and of themselves, change anything! We live in a kind of “cultural drift” in which we must learn to cope with historically determined circumstances with very little power to effect change or create a future that is discontinuous with the past.

An example of this can be seen when we speak with people in organizations and ask how much time is spent in meetings and how do people evaluate the value of meetings. Predictably, we will hear there are too many meetings and most of them are a waste of time. At the same time, most people are complaining that they lack the time to do many of the things which they say need to be done. The conclusion most often reached is to have fewer meetings. This is, in turn, followed by all the reasons we can't really have fewer meetings or why we can't have our meetings be more productive. The general mood becomes one of “resignation” until we simply accept or put up with the status quo and go through the motions of meetings without concern for or expectation that they can ever change.

Unfortunately, most of the work human beings do—in fact most of our lives—happens in meetings with other people. Consider, for example, that a telephone or email conversation is a kind of meeting, a sales call is a kind of meeting, and most planning occurs in meetings. Even social events or having a romantic dinner can be viewed as “meetings”.

Meetings are never a problem in and of themselves. We can all think of examples of meetings that were extraordinary, even life-changing.

What people are saying is that they spend too much time in meetings that are unproductive or unsatisfying. To a large extent, this is because people are speaking without commitment or they lack competency in resolving differences and having effective dialogue. If we ask ourselves what we are committed to making happen in the meeting—then organize our conversations around that commitment—we will begin to observe and experience a different meeting.

Not only do we empower ourselves as actors in the meeting (as opposed to reacting to what is said), but we also begin to listen differently to what is occurring and have many options not normally apparent.

The British writer George Bernard Shaw said, “Reasonable people adapt themselves to the circumstances. Unreasonable people adapt the circumstances to themselves. Progress depends on unreasonable people.”

This quotation highlights the dilemma that confronts us when we seriously consider making fundamental changes in how we live, how we work, our business culture and our practices for coordination. It suggests that if we expect anything to change, we need to be UNREASONABLE. More specifically, we need to make unreasonable commitments. If we only commit to what we think is reasonable or feasible, we are, by definition, making commitments to more of the same—to living in the cultural drift. “Reasons” are, by definition, products of past experience and common understandings for why things happen and what is or is not possible.

Being unreasonable is not the same as being unrealistic. Being unreasonable means acting in a manner that is inconsistent with conventional wisdom and common sense. Any example of significant change began with someone making a commitment to a possibility that was viewed as unreasonable or impossible at the time. Commitment is the difference between living in a context of responsibility for creating the future versus living in a context of reasonableness in which we must cope with whatever the circumstances give us.

One of the things I have learned is that people place a great deal of value on intelligence and knowledge. In a world that doesn't change or that changes very slowly, this value makes sense and is even practical since there is time to learn and apply what we know. In a world that is changing at exponential rates, however, conventional intelligence and knowledge are often obsolete before we have time to apply them. If we need proof or established acceptance of knowledge before we act, then it is often too late and our competitors have gone on to something else. We become intelligent and knowledgeable followers.

Intelligence and knowledge may inform what we commit to, but in themselves change nothing. The only thing that changes anything is commitment and action —intelligence and knowledge are not action. At best, they are a potential for action. At worst, they are a source of cognitive blindness and arrogance. In today's world, we must be willing and able to commit to possibility and action based on our vision and a view of what is needed to fulfil that vision.

Knowledge must become a by-product of commitment rather than a prerequisite for making commitment. Intelligence is being redefined as something like having the capacity for change.

Almost any discussion of how to effect changes—either personally or in an organizational context will provoke a degree of skepticism or even cynicism about pop psychology, management “fashions”, or self-help and consulting “gurus”. This cynical orientation usually results in either trivializing or discounting any possibility or the value of new proposals and approaches to change.

In other words, the problems associated with effecting meaningful changes in our lives and in our organizations are aggravated by the culture's tendency to reject whatever might make a difference.

Our actions, in turn, will correlate with how the world occurs for us. Since our actions are producing whatever circumstances we have, we inevitably find ourselves in a self-referential and self-fulfilling relationship with our view of our world. When people recognize this for themselves, they recover the capacity to be responsible for their point of view as just their point of view. When this occurs, people can interact with others in new ways, have different conversations, make authentic commitments, take new and unprecedented actions and thereby change or even transform their “reality”.

Commitment is a phenomenon that can be experienced and observed. We can remember that when we are committed we have a different mood, we observe and listen differently, we “feel” different than we do when we aren't committed or are not aware of our commitments. We can hear someone speak a promise and listen to what they say as being a commitment. When we see a great performance or accomplishment we often say that the person is really committed to what they are doing. In this sense, we define commitment as a source of action and accomplishment.

Commitment is also an action itself. Commitment doesn't occur until a human being expresses the commitment either by speaking or by doing something intentionally and directly. Commitment is choice. Commitment is the primary cause. Commitments don't refer to action; they are actions that transform one's relationship to the present and the past. Commitment is an action in language. I distinguish commitment as conscious action in the present moment. I cannot make a commitment yesterday and I cannot make a commitment tomorrow (until tomorrow comes).

From the perspective of commitment as an action, we could conclude that the answer to creating change to living a more productive and satisfying life and being more responsible is captured in the Nike slogan, “Just do it”. Most will agree, however, that knowing what to do and doing it are not the same. Cultures are constituted to persist. The nature of this persistence can be heard in the rationale or conversations we have about why we don't “just commit” and then do whatever it takes to fulfill our commitments.

If we have learned anything in the past 15 years of global competition, it is that we can no longer rely on a few leaders at the top of an organization to direct and control the work of everyone else. The whole concept of “empowerment” is based in the practical recognition that an enterprise cannot survive without everyone involved self-generating results based in their own intelligence and commitments.

“Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meeting and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets: 'Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.'”

W.H. Murray, the leader of the Scottish Expedition to Mt. Everest