There are many ways to provide value to leaders who seek to turn ideas into benefits. Leaders of services firms need to get and stay clear about how they help leaders in order to perform and grow to their full potential.
Click the figure below to view a presentation on how to think about helping leaders turn ideas into benefits.
As suggested by the illustration in Figure 1, a leader:
Another way to say it, as summarized in Figure 2, is that a leader develops, holds, nurtures, communicates, and drives to achieve a vision. Like Harry Potter’s Marauder’s map, the leader holds a map that is always changing, making sense of it, and navigating the course accordingly with the team looking over his/her shoulder. Continue reading How to decide what kind of leader to be.
Most people cannot listen until they have been heard. As a consequence, wise leaders who want to affect thinking and behavior learn to first be a great listener to those they aim to impact.
Holding back from jumping-in when a key point comes to mind in the middle of a fast-paced conversation can be a challenge but it is also essential in order to avoid being written-off as one who does not listen or understand, especially if the leader is new to the organization.
The following steps help a leader stay in-tune and attuned and dramatically improve their odds of success:
Continue reading How a new executive earns respect by listening until s/he can be heard.
Leadership teams need to Get Clear about many things, including:
Leaders often struggle to reach a good, a better, or even a best solution to countless such questions. More important than the right answer, though, is all team members having the same answer.
Once all team members are aligned on one answer, even a not very good one, on any matter, odds are that performance will improve because everyone pulls in the same direction. The result is a multiplier effect suggested by the three arrows forming a much larger fourth arrow in the above graphic . Continue reading How to test for and secure top team alignment on key matters to improve growth and performance.
Many intelliven.com blog posts are based on the slides and lecture notes from a masters class in Organization Development called Organization Analysis and Strategy offered at American University and taught by Peter DiGiammarino. These posts and other material from class, including:
are available from Amazon as a softcover workbook or from iTunes as an iBook titled Manage to Lead: Seven Truths to Help You Change the World.
Whether one wants to change personal habits, implement a new information system, improve a business process, get team members to work together, increase a community’s appreciation for diversity, or even to topple a monarchy, taking seven actions driven by seven disarmingly simple truths will individually and collectively help achieve the goal.
Manage to Lead presents a framework to describe and assess any organization. It also provides a structured approach to plan and implement next steps for an organization as it strives for long-term growth and performance.
Readers are invited to select a familiar organization on which to apply the tools and templates introduced throughout the workbook. Exercises in each chapter produce essential elements for the organization’s annual strategic plan and lay the groundwork for implementing that plan.
Readers can package the key elements from Organization Exercises to form a strategic plan that communicates how the organization sees itself and where it is headed. At the end of the year leaders can compare actual results with what was described in the strategic plan to study what happened, why what happened was different than plan, what is to be learned from that, and what to do differently going forward as a result.
Repeat the process over several years and compare actual to planned results year-to-year to see the organization mature, perform, and grow to its full potential.
