The vital leader

THE VITAL LEADER

Sustainable leadership for

the 21st

Century

By

Andrew Leigh and Michael Maynard

© Andrew Leigh and Michael Maynard of (VR3) 2

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

VITAL CONTEXT - LEADING IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Major trends

Who needs leaders?

Leadership is relational

Leadership starts here! THE VITAL STORY

Summary

Foundations CHAPTER 1: INDIVIDUALITY

The Genius Syndrome

The Charisma Myth

The Source of Individuality - Being Yourself - Personal Experience - Your World View - Personal Style - Personal values

Integrity - Integrity Barometer - Taking a Stand

Networking

Summary & Ideas for Action CHAPTER 2: INSIGHT

Self Awareness - Personal enquiry - Internal cast

Understanding other people

Seeing what’s going on - Curiosity - Foresight - Insight is seeing, not magic

Summary & Ideas for Action

Core Capabilities CHAPTER 3: INITIATE

Accept responsibility - Volunteer - Participate - Be accountable - Take centre stage

Research


Take risks - Step out of your comfort zone - Be assertive - Handle reverses

Instigate direct action

Follow-through

Summary & Ideas for Action CHAPTER 4: INVOLVE

Intensity of Involvement

Participation and Enrolment

Why Engage?

How to Engage - Being Valued - Being Involved - Being Developed - Being Inspired

Meetings

Empowerment

Coaching

Give People a Voice

Summary & Ideas for Action CHAPTER 5: INSPIRE

How to Inspire - The Why? - Source - Passion

Vision

Communicate - Conversation - Story-telling

Trust

Challenging goals

Summary & Ideas for Action CHAPTER 6: IMPROVISE

The Drive for Improvisation

The Principles of Improvisation

Creativity - Innovate - A try-it environment - Problem solve - Value Ideas - Encourage play

Flexibility

Presence - Physical presence - Psychological presence

Summary & Ideas for Action CHAPTER 7: IMPLEMENT

Be action-minded


- Paralysis of analysis - Setting Goals - SMART goals - Monitoring progress - Ask for help

Model Behaviour

Seek Feedback - Personal feedback - Organisational feedback

Persist

Spot success

Well-being

Summary & Ideas for Action CHAPTER 8: THE VITAL ENDING OVERVIEW

APPENDIX: ARE YOU A VITAL LEADER?

Check your leadership profile.

RECOMMENDED READING


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book strongly argues that leadership is about relationship. And so is the

process of writing.

We are deeply grateful to our wives, Gillian and Carol, for their

encouragement and willingness to sustain our relationships, especially when

we are entrenched in meeting deadlines.

We also owe a huge debt to all the people at Maynard Leigh Associates –

they allow us to practise and develop our own leadership on a daily basis.

And the workshop leaders, coaches and consultants there have all helped us

deepen our understanding of the seven leadership skills highlighted in this

book and their practical application in the workplace.

Getting anything done, without these relationships, would be impossible.

Andrew Leigh & Michael Maynard


THE VITAL

LEADER by

Andrew Leigh and

Michael Maynard

INTRODUCTION

The world is full of leaders. They are everywhere, yet we are manifestly short of leadership.

There is mounting evidence of far too many people at work feeling alienated, disengaged

and spiritually unrewarded by their work environment. It is morally repugnant, highly wasteful

and expensive. It therefore seems fair to talk of a crisis of leadership, particularly in large

organisations. Why?

While leaders seem to be everywhere, a dispiritingly small number come across as genuine

and highly capable. Far too many have been compromised, deposed, or defeated.i Even

more lack ideas, or appear unable to build the necessary bridges to lead in a world of

increasing diversity. It is hardly surprising therefore, that the more we experience the

shortage of genuine leaders, the more it dominates the media, takes up corporate agendas

and is the subject of think tank papers, conferences and countless other forms of

communication.

Our starting point here though, is not the shortage of leaders, important though that may be.

What is far more significant is the universal hunger for humanity, meaning and vitality in the

work place. Their widespread absence helps explain the poor performance of many

individuals and their organisations. It also speaks volumes for the failure of leadership.

In our constantly changing world, leaders of all kinds are struggling to keep up. They may

regularly change their cars, computers or mobile phones. Yet often they seem far less ready

to adjust their style to reflect the changing expectations of what it means to lead. Too many

for example, still yearn for the comfort of hierarchy and the reassurance of familiar command

and control - “I tell you what to do and you do it.”


The quality of leadership therefore continues to be a concern. Business students for

example, learn almost nothing about how to manage a high-engagement organisation. Yet

this will clearly be critical for organisational, let alone personal success, in the coming years.

Asked what firms must do to succeed in the future, numerous surveys of executives put

leadership top of the list. Despite this, the investment in developing better leaders continues

to miss the desired impact. ii

The Vital Leader does more than paint a broad brush picture of successful leadership in the

21st Century. It presents the essential components of such leadership. If you are a leader or

want to be one, it can help you get to grips with becoming effective and sustainable. No one

knows for certain all these requirements, until after the event. We claim no exceptional

powers of prediction. However, in working with thousands of leaders on their development

over several decades, we conclude even the most successful ones need a new approach

and a revised skill set.

To arrive at such an approach, we cannot merely extrapolate from the past. Merely looking

at previously successful teams, departments or organisations today, tells us only a little

about what will be needed from tomorrow’s leaders. Relying on what previously made

leaders succeed will produce a limited and possibly misleading picture on which to base

future choices. We’re facing a need for a new kind of leadership and we call it Vital.

By Vital, we mean leadership that is both essential for organisations and in the alternative

sense of being adaptable, vibrant, and energised. That is, people whose vision, inspiration,

and powers of execution, promote humanity, meaning and vitality in the work place, and

beyond.

We identify two sorts of skill-sets for such leadership: Foundations describe people with

strong Individuality and Insight. These, together with five other Capabilities, will be

essential, regardless of geography, industry, type of business or organisation.

The Vital Leader will be sustainable, with the skills to cope with the challenges of managing

across both organisational boundaries and geographical borders. Such a leader will also

have far less control than in the past. With the world in constant and rapid transition, “stuff”

will keep happening. Faced with new technologies, demographic shifts, consumption trends

and other social forces, leaders must manage uncertainty, and be adept at winning

consensus.

We are therefore attempting to change how people think and talk about leadership. It makes

no sense to base future development of leaders on outdated and irrelevant assumptions. To

survive and create new futures there must be leaps of faith. These need not occur blindly.

Instead, we reflect here on some of the major forces already manifestly shaping

organisations and others barely glimpsed over the horizon. Together, they offer important

clues for what Vital Leadership means in practice.

Why vital leadership?

The case for Vital Leadership would hardly resonate if leadership in organisations was

mainly working well. But it is patently not. The red warning lights are flashing all over the


world about the failure of leaders to understand change and to manage it well. In a study of

around 4000 executives into why senior leaders failed for example, the main reasons were:

communication, interpersonal skills and execution. iii

Few big firms, despite the inflated salaries of their top people, survive long-term. The best

chief executives money can buy are regularly out-performed by newcomers and market

forces. Meanwhile, almost regardless of geography, there are unacceptably low levels of

staff engagement and trust, absenteeism, and lack of diversity. These in turn result in poor

levels of innovation and creative thinking and weak individual performance.

When the world’s leadership gurus gather to talk about their pet subject, ‘trust’ soon surfaces

as a major cause of leadership failure. There is a good reason for this. A UK report in 2012

on widespread lack of trust in leaders and their organisations for example, ran to 100 pages

of detailed facts and arguments. iv The Centre for Creative Leadership estimated that four

out of five new CEOs lose the trust of their stakeholders and fail in the first 18 months.v In

ambitious Indian companies for instance, the pace of CEO turnover provides a benchmark

and is unnerving. The average tenure of MDs in the technology and consumer sectors for

instance, has dropped to a mere one to three years - hardly time to know where all the exits

are. vi

The demise of CEOs may attract little sympathy. Yet we should be concerned about the

waste of talent. Not only are some perfectly competent executives stumbling at the final

hurdle, others are positively dysfunctional. Many even cause serious damage to their

respective organisations. When a Time Warner CEO lost his job in 2011 after only five

months, the company diplomatically explained his “leadership style and approach did not

mesh with the company’s”vii This was company speak for “this person was doing us more

harm than good.”

Astute organisations increasingly realise that if they simply do what they have always done

in developing their leaders, they will only get more of the same. Yet more of the same is

almost certainly not what most 21st Century organisations will need. For example, they will

require people who can make sense of ever-increasing complexity and who can live

comfortably with uncertainty, ambiguity and disruption. They will also need to manage risk

with courage and confidence. These were far less important in the previous century when it

came to selecting sustainable leaders for the future.

If you are already a leader or want to be one, the Vital Leader is for you. Equally important,

we want to connect with those of you who spend a significant portion of your time on talent

management. You are the unsung heroes, the professionals who often fight an uphill battle

to persuade your organisations to invest in leadership development that looks different to

how it looked previously. In this book you will come face-to-face with the factors that make a

difference in shaping leadership development, and by implication how to turn these into

“The tragedy of life is that we understand it backwards - but we have to live it forwards” Kierkergard, Danish philosopher


practical action. While you may not agree with everything we present here, at least it’s a

starting point for deciding what you do need to do in this area.

From reading this book, you will gain a clearer view on what it will take to produce a leader

for the 21st Century, and how to be a sustainable one. It is not a cook book with a sure-fire

recipe for how to lead. It is more a route map towards inventing your own solution. Follow it

and you are likely to be around longer than many unfortunate colleagues who remain stuck

with increasingly outmoded leadership behaviours.

We offer you processes, stories, case studies and examples to help clarify what it means to

be a vital leader. The rate of change and increasing uncertainty means it is impossible to lay

down the exact nature of the new style of vital leadership. The full profile of this kind of

leader has yet to fully emerge into the daylight, based on long term success in the role. So

rather than looking for the elusive exemplars of perfection, we point to examples of Vital

Leadership behaviour in action.

In using this book therefore, you do not need to read it like a novel. Instead, you will find

some sections more directly applicable to your particular leadership situation than others.

Equally important, the approach we are advocating provides a fresh language for talking

about leadership and communicating with others about its key elements.

Why Us?

What if anything makes us qualified to talk about what it will take to lead effectively into the

future. Why do we argue so strongly for it in determining how to achieve sustainable

leadership in the 21st Century?

First, for over two decades we have been helping organisations develop their leaders. So the

subject of unlocking leadership potential has dominated our radar. For example, to develop

both their existing and future leaders our company, Maynard Leigh Associates, continues to

work with a wide variety of national and global organisations. Along the way we have

witnessed numerous valiant attempts to develop new leadership behaviour. Many have

failed or lacked sustainability. This book incorporates lessons drawn from what we have

seen, and from our practical experience of generating actual sustained behavioural change.

Secondly, our view of affecting leadership behaviour reflects our pioneering use of theatre

ideas in business. Once, this approach seemed fanciful. Yet many leadership development

programmes now include ideas we introduced in the late 1980s. As anyone who studies

leaders soon realises, successful ones rely heavily on techniques and methods that indeed

make them “performers” in every sense of the word. Whatever else changes about the

leadership role in the coming years, we remain convinced that the successful ones will

continue to need this performance capability.

Finally, for nearly a quarter of a century we have jointly led our own company through some

tough and troubled commercial times. Like steel tempered in a furnace, this experience has

tested us both individually and as an organisation. Frankly, we know from personal

experience just how tough it is to lead. We continue to evolve our own view of what it will

take to succeed as a 21st Century leader. The Vital Leader is very much work in progress.


VITAL CONTEXT

LEADERSHIP IN THE 21ST CENTURY

That astute observer of leadership Warren Bennis argued that to make sense of leadership

we must consider both the leader as a person, and the context in which they operate. Most

of this book deals with the person aspect, and the capabilities they need to be effective.

Nevertheless, we must make sure these are seen in a context. This is the environment in

which anyone who leads will be working. We can only talk of the Vital Leader while also

considering the need for Vital Organisations.

Almost before our eyes, organisational capabilities and the context in which they operate

keep changing. New notions about what a successful 21st century organisation might look

like are constantly emerging. Yet, wherever you are as a leader you must respond to key

trends, often mega ones. Any one of these may have important implications for individual

leadership.

For instance, we expect the boundaries between work and personal activities to become

increasingly blurred over the next decade. The assumed norm is being 24/7 mobile, with

high levels of connectivity. This alone has huge implications for anyone attempting to lead. It

includes the need to adopt flexible, agile working and flatter hierarchies to allow the pace of

change of accelerate. We expect yet more virtual work communities, often operating out of

different countries.

Such trends pose new conflicts and questions about where power lies within your own

organisation. It raises issues such as how to harness technology to involve and engage

people. These matters were slowly surfacing towards the end of the 20th Century. They are

now making themselves felt in many quarters. As a leader or developer, you need to actively

address them. An intellectual response is not enough. Somehow, awareness of all these

factors must translate into how you, or those you develop, lead. If we compare the key

characteristics of the 20th Century firm with those of the likely successful 21st Century firm,

we see the following already emerging:


HOW LEADERSHIP IS CHANGING

20th Century firm 21st Century firm

Vertically integrated

Top-down leadership

Build the ultimate product

Gain efficiency

Hoard information/build IP

Experts

Lone hero

Security

Push to change

Goal centric

Risk aversive

Build systems

Get everything clear

Be sure

Seek simplicity

Ignore pessimists

Big bang solutions

Leveraging size

Technology aware

Demographically aware

Networking

Instructing

Horizontally networked

Distributed responsibility

Continuous improvement

Scale learning

Share information

Learning new skills

High performance teams

Transparency

Pull towards change

Talent centric

Risk tolerant

Build relationships

Good enough vision

Paradox

Accept complexity

Shadow side

Link simple systems

Leveraging learning

Technology pervasive

Diversity rules

Connected

Collaborating

Source: Expanded from Leveraging the Talent-Driven Organization, Richard Adler Rapporteur The Aspen

Institute, 2010, reproduced by permission

The likely characteristics of a 21st century firm were suggested by the Aspen Institute during

its first decade. Already we can no longer view an organisation as a machine, as happened

in the past century. The machine metaphor meant executives relied almost exclusively on

explicit knowledge as a sure guide to action - facts, metrics, objective analysis, formal

planning and so on. Now firms are understood better if treated as living and breathing

organisms - unpredictable and multifaceted. To lead them, explicit knowledge is not enough.

Taken as a whole, these characteristics amount to what some scientists call: Complex

Adaptive Systems. Examples of these are often drawn from nature or biology and include

cities, rivers, insect, animal or bird populations, family units and so on. What they have in

common is they are hard to understand, are often unpredictable and subject to constant

change and adaptation. Modern organisations are therefore more akin to flocks of geese

than machines. The lead bird constantly changes, to be replaced by another and another. In

an organisation this is sometimes called “distributed leadership”, where just about anyone

with the talent and drive can at least temporarily play an important leadership role.

The Vital Leader is therefore someone who may come from anywhere in the organisation,

emerging, perhaps only temporarily, in response to the ever-altering landscape.


Major trends

At least five mega forces are transforming what past leaders once took for granted about the

nature of work: viii

Accelerating globalisation

Technology

Demography

Societal changes

Climate change and shift to a low carbon economy.

These are long-term transformations on a world-wide scale. Consequently successful

organisations will be those able to ride the waves of these forces, turning them to their

advantage. In doing so, many will radically adapt their cultures, structures, systems and

processes to survive the new work environment. Above all they will need a new form of

leadership.

For example, in future successful organisations, diversity of ideas and sources of information

will allow just about anyone to potentially emerge from almost anywhere to provide some

kind of leadership. It may be temporary but it will also be irrespective of job title. This

contrasts strongly with the 20th Century tradition, where only a few people were seen as able

to lead. Instead, power will be more evenly distributed, with less reliance on a single all-

powerful top gun.

To lead in such an environment you can no longer expect to command and give direction by

relying on a highly centralised, obedient, hierarchical bureaucracy. Instead, success will

depend on winning consensus across diverse interests, forming ever-changing alliances,

networking, and working through collaboration. Rather than relying on authority to get things

done, the vital leader will depend on an ability to stay connected.

Leadership will increasingly be ineffective if restricted to few at the top of the organisation.

For example, increasingly we can expect to see talent-driven organisations in which vital

leadership surfaces to help assist with creativity, handle transitions, turbulence, and the

need for both individuals and the enterprise to constantly adapt. Later these ‘temporary’

leaders may simply return to their previous non-leadership roles.

To make a positive contribution in such a personally challenging environment, you will need

to rely on two Fundamental aspects of leadership: your individuality and your insight. Like a

talented stage director, you will be conjuring up the equivalent of a three act play, without a

script and relying entirely on the abilities of an often sceptical and sometimes changing cast

of actors.

Who needs leaders?

Logical steps and so-called rational thinking make sense mainly in a stable context. The

context for leaders of the 21st Century though will be anything but steady. Constant


“I used to think that running an organization was equivalent to conducting a symphony orchestra. But I don't think that's quite it; it's more like jazz.

There is more improvisation.” Warren Bennis

uncertainty will hardly suit everyone aspiring to lead. For example, relying on techniques and

plans to guide your thinking and behaviour will not be entirely sensible.

Of course there will always be some stable areas, such as, health and safety, regulation,

execution or logistics. Here there can still be continued reliance on past practices and

proven methods for such circumstances. All organisations need boundaries and due

diligence - it’s not a free-for-all.

But these areas are likely to diminish in importance and vital leaders must grapple with the

implications of a more dynamic context. It’s a crazy world of irrationality and paradox, a

source of both destructiveness and creativity. In this perplexing environment, you will be

better off relying on values, collaboration and talent than the more familiar top down setting

of goals.

In this unstable, disruptive and ever changing context, new forms of leadership may spring

from anywhere to help define and pursue goals. These new-style leaders come forward

because they can add value to the situation irrespective of title or position. This may send

shivers down the spine of traditionalists. Yet, if a leader is not adding value, then they have

no place in a vital organisation. And there are already many organisations that function

almost entirely without the standard authoritarian leader.

A challenging, yet slowly emerging idea that may yet take hold during the Century is

leaderless or “peer-based organisations”. ix These shun hierarchies. In a connected,

network-based society, new ways of organising like this need to emerge. The old idea that

only a few gifted individuals can make important decisions around strategy, tactics and

operations, are being strongly questioned.

In the world of music, for example, leaderless orchestras are well-known, despite the

importance attached to conductors, Orpheus, an orchestra with no conductor is an annual

fixture at Carnegie Hall. It has won numerous awards, without ever having an onstage boss.

And many theatre and dance ensembles work perfectly well without a conventional director.

A temporarily ‘leaderless’ Morrison’s, the UK supermarket group, showed it was doing fine

with no CEO in place in early 2010. The company unveiled a bumper set of Christmas sales

figures. Similarly in Morning Star, a leading US food processor, nobody gives orders and

nobody takes them, yet it had over $700 million revenue in 2010. No one there has a boss,

employees negotiate responsibilities with their peers, there are no titles and no promotions,

compensation decisions are peer based. Sounds mad? Maybe, but it’s the world’s largest

tomato processor. With no apparent leaders or managers, except its president Chris Rufer,

the company runs three large plants and a trucking company moving over two million tons of

the fruit a year.

Morning Star has literally killed off hierarchies. Those who lead tend to emerge, not because

of their title or track-record, but because they add value in a given situation.


“Vital: Full of life or activity...essential to the existence of a thing or the matter in hand.” A Vital Leader is both essential to the organisation and someone who provides energy, inspiration, and meaning. By helping transform the work environment, the Vita Leader creates high levels of engagement and prompts discretionary effort which generates outstanding individual and corporate performance.

Despite exorbitant pay rates too many leaders in lots of organisations simply do not add

sufficient value, which may partly explain the rising failure rates of CEOs. In companies like

Morning Star there is no tolerance for complacent, narcissistic and exclusive leaders, free-

loading in the executive facilities of the ‘C’ suite. Such an approach demands talent: vital

capabilities that contribute to success. x

Our present view of vital leadership stems mainly from practical encounters with those who

already seem to bring humanity, vitality and meaning to the workplace and produce

exceptional results. Please let go of the out-dated idea that you have to be “born to lead.” In

fact, leaders are made all the time-- through experience, by practising leadership, by

development efforts of sustainable organisations who value this new approach.

Vital means Vital

In this new world leaders may not always be indispensable. So how do you stay sustainable

and continue to add value? Vital Leaders survive and thrive by embodying both definitions of

the word ‘vital’ – that is, they are essential and spirited. So, they are not just vital to their

organisation’s success. They are also vital in the sense of providing a vitality and energy that

inspires and transforms - situations, people, opportunities and organisations.

Despite their obvious personal power it is asking entirely too much of them to single-

handedly transform or rescue organisations. Particularly in a connected and diverse

environment, there will be a need for others to exercise judgement and authority at all levels

in the organisation. To rely on a single heroic leader merely perpetuates the crisis of

leadership mentioned earlier. xi

Leadership is Relational

The task facing leaders in the 21st Century organisation is unprecedented. The job is

becoming too demanding and complex for any one individual to accomplish it with just a few

enthusiastic supporters. Knowing how to engage a wide variety of people will be critical.

Therefore the Vital Leader will be something of an expert at relationships.

This view of leading, in which relationship-building is an essential skill, is only starting to

penetrate the majority of today’s organisations.xii But it will almost certainly be important in

how future one in the 21st Century operate. In contrast, many organisations still rely heavily

on task-oriented leaders which often results in people feeling secondary and not crucial to

success.


There are certainly benefits in both types of leadership. If you are a task-oriented leader for

example, your focus will be highly logical and analytical. You will have a good grasp of how

to get the job done using workplace procedures. This way you ensure everything is

accomplished in a timely and productive manner.

Similarly, there are benefits in being a relational-oriented Leader. For you, productivity is

paramount in meeting goals and succeeding, whether in a business environment or

otherwise. However, you also realise that what builds productivity is a positive environment

where individuals do not feel unjustifiably driven. An essential aspect of being a Vital Leader

is therefore the ability to create

A powerful relationship between you and those you lead

Probably no leader is entirely one or the other: task driven or relationship driven. However,

across the developed world we are witnessing a major shift in which relationships count far

more than in the past. They are the key to making things happen and in achieving personal

and organisational success. This involves:

Using values to drive performance

Creating engagement

Inspiring people

Networking

Generating constant innovation

Managing risk

Feeling comfortable with paradox.

All these are undermining old style employer/employee relationships, which depend so

heavily on power structures and hierarchies.

BEING A TASK-ORIENTED LEADER

You care less about catering to employees, and are more concerned with finding technical, step-by-

step solutions for meeting specific goals.

You might ask "What steps can we take to meet our quarterly financial goals?" as opposed to asking

"How can we build the kind of employee productivity that brings about success within the company?"

BEING A RELATIONSHIP-ORIENTATED LEADER

You understand the importance of tasks, but also place a tremendous amount of time and focus on

meeting the needs of everyone involved in the assignment. This may involve:

Creating engagement

Finding ways to inspire

Providing incentives, like bonuses or new work opportunities

Being attentive to people’s needs or outside-work activities and interests

Mediating to deal with workplace conflicts

Spending individual time with employees to learn their strengths and weaknesses

Offering above-average financial compensation

Leading in a personable or encouraging manner.


Leadership as a relationship:

What is your leadership style?

Do you know how to lead diverse teams over which you have only limited authority?

Are you able to create a fertile ground for fresh thinking and new ideas?

Can you win people’s loyalty, when perhaps the loudest unspoken question in the room is

“Why should anyone be led by you?” xiii

Is your approach inclusive--can you share ideas rather than selling or telling?

It is no longer what you do but how you do it, who you affect--- letting both the mind and the

heart guide your way

Is what you are doing ethical?

Do you follow a higher purpose?

In the previous century, there was much attention on the pure mechanics of leading- “how do

I get people to do what I want”. In the more demanding environment of the 21st Century, this

has become “how do I find common ground with people and build powerful relationships with

them?” Previous personal experience alone does not guarantee success. There are a host

of leaders with brilliant résumés and unquestionable track records who failed to adapt to

changing circumstances

Hugely experienced people sometimes lack relationship skills

Carly Fiorina, one of the most powerful women in corporate America, was forced out of the

troubled computer maker by the company's board in 2005. Apart from not leading the

company to renewed success, she created considerable internal tension and conflict.

Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling was unquestionably clever and creative. Yet his misdirected and

unprincipled approach to business was not only criminal but morally repugnant. And he

became ever more isolated as he went along.

When Jack Griffin, CEO of Time Inc., lost his job in 2011 after only five months, Time Warner

explained his “leadership style and approach did not mesh with the company’s” Insiders

called it a “polarizing management style” and "a good leader makes decisions that are

inclusive, inspiring, motivating. With Jack, it was a demoralized, estranged group of execs." xiv

To sum up, sustainable leadership is likely to involve more emphasis on relationships than

pure task. You could call this a “post-industrial model of leadership”, which is merely a handy

way of reminding us to look afresh at what it will take to lead in the future. This is unlike the

“me-centric” image we still tend to hold about leaders. Many of the most successful business

leaders are surprisingly reluctant to talk about themselves. While seldom shrinking violets,

they are more concerned with their relationship to others as a way of getting things done.

Whilst dreaming up a compelling vision may be high on their agendas of many newly

incumbent leaders, it is more likely that they will focus on the prosaic job of seeing what’s

needed and then getting the right people around them. And nurturing the right sorts of

relationships.

Leadership Starts Here!

Simple though it sounds, Vital leadership relies on a blend of personal behaviour, attitude

and actions. Two Foundations on which Vital Leadership rests are Individuality and Insight:


Individuality—being yourself, having a distinctive style, driven by values, demonstrating

integrity, vitality and character.

Insight—self awareness, understanding others and seeing the situation with clarity,

often in new or unexpected ways

These two pillars of Vital Leadership are the building blocks supporting further action.

No leader, in our view, will succeed in the coming years without also paying considerable

attention to, five additional core capabilities. The skill to:

Initiate, Involve, Inspire, Improvise, and Implement

Each of these begin with the letter I – which also reflects the personal and individual nature

of leadership.

Together, the 7 I’s depict the personal development journey a Vital Leader must undertake

to produce change. It starts with who you are - your individuality defines the areas that you

are interested in. These will be affected by your values, cares and concerns. You also need

Insight to see what’s needed around you.

The two Foundations can certainly be nourished and enhanced, yet not prescribed. And the

core capabilities are entirely learnable. You can become a Vital Leader and develop these

skills with sufficient practice and commitment. In the rest of this book we will show what this

means in practice. For example we suggest the Vital Leader will be excellent at execution,

able to handle both strategic and tactical changes. Similarly, we suggest that part of being a


Leader Requirements

Organisation Characteristics

FOUNDATIONS CAPABILITIES INITIATE INVOLVE INSPIRE IMPROVISE IMPLEMENT

Horizontally networked

Distributed responsibility

Scale learning

Share information

Learning new skills

High performance teams

Transparency

Pull towards change

Talent centric

Risk tolerant

Build relationships

Good enough vision

Paradox

Accept complexity

Shadow side

Link simple systems

Vital Leader requires the ability to inspire people and we suggest practical ways you can go

about developing this important muscle.

We can use the outlines of the likely characteristics of a successful 21st Century organisation

to shed further light on what it will mean to be a Vital Leader. Nothing of course is forever,

and the table below identifies likely organisational characteristics as we see them now.

Although these may evolve differently in the coming years we know enough already to guide

us in describing the emerging Vital Leader.

FUTURE ORGANISATION CHARACTERISTICS WILL DETERMINE WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A LEADER

Inevitably there is something intensely personal about leadership. Essentially you will define

your own style and approach. That’s what being a leader means - you break the mould and

invent new forms that reflect you character.

You must decide for yourself which aspects of being a leader you need to develop and which

you are already good at. Feedback, coaching and other forms of personal development can

all shed light on how your leadership needs to change and grow.

In this book we offer guidance on what it will take to succeed in this role. But ultimately it is

you - the ‘I’ of Leadership - who decides whether you will step into this new approach, and

you who chooses to constantly invest in your personal growth and development.


“I believe we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practising dancing, or to learn to live by practising living, the principles are the same.”

Martha Graham, US dancer and teacher

Few leaders get it right first time. Learning anything requires the willingness to experiment

and get feedback. You learn to lead by constantly trying and sometimes failing. The

legendary Steve Jobs may have built one of the world’s most successful companies, but he

was also fired from Apple before he later returned in triumph and approached his leadership

in a more informed and inclusive way.

Whatever your dreams or aspirations, your personal leadership mission needs to uncover

what works for you as a leader. Just because some other leader has found a way to make

things happen does not mean it is also your way. Only through practice will you come to lead

instinctively, and practice means being willing to risk failure and even rejection.

TWITTER SUMMARY:

The world is changing and approaches to leadership must keep up. It needs a new approach

involving 7 essential capabilities.

RECAP

This opening section introduces the essential components of leadership in the 21st Century.

Global trends are altering expectations about what successful leaders must do to survive

and thrive. In particular, leadership is more than ever in the person and the context.

For example, the new style leaders must be able to live with continuing uncertainty, be good

at building relationships and success will rely on the foundation of insight and individuality.

There are five additional requirements which together add up to the 7I’s of leadership in the

21st Century.

i See for example The Role of Tomorrow's Leaders, September 15, 2010, HBR Blog Network, also on

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8WRz3CxafE also on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8WRz3CxafE

ii See for example: Leveraging Leadership Competencies to Produce Leadership Brand: Creating Distinctiveness

by Focusing on Strategy and Results by Jim Intagliata, Dave Ulrich, Norm Smallwood in Human Resources

Planning, Winter, 2000, Volume 23.4, pp. 12-23.

iii Why Leaders Fail, The NBO Group Ltd, 2003

iv Where Has All the Trust Gone? CIPD 01 Mar 2012

v Almost Ready: How Leaders Move Up, by D Clamps Harvard Business Review January 2005

vi The Art and Science of Picking a New Leader, Andrew Hill, FT 25

th October 2011

vii Business Standard 21

st April 2011


viii

See for example, The Myth of Leadership: Creating Leaderless Organizations, by Jeffrey S. Nielsen,

Intercultural Press, 2004

ix See for example, The Myth of Leadership: Creating Leaderless Organizations, by Jeffrey S. Nielsen,

Intercultural Press, 2004

x First Let’s Fire All the Managers, by Gary Hamel, Harvard Business Review, December 2011

xi See for example, Lessons From the Field: An essay on the Crisis of Leadership in Contemporary organisations,

by James Krantz, Yale School of Organisation and Management, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science Vol. 26,

No. 1, 1990

xii Relational Leadership Theory: Exploring the social, processes of leadership and organizing by Mary Uhl-Bien,

University of Nebraska-Lincoln 2006

xiii Why Should Anyone Be Led By You? by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, Harvard Business School Press, 2006

xiv Time Inc. CEO Jack Griffin Ousted, by Jennifer Saba, Reuters, Fri Feb 18 2011

Date post:	20-Mar-2016
Category:	Documents
Upload:	maynard-leigh
View:	217 times
Download:	1 times

The vital leader

Documents