#Leadership Basics: Getting Things Done

We live in a VUCA world – volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. Our VUCA world is one of the contributing factors to our need for greater leadership skills in the workplace. And while leaders must be approachable, show individualized attention for their followers and address the welfare of the group, they also must ensure that the group attains its goals.

The leader’s concentration on goal attainment is what academics call “Initiating Structure”, the ability to focus the team by clearly articulating goals, defining team roles, developing structure and procedures, scheduling work to be done and monitoring work progress and quality. In a VUCA world, initiating structure provides the framework for teams to operate. Without this framework, VUCA wreaks havoc.

While this sounds rather boring, projects without initiating structure rarely go well.  Recently I was part of a working group that was identified as a pilot project to implement a new approach to curriculum design. Because the team lacked an agreed upon process, we ended up wasting a lot of time, and experienced a lot of confusion. This lack of process also alienated a fair number of the team members. While initiating structure isn’t quite as sexy as many other leadership activities, it is probably the most fundamental to the attainment of group goals.

Yesterday, a former colleague of mine, Graham Robertson, a 20 year Consumer Package Goods (CPG) marketer, and now marketing genius at Beloved Brands, came to my Brand Management class. Graham shared with my students the real world expectations of entry level marketing staff at a CPG organization. Many of those expectations are based on initiating structure. If you can’t organize, execute and evaluate a task, all the charisma and vision in the world won’t make you a good leader. We tend to dismiss initiating structure in conversations about leadership, possibly because it isn’t exciting or fun or motivating. But in the end, leadership is about setting and attaining group goals.

So the next time you are assigned to lead a group, consider the initiating structure. What is the group process and how are you going to communicate that process? How are you going to engage the group to develop and manage the process? How are you going to communicate group goals? Spending time early in your group process to develop structure will increase the likelihood of your team attaining their goals.

Source: Johns, G. & Saks, A. (2011). Organizational Behaviour: Understanding and Managing Life at Work. 8th Ed. Toronto: Pearson Prentice Hall.

40% of our time spent influencing others – isn’t that #Leadership?

We spend a lot of our time selling. Selling things and ideas. In fact, according to Daniel Pink, in his new book, “To sell is human”, we spend roughly 40% of our work time persuading, influencing or convincing others. This is probably no surprise to anyone working in a professional, information driven job.

I’ve been grumbling a lot about the excessive (or perhaps obsessive) discussion of leadership in the modern press. How we have bad leadership, no leadership, how to “do” leadership…. Suddenly, the light bulb went on. The reason that we are so obsessed with leadership is that 40% of the average person’s job is to influence others. Since the definition of leadership is to persuade or influence others to work together to attain a goal, 40% of  the average worker’s job is some form of leadership.

Could this be the reason that white collar productivity refuses to budge upwards?  Have we overdone it? Are we spending too much time and effort engaging others and convincing them to buy into organizational objectives?  Or do we just need to learn how to “play well together” ?  Back in the day, when I was a marketing director at a large multinational company, I once tracked how much time I was spending in meetings persuading, okay, pleading with others to see the vision and implement it. It was over 60% of my time. These activities aren’t scaleable, and you can’t speed them up. They take the time that they take. Short cut the engagement and persuasion, and you get half-hearted engagement, passive resistance and poor execution.

But this does raise the question of leadership. If leadership is all about persuading and engaging others, why do we spend so much time thinking and talking about the “Leader”, instead of learning more about what influences followers?

Source: Pink, D. (2012). To sell is human: The surprising truth about moving others.  New York: Riverhead Books.

Strategic Leadership: Vision plus Management

We have a new Pope. As a non-Catholic teaching at a Catholic University, I have been following the coverage of this new leader of the world-wide Roman Catholic Church with interest.

Pope Francis is facing a broad range of issues within the church, from the financial and sexual scandals to infighting within the church hierarchy to fighting pressure for change of church teachings on a wide range of social issues. It’s one hot mess. Much of the discussion prior to his election was whether the conclave should choose a “leader” to lead the people back to the teaching of the church, or choose a “manager” to deal with the ineffective internal working of the church.

For the past 15 or 20 years, most academics have differentiated between leadership and management.  Leaders persuade and inspire change, while managers make sure that the status quo gets delivered on time, on budget, correctly. While this may be a handy set of definitions, leader vs. manager is a false dichotomy. In order to be effective, we must possess both leadership and managerial skills.

If an organization is ineptly managed, with ethical scandal, corruption, or just lazy responses to serious issues, these behaviours will reflect on the organization. They will also spread within the organization.  It’s pretty difficult to lead change when an organization is perceived as corrupt, self-satisfied, internally oriented and broken. You can have all of the vision you want, if your organization is poorly managed, most people won’t trust you to lead you to the vision.

In the reverse, if the organization is well managed, but you don’t have a vision that your followers are aligned to, you’ll still struggle. Management without leadership vision is doomed to failure over the long term, as the organization slowly loses relevance. Vision without management usually results in chaos.

The bottom line? Most organizations in crisis need both vision and management plus a lot of good luck to ensure a turn around. Focusing too much on either leadership or management is a recipe for disaster.  Strong leaders are strategic, they have a clear strategic direction and they put in place the skills, culture and controls to ensure that they attain that direction, while maintaining the current stability of the organization. It’s a tall order for one individual.

Leadership Development: Knowing, Doing, Being

Often leaders look to training to fill the leadership gap in their organizations.  They identify the best and brightest, the “high potentials”. They then send them to extensive leadership training to become better leaders. Ta da! You now have a trained “leader”. This common approach to leadership development is doomed to fail because training is only the beginning of leadership development.

Catalyst, a women’s leadership think tank, believes that leadership development follows a 10/20/70 effectiveness rule: 10% of development comes from training; 20% comes from mentoring and 70% comes from leading big, visible projects with stretch goals, big budgets and high risk.  Thus the majority of development comes from “doing” leadership rather than “knowing” leadership.

Leadership training needs to be embedded in a broader approach to leadership development by identifying organizational needs, gaps in leadership skills and projects or positions for employees to develop their leadership skills. Only then does it make sense to provide leadership training in the context of that next stretch assignment.

I often find that many of my students “know” what the concept of positioning means, but when I ask them to actually use the concept in the development of a real world strategy, they struggle to use it. Why? Because knowing is different than doing. You have to know something before you can do it.  But to really learn it, you have to do it.

Many organizations send people to training before there is a clear plan where they will use these newly acquired leadership skills. Thus, newly trained employees can sit for months or even years without the opportunity to practice their leadership skills. The result is over-trained, over-mentored employees who are frustrated because they can’t put their training to work. People need the opportunity to practice their newly learned skills. Training is not a strand alone solution, it needs to be linked to succession planning.

Many people believe that individuals need to have a personal identity of “leader” before they can lead others. In other words, you have to have the confidence to believe that you are a leader before you can lead. I believe just the reverse. Behaviour is what changes beliefs. In other words, if I act like a leader long enough, I will begin to think that I am a leader. We develop the confidence to lead through the experience of having successfully led. “Being” a leader is the result of “doing” leadership.

The bottom line: Leadership development starts with knowing about leadership, proceeds to doing leadership, and ultimately results in being a leader. But relying exclusively on training to develop leaders is like assuming that vanilla is the only ingredient in a vanilla cake – it’s bound to be a disaster.