47 Habits of Pretty Good Leaders

Let’s see if this headline is too sweat-inducing to attract eyeballs. I think 47 is just a tad above the magic “5” number bloggers are apparently taught to use. So, sorry but I’ve added 42 additional elements to the perfect blog formula. I believe in simplicity, but you must seek the “simplicity on the other side of complexity” (Oliver Wendell Holmes).

This post is another excerpt from one of my favorite business books The Leader’s Handbook by Peter Scholtes. It’s not what you think; it’s not a self-help book. It’s a book on systems thinking and how that should be incorporated into a business at every level. It tells you exactly what to do when you dive into it. So, here we go with a brief <g> overview on how to be the new type of leader:

Quote:

1. The new competencies of leadership

2. Systems Thinking

3. Understanding the variability of work

4. Understanding how we learn, develop, and improve

5. Understanding people

6. Understanding the interaction between systems, variability, learning, and human behavior

7. Giving vision, meaning, direction, and focus to the organization

8. As they learn the new way, leaders must be patient with themselves and others, persistent, and humble, and allow themselves and others to be inelegant.

9. Regarding this new approach, we are moving from unconscious incompetence through conscious incompetence, the most difficult transition of all. This may take three years or more to achieve. Then we may move into conscious competence and on into unconscious competence. This cycle will go on forever.

10. Leaders need to understand the organization systematically: clearly understanding the purpose of any undertaking, then understanding the interactions and interdependencies between the parts that result either in the achievement or in the failure to achieve that purpose. All output, desired or undesired, is the net result of the system and its interactions (not the people and their inadequacy).

11. Everything is part of a larger system. For leaders to understand what is going on, they must understand the larger system of which any effort is part and with which it interacts.

12. Changing the system will change what people do. Changing what people do will not change the system.

13. All the teamed-up, accountable, empowered, incentivized, motivated, and paid-for-performance people you can must cannot compensate for a dysfunctional system

1. Leaders must understand variation and the difference between common cause variation and special cause variation. Leaders who do not understand variation will:

2. See trends where there are no trends

3. Miss trends where there are trends

4. Attribute problems to individuals who have no control.

5. Give credit to people who are simply lucky

6. Fail to understand past performance

7. Be unable to predict future performance

8. Not understand their systems or how to improve them

9. Leaders need to instinctively use the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle, seeing themselves less as directors and controllers and more as leaders of learning and experimentation

10. Leaders need to understand the difference between necessary and unnecessary change as well as the difference between change and improvement. Leaders must know what is needed to assure that any proposed change will be an improvement. Change requires knowledge. Improvement requires profound knowledge.

11. Leaders need to understand motivation, the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, that they cannot motivate, and that their attempts to do so will probably make things worse. Leaders need to understand that they can, however, demotivate people.

12. Leaders need to understand the importance of participation and involvement of people when solving problems and planning change. Participation results in better decisions, solutions, and improvements. Excluding people and stealthful or coercive approaches to change do great harm to the organization and its people

13. Leaders may well seek to discover what their organization’s culture is, keeping in mind that they are the people least likely to understand it.

14. Without personal, face-to-face relationships there is no leadership. Leaders create and foster networks of personal relationships within the organization and between the organization and those on the outside.

15. Leaders must go an inch wide and a mile deep and lead the organization in this focused approach. The organization must focus its efforts so that if does a few things thoroughly rather than many things inadequately.

16. Leaders develop clarity and consistency regarding the organization’s purpose, continually reminding the workforce of that purpose.

17. Leaders need to understand the purpose of the organization in terms of the capabilities acquired by the customer as a result of interacting with it.

18. Leaders need a customer-in perspective, helping the whole organization define a good job from the customer’s perspective.

19. Feedback is the mother’s milk of improvement. Leaders need to establish ongoing feedback loops from the customer to the organization. Within the organization, leaders need to promote the establishment and maintenance of ongoing systems and process-based feedback loops.

20. Leaders need a strong sense of Gemba (the work flow going directly toward the outside customer), understanding this as the important daily customer-oriented work, to which leaders give priority and support.

21. Leaders need to promote the standardization of recurring processes and an understanding of how each person’s standardized processes of work fit with other processes and within larger systems

22. Leaders need to understand the difference between simplistic approaches to standardization, such as ISO 9000 and a more systematically based, holistic, and integrated approach to standardization, an approach that is part of a larger philosophy and context

23. Leaders need to use and promote the use of flowcharts that help to display how the systems and processes unfold and how the work of one individual or group fits into a large flow of work

24. Leaders need to lead the removal of internal barriers, breaking them down and creating interactive systems and processed based on collaboration, cooperation, and interdependence.

25. Leaders must not succumb to the latest fashions and fads.

26. Leaders need the ability to lead the planning and action necessary for breakthrough improvement and large systems change

27. Leaders must lead the creation of purpose, mission, vision, and values, statements that are unique rather than generic, statements that are from the heart, not empty exercises in wordsmithing.

28. Leaders need to lead the establishment of systems and processes for routinely collecting and analyzing critical data, the vital signs that indicate the organization’s well-being, needs, and opportunities.

29. Leaders must believe strongly that planning consists not only in identifying goals and priorities but also in specifying the methods and activities necessary and sufficient to successfully achieve those goals and priorities.

30. Leaders need to lead not only the planning process-the establishment of priorities and methods needed to accomplish them-but also the review process. Leaders visit those engaged in the improvement efforts to ask good questions and offer challenge and support.

31. Leaders need to understand and appreciate the importance of clear, workable operational definitions, specifically defining characteristics from the customer’s point of view.

32. Leaders need a reflex for smart measurement, not simplistic, conventional, and un-useful measurement. People throughout the organization must know what to measure, how to measure it, why it is important to measure it, how to interpret the data, and how to react to whatever the data indicate.

33. Leaders need to see themselves:

34. More as coaches and less as directors

35. More as experimenters and less as controllers

36. More as educators and less as advice-givers

37. More as inquirers and less as inspectors

38. Leaders need to appreciate the importance of good questions and develop an instinct for asking good questions

39. Leaders must know what good listening is and how to practice it

40. Leaders too often use the rhetoric of humanism and combine it with inhumane actions. Leaders need to see this disparity and make their actions consistent with their words

41. Leaders need to examine the assumptions behind their organization’s policies, for example, the implicit belief that employees cannot be trusted. What is implicit and unspoken must be called into question

42. Leaders need to understand the inherently demeaning nature of incentives or and carrot and stick approaches.

43. Leader who desire to solve problems of employee performance or morale need to see those problems as part of a larger, self-perpetuating system of problems.

44. Similarly, leaders need to understand that behind any self-perpetuating system of performance and morale problems are unspoken and false assumptions about the nature of people and work

45. Some of the common, and false, assumptions leaders have about workers and work are:

46. Problems, for the most part, result from individual dereliction

47. Successful work requires holding people accountable for the achievement of measurable goals

48. There is a reservoir of withheld effort that must be coaxed or coerced out of people

49. The leader’s job is to motivate and control the workforce

50. Leaders need to understand that there is no good way to do performance appraisal. It is inherently the wrong thing to do. Leaders need to know what wrong with performance appraisal and what to do instead.

51. Rather than seeking control of their people, leaders must work with their people to gain control of the systems and processes. Rather than dysfunctional systems that require heroic effort of outstanding people, leaders should seek the creation and maintenance of outstanding systems and processes that continuously succeed with the ordinary efforts of average people.

52. At the heart of many conventional management policies is a desire on the part of some leaders to maintain control, or the illusions of control, over people. Leaders need to learn whether this is true of them and learn what can be gained from the control of the work, not the workers.

53. Leaders need to understand that in order to develop an alternative to performance appraisal they must change the way they think

54. Leadership is not just a position. It’s a process. The responsibility of those in the position of leadership is to see to it that the process of leadership occurs.

55. A workplace can be a place of healing or a place where crazy-making takes place. A leader’s hob is to create an environment that is healing.

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So, did you read them all? They summarize the content of the entire book. If you think reading this is too hard, try reading the whole book. You’ll learn something, or reinforce something; guaranteed.