Leadership Skills

1
Leadership Skills

• Review concepts from previous session
• Sandra Lee (B) case
• What are the skills possessed by effective
  leaders?
• Daniel Goleman, What makes a Leader?
• What characteristics cause leaders to fail?

2
Sandra Lee (B)

• What skills does Sandra Lee possess?
• Does she demonstrate emotional intelligence?
• Were her actions with respect to the custodian
  and the more troublesome teachers appropriate?
• How was she able to transform South Heights?
• How would you maintain the success at South
  Heights?

3
What Makes a Leader?

• Most effective leaders possess emotional
  intelligence
• twice as important as technical skills and
  cognitive abilities
• emotional intelligence is critical at senior
  levels
• components of emotional intelligence
• self-awareness of emotions, strengths
  weaknesses, values and goals
• self-regulation over emotions and moods
• drive to succeed
• empathy in understanding feelings and emotions
• socially skilful in managing relationships
• first three are self-management skills, the
  latter two are skills in building and managing
  teams
• emotional intelligence can be learned

4
What Makes a Leader?

• Is this a good model of leadership skills?
• Are there other essential attributes of
  leadership?
• Kouzes and Posner suggest that the following
  attributes are important to leadership
• Being honest
• Being forward-looking
• Being inspiring
• Being competent
• Taken together they make a leader credible
• Do these attributes complement emotional
  intelligence?
• How might we learn or develop these skills and
  attributes?

5
Leadership Quotations

• He who knows much about others may be learned,
  but he who understand himself is more
  intelligent. He who controls others may be
  powerful but he who has mastered himself is
  mightier still. Lao-Tsu

6
Leadership Quotations

• Know the enemy and know yourself in a hundred
  battles, you will not be defeated. When you are
  ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your
  chances of winning and losing are equal. If
  ignorant both of the enemy and of yourself, you
  are sure to be defeated in every battle.
  Sun Tzu, The Art of War

7
Leadership Quotations

• An army may be compared to water, for water in
  its natural flowing avoids the heights and
  hastens downwards. So in a war, an army should
  avoid strength and strike at weakness. As Water
  shapes its flow in accordance with the nature of
  the ground, an army manages to be victorious in
  relation to the enemy it is facing. As water
  retains no constant shape, so in war there are no
  constant conditions. One who can modify his
  tactics in accordance with the enemys situation
  and succeed in gaining victory may be called
  divine. Sun Tzu, The Art of War
  
  

8
Leadership Quotations

• The purest treasure mortal times afford is
  spotless reputations that away, men are but
  gilded loam or painted clay. William
  Shakespeare, Richard III

9
The Work of Leadership

• companies today face adaptive challenges change
  in society, markets, customers, competition and
  technology
• mobilizing an organization to adapt its behaviour
  in order to thrive is critical
• in order to make change happen, leaders have to
  break a long standing pattern of their own,
  providing solutions to others
• responsibility for problem solving must shift to
  the people in the organization
• adaptive change is distressing because people
  need to take on new roles, values and
  relationships
• instead of providing answers, leaders must ask
  tough questions, let people feel the pinch of
  reality, challenge the way we do business

10
The Work of Leadership

• Principles for leading adaptive work
• Get on the Balcony
• Bobby Orr was great because he played hard while
  keeping the whole game situation in mind, as if
  he stood on a balcony above the field of play
• business leaders have to be able to view the
  larger patterns of play as if they were on the
  balcony
• they should give employees a strong sense of
  history, as well as an idea of the market forces
  at work today
• Identify the Adaptive Challenge
• Colin Marshall, CEO of British Airways,
  recognized the need to transform an airline
  nicknamed Bloody Awful into an exemplar of
  customer service

11
The Work of Leadership

• the essential adaptive challenge was creating
  trust throughout the organization
• Marshall and his team held up a mirror to
  themselves recognizing that they embodied the
  adaptive challenge facing British Airways
• Regulate Distress
• leaders must realize that people can learn only
  so fast
• because leaders must strike a balance between
  having people feel the need for change and having
  them feel overwhelmed, leadership is a razors
  edge
• a leader protects people by managing the rate of
  change

12
The Work of Leadership

• Maintain Disciplined Attention
• a leader must get employees to confront tough
  trade-offs in values, procedures and power
• get people on the executive team to listen and
  learn from one another
• get conflict out in the open and use it as a
  source of creativity
• when sterile conflict replaces dialogue, the
  leader steps in and puts the team to work on
  reframing issues
• Give the Work Back to the People
• encourage responsibility by trusting others and
  decentralizing authority
• a leader has to let people bear the weight of
  responsibility

13
The Work of Leadership

• the key is to let people discover the problem
• the leaders most important role is to instill
  confidence in people
• they must dare to take risks and responsibility
• back them up if they make mistakes
• Protect the Voices of Leadership From Below
• giving a voice to all people is a the foundation
  of an organization that is willing to experiment
  and learn
• whistle blowers and creative deviants get smashed
  and silenced in organizational life
• leaders must rely on and protect those who raise
  questions that indicate an impending adaptive
  challenge
• Ronald Heifetz and Donald Laurie, HBR, 1997

14
Next Session

• Prepare Walt Disney Productions (A)
• Evaluate Walt Disney in terms of the model of
  practices and commitment of exemplary leadership
  described in Kouzes and Posner.
• What are the problems confronting Walt Disney
  Productions?
• What skills would you seek in a new CEO?
• If you were the CEO, how would you instill a
  culture of creativity and innovation in the
  company?
• How can you become a more creative and innovative
  leader?

15
Why Executives Derail

• Problems With Interpersonal Relationships
• insensitive, manipulative, overly critical
• using others to further ones own ambitions
• tendency to authoritarianism
• unwilling to communicate/too individualistic
• Failure to Meet Business Objectives
• lack of follow-through on promises
• being overly ambitious
• self-promotion without substance
• Inability to Build and Lead a Team
• effective behaviours change with management level
• balance between power over and connected to
• expectations around leadership style changing

16
Why Executives Derail

• Inability to Change or Adapt During a Transition
• failure to adapt to a new boss
• failure to acquire new skills
• inability to adapt to new job demands
• unable to learn from feedback
• Changing Dynamics of Derailment
• ability to change and adapt more important
• scope of building and leading a team is changing
• Other causes of derailment?

17
Leadership Quotation

• As Caesar loved me, I weep for him as
  he was fortunate, I rejoice at it as he
  was valiant, I honour him but as he was
  ambitious, I slew him. Brutus, in Julius Caesar,
  William Shakespeare