Articles & White Papers
| Strength-Focused Transformational Leadership
| | Reading a recent executive-level HR article on leadership, I was struck by how the Human Resource community is currently defining leadership. The authors began by asking the question, "What is leadership?" and then answered the question by identifying a group of key leadership competencies. They listed four major task areas that, in their views, differentiated effective leaders from ineffective leaders: 1. Providing direction, 2. Assuring alignment, 3. Building commitment and, 4. Facing adaptive challenges. The authors stated that these four task areas reflect current thinking and research about leadership effectiveness. My immediate reaction was, "You're kidding! No wonder HR professionals are too often left out of the strategic business process." Not one word in this supposedly high-level article mentioned results. It's as if leadership is all about activities rather than accomplishments.
RESULTS AND LEADERSHIP
All business stakeholders know that when you drill to the core of business, it is all about sales minus expenses. No matter what business leaders do, if they don't produce a profit the company will fail at some point (even, as it turns out, in the dot.com world). For some, this may sound so elementary that they assume that all good leaders have to produce results so we really don't have to discuss it. My view is different. If results are not always a critical part of defining leadership, we can be easily sidetracked into leadership tasks that may not help achieve core goals. Great leaders are ultimately defined by great results.
I know that it is not enough to define leadership as achievements. All of us want to know how to create these results. How do I become better in my own leadership? What can I do to help others be more effective leaders (achieve greater results)? Leadership methods and tasks are an integral part of leadership results but do not, by themselves, differentiate good leaders from poor leaders. No quantitative longitudinal research on leadership that I know of has predicted anything more than 10-15% of leadership effectiveness using traits, intelligence of methods.
To read the full paper... |
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| | Overachievers drive short term success, but their long term impact to the organization is typically a negative one.
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