Leadership Development as Competitive Advantage

Great article here from Emory Leadership.Org on "Leadership Development as Competitive Advantage"

"One of the most critical CEO challenges is to create sustainable competitive advantage.

The keyword is “sustainable” as many companies find that whatever competitive advantage they are able to carve out for themselves is relatively short-lived. It is difficult to hide a strategic innovation from your competitors.

So how do great companies create sustainable competitive advantage?

One approach is to employ systems thinking – creating a differentiated complex system is more difficult for competitors to imitate than a strategic innovation.

• Why do some companies consistently outperform others?
• It is not due to the strategic innovations of some new, easily copied techniques. Rather, it is the result of employing a total systems approach that identifies, nurtures, trains, and coaches the leadership. The system drives sustainable achievement.

BOTTOMLINE: A leadership development system is complex and difficult to build. It begins with recruitment and incorporates job placement, performance management, human resource development, and succession planning. (One such "system" - called Six Disciplines, is designed specifically for top-performing small businesses, and incorporates these key best practices in its methodology.)

Living The Good Life

In life, as in business, there comes a time to make serious choices.

From Adrian Savage, a wonderful piece of advice " How To Give Yourself The Best Chance In Life."

The essence?

• Take time to work out what's most important to you
• Keep focusing on your strengths
• Keep trying new things
• Broaden your horizons
• Deliberately shift your perspective
• Spend as much of your time as you can doing things that need to be done. (EXECUTE!)

BOTTOMLINE: If your work and your core values don't match fairly well, you'll never make much of a success.

Critical Leadership Challenges

The Center for Creative Leadership asked its readers to identify the critical leadership challenges facing them and their organizations.

The results of their survey:

"What are the critical leadership challenges that you face in your current job?" (multiple responses)

• 68% said "managing change and complexity"
• 59% said "developing others for leadership roles"
• 54% said "working collaboratively by building and maintaining relationships"
• 54% said "communicating effectively"
• 53% said "building an effective team"

What are the critical leadership challenges that your organization faces? (multiple responses)

• 70% said "developing leadership at all levels"
• 66% said "developing a climate for innovation"
• 61% said "developing high potential and emerging leaders"
• 59% said "operating from an integrated understanding of the organization"

A Bit of Inspiration

Need a bit of inspiration today?


(Tip of the hat to good friend Anita Campbell at Small Business Trends for this one!)

Work Hard, Not Long

Rob May, our friend over at the Business Pundit, resurfaced this article from Fast Company on "Working Hard, Not Long."

The essence?

• Working hard and working long, -- "long" and "hard" are now two different things.
• We work long because we are trying to avoid working hard.
• We praise multitasking when really we should praise focus - because focus is hard
• We praise going through 100 emails to "stay in the loop" when really we should praise the ability to discern what is important and what isn't.

BOTTOMLINE: We all have the same amount of time available each day. It's how you use it that is important, not how much you use. Life is too short and too precious to drag it out by working long. Work hard instead.

Is Your Organization "Ready & Able" for Six Disciplines?

In this short video, listen to Gary Harpst, CEO and Founder of Six Disciplines Corporation, as he describes what a "Ready and Able Organization" is, and how you'll know if/when you're ready for adopting the Six Disciplines Methodology.

Change Management for Six Disciplines Clients

When introducing any new business process improvement approach (like the Six Disciplines™ Methodology), change management is a key to successful implementation.

Prosci's newest 2005 Best Practices in Change Management reveals these top report findings:

• The #1 contributor to (business improvement) project success is active, strong and visible sponsorship throughout the project.
• The top obstacles to successful change are employee resistance at all levels: front-line, middle managers, and senior managers and inadequate senior management sponsorship.
• Employees want to hear messages about change from two people: the CEO and their immediate supervisor - the message they want to hear from each individual is very different.
• When asked what they would do differently next time, most teams would dedicate resources to change management.
• The top reason for employee resistance is a lack of awareness about the change.

Knowing these factors before going into any important business process improvement can help set expectations appropriately.

National Small Business Week in the U.S.

National Small Business Week is coming up in April in the United States.

The Small Business Administration is holding a two-day event, April 12 - 13, 2006 in Washington.

More information at the SBA website

BOTTOMLINE: The differences that small businesses have over larger enterprises include the ability to connect to people to purpose, more effective communication, timely decision-making, more in-depth customer intimacy, and the ability to attract talented team members.

(Thanks to Anita Campbell over at Selling to Small Business for the tip!)

Six Disciplines Leadership Center of North Carolina Names Managing Partners

Six Disciplines Corporation today announced Bruce Fawcett and Craig Landwehr will assume the Managing Partner roles with the newly-added franchise of Six Disciplines Leadership Center of North Carolina, located in Durham.

Bruce and Craig will be responsible for ensuring the long-term success of Six Disciplines clients in North Carolina. Both with offer business coaching and strategic advisory services to top-performing organizations that adopt the Six Disciplines™ Methodology, in pursuit of continual business process improvement.

The Six Disciplines Leadership Center of North Carolina is scheduled to be operational in March of 2006, with offices at 4819 Emperor Blvd, Durham, NC, 27703. For more information, contact Bruce Fawcett at 919.313.4587 or email BFawcett@SixDisciplines.com.

Six Disciplines Leadership Centers Expands Into North Carolina

Six Disciplines Corporation today announced that it has signed a franchise agreement to launch a Six Disciplines Leadership Center to service the North and East areas of North Carolina.

The Six Disciplines Leadership Center of North Carolina will service clients in the north and eastern portions of the state of North Carolina, extending from Winston-Salem to Wilmington, including the Triad and Triangle regions.

Partners in the Six Disciplines Leadership Center of North Carolina include Bruce Fawcett, Craig Landwehr and Mark Granville.

The Six Disciplines Leadership Center of North Carolina is scheduled to be operational in March of 2006. For more information, contact Bruce Fawcett at 919.313.4587 or email BFawcett@SixDisciplines.com.

da Vinci's 7 Principles

Sometimes, you have to start out, learning from those who came before us...

da Vinci's 7 Principles

1. Curiositá - An insatiably curious approach to life and an unrelenting quest for continuous learning.
2. Dimostrazione - A commitment to test knowledge through experience, persistance, and a willingness to learn from mistakes.
3. Sensazione - The continual refinement of the senses, especially sight, as the means to enliven experience.
4. Sfumato (Literally "Going up in smoke") - A willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty.
5. Arte/Scienza - The development of the balance between science and art, logic and imagination. "Whole-Brain" thinking.
6. Corporalita - The cultivation of grace, ambidexterity, fitness, and poise.
7. Connessione - A recognition of and appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things and phenomena. Systems thinking.

(Tip of the hat to Phil over at Make It Great!)

Nine Lives of Leadership

800-CEO-Read has made the ebook the Nine Lives of Leadership, by Lisa Haneberg, from Management Craft fame, available for free.

It’s a great leadership resource for all leaders and managers to read.

(Tip of the hat to George Ambler at The Practice of Leadership for this one)

The Myths About Strategic Leadership

From the Center for Creative Leadership comes "Strategic Leadership: Beyond Setting Direction"

Their assertions:

• Much is made of the importance of strategy in today's organizations.
• Even so, managers and executives often struggle to move strategy beyond setting direction or goals and toward an on-going process of transforming and sustaining the organization
• The missing piece is what is called strategic leadership
• The focus of strategic leadership is the enduring success of the organization, and the work of strategic leadership is to drive the organization so that it will thrive in the long term.

BOTTOMLINE: If you think strategic leadership isn't in your job description, think again. You may have been misled by one of these common myths about leadership and strategy:

"Strategic leadership is only the CEO's job."

"I need to be strategic; my people don't."

"Leading strategically is about making the right choice at the right time."

Entrepreneurial Proverbs

Sometimes, the most basic advice is the best.

Ready for some "basically little nuggets of wisdom for bite-sized nutrition" ?

Here are some "Entrepreneurial Proverbs"

(Tip of the hat to Rob May at the BusinessPundit for this one!)

Defining Leadership

Management Consulting News offers this interview with author Aubrey C. Daniels on "What Followers Reveal about Leaders." Daniels helps the world’s leading organizations apply the principles of behavioral science to the workplace. His consulting firm, Aubrey Daniels International, works with business leaders to develop management strategies that reinforce behaviors for long-term success

The essence of his research:

• Although leadership has been dissected and written about for hundreds of years, the failure rate for American business leaders is 50 to 60 percent. Clearly, we still have a problem.
• There’s no real agreement on the definition of leadership. Usually it’s defined so broadly that it’s up to the individual to decide what constitutes good leadership
• Leadership is not a personality trait. But charismatic profiles tend to make people believe that’s all there is to it.
• A definition of leadership: the role of the leader is to establish the conditions under which all performers will choose to execute the mission, vision, and values of the organization.
• Leadership is about affecting behavior, so when we talk about leading people, we should really talk about leading people’s behavior.
• What we’re writing about is measuring the effectiveness of leaders by examining the behavior of their followers. We define leadership, not only by a leader’s behavior, but also by the behavior of a leader’s followers.

BOTTOMLINE: The most successful leaders transcend personality to develop a follower’s loyalty to the organization’s goals. A leader must continually challenge followers to reach for attainable goals so they will stretch and grow

Leadership: Head, Heart and Guts

The results are in from the first annual Global Leadership Imperative, launched by Mercer Delta Executive Learning Center, a global provider of senior executive programs.

The study uncovered the top four business risks facing business leaders and their ability to achieve business results over the next 24 months.

• 83% of senior executives said “increased competitive pressures” poses the greatest challenge to businesses and requires the broadest leadership skill set,
• 67% said “responding to rapidly changing market conditions”
• 60% said “failure to innovate”
• 52% said “satisfying customer expectations”

Senior executives identified the profile of today’s successful business leader as multi-dimensional, possessing a combination of three core competencies in order to rise above the top four business challenges. Mercer Delta Executive Learning Center categorizes these competencies as:

• Head: Cognitive skills; providing strategy, direction and purpose
• Heart: Emotional intelligence; understanding, working with, and developing others
• Guts: Values; doing the right thing based on clear values

BOTTOMLINE: Executives in this study identified the capacity to “think like a customer” as the most important leadership capability for their organizations.

Four Keys For Living Authentically

Four keys to help you create your individual style for living:

1. Choose happiness in your lifestyle
2. Live authentically
3. Live by the trinity of what is true, good and beautiful
4. Aspire to achieve authentic excellence

(Tip of the hat to Phil at Make It Great! for this one, spotted over at Worthwhile - Alexandra Stoddard, from Time Alive)

Providing Value

David Rothacker, over at Rothacker Reviews, asks the question:

"Think about your life and business today. What can you provide to someone that is more than what they expected?"

David's thoughts on providing value are included here.

(We're humbled by the mention of Be Excellent in this article)

Leadership Succession and Recruitment

Leadership succession and recruitment need the sharp attention of your company's top executives and board.

But who should be held accountable—and how?

An excerpt from a Harvard Business Review article by Jeffrey Cohn, Rakesh Khurana, and Laura Reeves offers some insights:

• Many executives believe that leadership development is a job for the HR department. This may be the single biggest misconception they can have.
• At companies that are good at growing leaders, operating managers, not HR executives, are at the front line of planning and development.
• Many senior executives now hold their line managers directly responsible for these activities.
• They must mentor emerging leaders, from their own and other departments, passing on important knowledge and providing helpful evaluations and feedback.
• If line managers are held responsible for executing the talent development initiatives, the board should assume high-level ownership of the overall system. (Traditionally, however, most boards have focused on CEO succession, giving short shrift to systematic leadership development.)
• Detached from day-to-day operations and biases, board directors can objectively look at the company's leadership development systems and bench strength.

Sharpening Your Business Acumen

How do leaders anticipate external trends and craft their strategies accordingly? They follow a six-step thinking process.

Strategy+Business magazine offers a six-step guide for incorporating external trends into your internal strategies.

1. What is happening in the world today?
2. What does it mean for others?
3. What does it mean for us?
4. What would have to happen first (for the results we want to occur)?
5. What do we have to do to play a role?
6. What do we do next?