Tis that time of year again. The holiday season is directly upon us. Bad fruitcake, cheesy decorations, alcohol laced eggnog and the all-important gift-giving. But in this last category, the times have begun to change for the better, at least a little bit. Read the rest of this entry »
If you attended B-School or spent any time studying organizations, you likely have heard of the Hawthorne Effect. This phenomenon gets its name from productivity studies conducted in the late 1920s at the Hawthorne Works, a Chicago area plant of the Western Electric company. The findings are fascinating and worth five minutes of Wikipedia reading. The upshot is that the productivity of workers consistently increased throughout the period of time that they were being analyzed, without regard to the factors being manipulated. Read the rest of this entry »
A longtime friend, onetime boss and successful senior executive recently asked my opinion about this age old question. Following is my reply to him.
I have spent the last several years coaching executives to enhance their leadership capability and have also done quite a bit of reading and writing on the subject. I have evaluated the skills of executives that I have coached and found that those who get promoted are strong in three areas:
1. Results orientation (73% are strong here)
2. Relational Skills (45% are strong here)
3. Intellectual Skills (36% are strong here)
Interestingly, leadership is cited as a strength only 11% of the time…and this is for senior executives who get promoted! So if an individual’s intention is to become a senior leader (and therefore assume critical leadership responsibility) the best thing to “lead for” (by far) is results. In this regard, I believe that everyone has a great capacity to improve because of the tried and true processes that one can put in place to achieve results.
A broader measure of leadership, say the ability to inspire, engage, align and motivate others to see and opportunities they did not see before is augmented by certain skills that some people have more readily as a result of their natural gifting and hard-wiring. Cognitive abilities that support innovation and strategy, and relational skills come to mind. Easier to inspire and motivate if you are a bit of an extrovert; harder for introverts. Easier to see opportunity if you are a balanced reflective and imaginative thinker; harder if you are overly pragmatic. You get the drift.
The bottom line: While some people possess more of the natural gifting to be an inspirational leader, everyone has the potential to improve by leveraging their natural strengths while addressing their opportunity areas. And if a leadership position in business is what is desired, one thing matters more than all others-getting results.
The timeless adage states that tomorrow never comes, because it is always today. Tomorrow offers endless possibilities, if we could only get our act together today. Sometime we do, but mostly we do not, making it easy to feel discouraged.
Leadership is often looked upon in the same way. There is an idealized image of leadership that tends to take it out of the reach of mere mortals, reserving it for the likes of Alexander the Great and Abraham Lincoln. Read the rest of this entry »
In a recent post, I asserted that success requires that we focus on the right activities in a sea of competing priorities. Easier said than done.
Our most precious resource is our time. If you work for 40 years, you have about 83,200 hours to make a career. It is really just a flash, especially considering how much time has already passed. If you are 40 years old, you have already lived 350,640 hours. Time’s a wasting. Tick, tick, tick. Read the rest of this entry »
