Being a leader is perhaps the hardest challenge any of us will ever face. No matter how long we work at it, practicing the right behaviors is a never-ending task. Knowing – and avoiding – the wrong ones is too. Thus, we offer the following six common leadership pitfalls:
![]() Jack Welch, respected business leader and writer is quoted as proposing these fundamental leadership principles (notably these principles are expanded in his 2001 book 'Jack: Straight From The Gut'):
However - always remember the philosophical platform - this ethical platform is not a technique or a process - it's the foundation on which all the techniques and methodologies are based. Plan carefully, with your people where appropriate, how you will achieve your aims. You may have to redefine or develop your own new aims and priorities. Leadership can be daunting for many people simply because no-one else is issuing the aims - leadership often means you have to create your own from a blank sheet of paper. Set and agree clear standards. Keep the right balance between 'doing' yourself and managing others 'to do'. Build teams. Ensure you look after people and that communications and relationships are good. Select good people and help them to develop. Develop people via training and experience, particularly by agreeing objectives and responsibilities that will interest and stretch them, and always support people while they strive to improve and take on extra tasks. Follow the rules about delegation closely - this process is crucial. Ensure that your managers are applying the same principles. Good leadership principles must cascade down through the whole organization. This means that if you are leading a large organization you must check that the processes for managing, communicating and developing people are in place and working properly. Communication is critical. Listen, consult, involve, explain why as well as what needs to be done. Some leaders lead by example and are very 'hands on'; others are more distanced and let their people do it. Whatever - your example is paramount - the way you work and conduct yourself will be the most you can possibly expect from your people. If you set low standards you are to blame for low standards in your people. "... Praise loudly, blame softly." (Catherine the Great). Follow this maxim. If you seek one singlemost important behavior that will rapidly earn you respect and trust among your people, this is it: Always give your people the credit for your achievements and successes. Never take the credit yourself - even if it's all down to you, which would be unlikely anyway. You must however take the blame and accept responsibility for any failings or mistakes that your people make. Never never never publicly blame another person for a failing. Their failing is your responsibility - true leadership offers is no hiding place for a true leader. Take time to listen to and really understand people. Walk the job. Ask and learn about what people do and think, and how they think improvements can be made. Accentuate the positive. Express things in terms of what should be done, not what should not be done. If you accentuate the negative, people are more likely to veer towards it. Like the mother who left her five-year-old for a minute unsupervised in the kitchen, saying as she left the room, "...don't you go putting those beans up your nose..." Have faith in people to do great things - given space and air and time, everyone can achieve more than they hope for. Provide people with relevant interesting opportunities, with proper measures and rewards and they will more than repay your faith. Take difficult decisions bravely, and be truthful and sensitive when you implement them. Constantly seek to learn from the people around you - they will teach you more about yourself than anything else. They will also tell you 90% of what you need to know to achieve your business goals. Embrace change, but not for change's sake. Begin to plan your own succession as soon as you take up your new post, and in this regard, ensure that the only promises you ever make are those that you can guarantee to deliver. "Too often, managers think that people development occurs once a year in performance reviews. That's not even close. It should be a daily event, integrated into every aspect of your regular goings-on. Customer visits are a chance to evaluate your sales force. Plant tours are an opportunity to meet promising new line managers. A coffee break at a meeting is an opening to coach a team member about to give his first major presentation. Think of yourself as a gardener, with a watering can in one hand and a can of fertilizer in the other. Occasionally you have to pull some weeds, but most of the time, you just nurture and tend. Then watch everything bloom."
~ Jack Welch WHAT LEADERS DO. Jack Welch Management Institute
•Leaders relentlessly upgrade their team, using every encounter as an opportunity to evaluate, coach, and build self-confidence. •Leaders make sure people not only see the vision, they live and breathe it. •Leaders get into everyone’s skin, exuding positive energy and optimism. •Leaders establish trust with candor, transparency, and credit. •Leaders have the courage to make unpopular decisions and gut calls. •Leaders probe and push with a curiosity that borders on skepticism, making sure their questions are answered with action. •Leaders inspire risk taking and learning by setting the example. •Leaders celebrate. _ There is no pat formula for being a CEO. Everyone does it differently, and there’s no right or wrong way to go about it, no magic formula that is the right thing to do in all cases. Jack Welch has, however, found a number of things that have helped him lead GE over the years, among them the following:
● Maintain your integrity. Establish your integrity and never waver from it. People might not have agreed with Welch on every issue, but they always knew they were getting it straight and honest. He never had two agendas; there was only one way — the straight way. ● Set the tone for your company. The organization takes its cue from the person on top. Welch always told GE’s business leaders their personal intensity deter- mined their organization’s intensity — how hard they worked and how many people they touched would be emulated a thousand times over. ● Maximize your organization’s intellect. Getting every employee’s mind into the game is a huge part of what being a CEO is all about; taking their best ideas and transferring them to others is the secret. Be open to the best of what everyone, every- where, has to offer, then transfer that learning across the organization. ● Put people first, strategy second. Getting the right people in the right jobs is a lot more important than developing a strategy — this truth applies to all kinds of businesses. Without the right leaders in place, the best, most forward-thinking strategies in the world will amount to little. ● Stress informality. Bureaucracy strangles; informality liberates. Creating an informal atmosphere is a competitive advantage. It isn’t about first names, unassigned parking spaces, or casual clothing; it is about making sure everybody counts, and everybody knows they count. Passion, chemistry and idea flow from any level at any place are what matter. Everybody’s wel- come and expected to go at it. ● Be self-confident. Arrogance is a killer, and wearing ambition on one’s sleeve can have the same effect; legitimate self-confidence, however, is a winner. The true test of self-confidence is the courage to be open o welcome change and new ideas, regardless of their source. Self-confident people also are not afraid to have their views challenged; they relish the intellectual com- bat that enriches ideas. ● Appraise all the time. Whether you are handing out a stock option, giving a raise, or simply bumping into someone in the hallway, always let your people know where they stand. ● Mind your culture. If your company joins forces with another through merger or acquisition, establish the new entity’s culture on day one, to minimize confusion and root out resistance to your goals. ● Recognize the benefits of speed. By acting decisive- ly on people, plants and investments, Jack Welch was able to get out of the pile very early in his career at GE. Yet, upon his retirement 40 years later, one of his greatest regrets was that he hadn’t acted fast enough on a number of occasions. He never regretted taking quick action. ● Forget the Zeros. The entrepreneurial benefits of being small — agility, speed and ease of communication — are often lost in a big company. Welch’s experience in plastics enabled him to come to the job of CEO knowing that isolating small projects and keeping them out of the mainstream was a smart thing to do. By focusing on such projects as separate, smaller business- es, the people involved were more energized, adventurous and backed by the right resources. Jack Welch: Straight from the gut __ GE is all about finding and building great people, in direct accordance with Jack Welch’s passion for making people GE’s core competency. The secret to GE’s success in this regard is the system it employs to select and develop great people. In a company with over 300,000 employees and 4,000 senior managers, GE needed a structure and a logic, so that every employee knew and understood the rules of the game.
The heart of this process is the human resources cycle — full-day Session C human resources reviews at every major busi- ness location (held in April), two-hour videoconference Session C follow-ups (held in July), and Session C-II’s, held in November, which confirm and finalize the actions committed to in April. And that is only the formal structure. At GE, there is an informal, unspoken personnel review — in the lunch- room, the hallways and in every business meeting. That intense people focus — testing everyone in a variety of environments — defines managing at GE. Differentiating People All these people-centric endeavors, both formal and informal, are done in an effort to differentiate GE’s best employees and managers from the rest of the pack. Differentiation isn’t easy; over the years, the company used many kinds of bell curves and block charts to differentiate talent, in an effort to rank performance and potential (high, medium and low). Eventually, Welch found a ranking tool he liked — the “Vitality Curve.” Every year, the company asked each of its businesses to rank all of their top executives, in an effort to force these business leaders to differentiate their leadership. They had to identify the people in their organizations that they considered in the top 20 percent, the vital mid- dle 70, and, finally, the bottom 10 — by name, position and compensation. Those who did not perform to expectations generally had to go. While making these judgments is not easy, doing so is how great organizations are built, Welch felt. Year after year, differentiation raises the bar higher and higher, increasing the overall caliber of the organization in a dynamic process that makes everyone accountable for his or her performance. People (particularly those in the top echelon) must constantly demonstrate that they deserve to be there. Being Boundaryless One of Jack Welch’s passions as CEO of GE was to create a corporate culture devoid of the kinds of territorial walls that can sink even the best operations. This type of “boundaryless” culture (introduced at the company’s 1990 annual meeting) would remove the barriers among all the various functions at the company — engineering, manufacturing, marketing and the rest. It would recog- nize no distinctions between “domestic” and “foreign” operations. It would knock down external walls, making suppliers and customers part of a single process. It would eliminate the less visible walls of race and gender. It would put the team ahead of the individual ego. Rewarding Ideas Boundaryless would also reward people who recog- nized and developed a good idea, not just those who came up with one, encouraging leaders to share credit for ideas with their team, rather than take full credit themselves. The concept also opened GE to the best ideas and practices from other companies, like Wal- Mart’s process to gather and use market intelligence quickly (see box above). It would make each employee and leader at GE wake up with the goal of “Finding a Better Way Every Day” — a phrase that became a slo- gan at GE plants and offices the world over. Manager Types In 1992, Jack Welch discussed with GE’s leaders how to differentiate GE’s managers, based on their ability to deliver numbers, while maintaining GE’s values, includ- ing being boundaryless. He described four types of man- agers: ● Type 1: The manager who delivers on commitments — financial or otherwise — and shares the values. His or her future is an easy call. ● Type 2: The manager who doesn’t meet commitments and doesn’t share the organization’s values. Not as pleasant a call, but just as easy as Type 1. ● Type 3: The manager who misses commitments but shares all the organization’s values. This type might be given a second or third chance, just in a different environment. ● Type 4: The manager who delivers on all commitments, makes numbers, but doesn’t share the values. This type usually forces performance out of people, rather than inspiring it. GE could not afford the Type 4 manager. Welch immediately illustrated his commitment to these values by asking four corporate officers to leave the company, because they did not share GE’s values, particularly boundaryless behavior. Suddenly, “Finding a Better Way, Every Day” wasn’t just a slogan — it was the essence of boundaryless behavior, and by defining the expectations of everyone at GE, established the “social architecture” of the company. Over the course of three years, employ- ees used that architecture to hammer out a values state- ment for the entire organization, one that GE considered so important, it put them on laminated cards that all employees carry. Jack Welch, respected business leader and writer is quoted as proposing these fundamental leadership principles (notably these principles are expanded in his 2001 book 'Jack: Straight From The Gut'):
However - always remember the philosophical platform - this ethical platform is not a technique or a process - it's the foundation on which all the techniques and methodologies are based. Plan carefully, with your people where appropriate, how you will achieve your aims. You may have to redefine or develop your own new aims and priorities. Leadership can be daunting for many people simply because no-one else is issuing the aims - leadership often means you have to create your own from a blank sheet of paper. Set and agree clear standards. Keep the right balance between 'doing' yourself and managing others 'to do'. Build teams. Ensure you look after people and that communications and relationships are good. Select good people and help them to develop. Develop people via training and experience, particularly by agreeing objectives and responsibilities that will interest and stretch them, and always support people while they strive to improve and take on extra tasks. Follow the rules about delegation closely - this process is crucial. Ensure that your managers are applying the same principles. Good leadership principles must cascade down through the whole organisation. This means that if you are leading a large organisation you must check that the processes for managing, communicating and developing people are in place and working properly. Communication is critical. Listen, consult, involve, explain why as well as what needs to be done. Some leaders lead by example and are very 'hands on'; others are more distanced and let their people do it. Whatever - your example is paramount - the way you work and conduct yourself will be the most you can possibly expect from your people. If you set low standards you are to blame for low standards in your people. "... Praise loudly, blame softly." (Catherine the Great). Follow this maxim. If you seek one singlemost important behaviour that will rapidly earn you respect and trust among your people, this is it: Always give your people the credit for your achievements and successes. Never take the credit yourself - even if it's all down to you, which would be unlikely anyway. You must however take the blame and accept responsibility for any failings or mistakes that your people make. Never never never publicly blame another person for a failing. Their failing is your responsibility - true leadership offers is no hiding place for a true leader. Take time to listen to and really understand people. Walk the job. Ask and learn about what people do and think, and how they think improvements can be made. Accentuate the positive. Express things in terms of what should be done, not what should not be done. If you accentuate the negative, people are more likely to veer towards it. Like the mother who left her five-year-old for a minute unsupervised in the kitchen, saying as she left the room, "...don't you go putting those beans up your nose..." Have faith in people to do great things - given space and air and time, everyone can achieve more than they hope for. Provide people with relevant interesting opportunities, with proper measures and rewards and they will more than repay your faith. Take difficult decisions bravely, and be truthful and sensitive when you implement them. Constantly seek to learn from the people around you - they will teach you more about yourself than anything else. They will also tell you 90% of what you need to know to achieve your business goals. Embrace change, but not for change's sake. Begin to plan your own succession as soon as you take up your new post, and in this regard, ensure that the only promises you ever make are those that you can guarantee to deliver. Is it possible to train people to be effective leaders -- or do you think that the best leaders are just born that way? For some people, the question of whether leaders are born or made is truly intellectual – fodder for a good classroom or dinner party debate. But for people like you, in front-line positions to hire, promote, and fire, the question, “Who has the right stuff to lead?” definitely has more urgency. Getting the answer right can drive an organization’s culture and performance to new levels. Getting it wrong can too -- downwards.
So what’s the answer? Of course, since we’re talking about real life here, it isn’t neat or simple. The facts are, some leadership traits are inborn, and they’re big whoppers. They matter a lot. On the other hand, two key leadership traits can be developed with training and experience – in fact, they need to be. Before going any farther, though, let’s talk about our definition of leadership. It’s comprised of five essential traits. These traits, by the way, do not include integrity, which is a requirement in any leadership position, or intelligence, which is likewise a ticket to the game in today’s complex global marketplace. Nor do they include emotional maturity, another necessity. These three characteristics are baseline – they’re givens. So let’s go beyond them. From our experience, the first essential trait of leadership is positive energy – the capacity to go-go-go with healthy vigor and an upbeat attitude through good times and bad. The second is the ability to energize others, releasing their positive energy, to take any hill. The third trait is edge – the ability to make tough calls, to say yes or no, not maybe. The fourth trait is the talent to execute – very simply, get things done. Fifth and finally, leaders have passion. They care deeply. They sweat; they believe. As you may have figured, positive energy and the ability to energize are pretty hard-wired. They’re basically personality. Similarly, passion feels inborn. Some people just seem to come fully loaded with intensity and curiosity; they naturally love people, life, and work. It’s in them. It is them. Edge and the ability to execute are different. New hires rarely show up with them in polished form, and even middle managers benefit from training in both. But the best teacher for these two traits is trench warfare. That’s because edge and execution are largely a function of self-confidence. You can say yes or no a heck of a lot better when you’ve done it a bunch of times and seen how well decisiveness works. Likewise, only in real world challenges can managers truly feel the power of moving quickly, demanding accountability, and rewarding results. They can also experience how damaging it is not to execute – a mistake most effective leaders don’t make twice. So are leaders born or made? The answer (perhaps not surprisingly) is both. Your best strategy, then, is to hire for energy, the ability to energize, and passion. Go full force in training and developing edge and execution. Promote the people who have a good dose of all five traits. Always remember, though, that not everyone was meant to be a leader. But as long as you are one yourself – and you are -- it’s your job to find and build those who were. Sourse: http://www.welchway.com/Home.aspx |
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