Think about the inspirational leaders of Apple, Amazon and Southwest Airlines. You can probably name them: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Jeff Bezos, and Herb Kelleher.
Next, try to name the leaders of General Motors, TiVo and AOL during the same period. Some were good, but very few left a leadership legacy that was strong enough to ensure future success.
Business is fundamentally an extended conversation. Whether you’re speaking with your boss, team members, colleagues or direct reports, conversations shape what gets done.
As a leader, you must engineer conversations to foster clarity, cooperation, creativity and a connection to company values.
There’s a lack of trust in senior management, according to a survey by the human-resource firm Watson Wyatt:
Clearly, much is going wrong in the workplace, which presents middle managers with unprecedented opportunities to step forward and offer course corrections.
Not a month goes by without some highly publicized ethical scandal. Be it tax evasion, executive pay excesses, sexual dalliances and outright fraud, many individuals are simply unable to resist temptation.
Does this make the perpetrators corrupt sociopaths?
You would think bad business results are enough to shake people out of complacency. But approximately 50 percent of companies fail to establish a sufficient sense of urgency to succeed in their transformation efforts, according to John Kotter, author of Leading Change and A Sense of Urgency.
In a ruthless, globally competitive market, companies cannot afford the luxury of holding onto more employees than they need. With economic constraints and technological advances, some jobs are being eliminated completely — a trend that will surely continue.
A new generation of sophisticated information and communication technologies, together with new forms of business reorganization and management, is wiping out full-time employment for millions of blue- and white-collar workers.
Everyone’s talking about ways to find opportunity amid economic chaos. Yet there’s something right under our noses that’s being overlooked: Times of crisis present unprecedented opportunities to stretch and develop real leadership capabilities.
What’s needed, specifically?
For all the leadership training workshops—and despite the thousands of business books published every year—very few people can confidently explain how they take charge, engage others, and develop their leadership skills.
“Why should anyone be led by you?” It’s a great question, as well as the title of an excellent September–October 2000 Harvard Business Review article co-authored by Robert Goffee and Gareth Jones. It’s worth summarizing here.
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