I just watched Michael Feiner, a professor at Columbia Business school, on Authors@Google. He talked about leadership.
Jack Stack, author of the great game of business says that there are two disciplines needed in a company: optimization and innovation. I think that these overlap with the skills of management and leadership. Management is about predictability and order, about planning and using resources to meet the plans These are skills of optimization. Innovation would require leadership.
Leadership is three main things. It is about:
- Establishing direction
- Building Alliances and Coalitions
- Motivating and Inspiring
How to do that? Michael says that leadership is managing relationships. Managing relationships is one to one activity, 90% is bellow the surface – activity that is not visible.
How do you lead people to excel? Here are Michael’s laws of leaders who lead people to excel:
- Law of Expectation – Pygmalion effect. People live up to what you believe them capable of.
- Law of Intimacy – know people, what excites them, what frustrates them, passions
- Law of Building a Cathedral – connect the work to meaning (Laying Bricks or Building Cathedrals)
- Law of Personal Commitment – be available, respond
- Law of Accountability – targets matter, disciplined action is required
- Law of Pull vs Push – allow others to influence you (“help me understand why you feel that way?”)
- Law of The Mirror – a problem needs 2 people – (“what am I doing to contribute to this problem?”)
- Law of Winning Championships – none of us is better than all of us
- Law of Healthy Conflicts – dialogue, debate and disagreement necessary for growth
- Law of Leading bosses – Intellectual courage
- Law of Values based leadership – WYHA 2 WYHB (Move from “What You Have Achieved” to “What You Have Become”).
The video is here (on the blog).
Have a great week.
