On Leadership by Harvard Business Review

• I have found, however, that the most effective leaders are alike in one crucial way: They all have a high degree of what has come to be known as emotional intelligence.
• The EI skills are:
• Self-awareness--knowing one’s strengths, weaknesses, drivers, values, and impact on others.
• Self-regulation--controlling or redirecting disruptive impulses and moods.
• Motivation--relishing achievement for its own sake.
• Empathy--understanding other people’s emotional makeup.
• Social skill--building rapport with others to move them in desired directions.
• Use practice and feedback from others to strengthen specific EI skills.
• Self-awareness means having a deep understanding of one’s emotions, strengths, weaknesses, needs, and drives. People with strong self-awareness are neither overly critical nor unrealistically hopeful. Rather, they are honest--with themselves and others.
• People who have a high degree of self-awareness recognize how their feelings affect them, other people, and their job performance.
• Scientific inquiry strongly suggests that there is a genetic component to emotional intelligence.
• One thing is certain: Emotional intelligence increases with age. There is an old-fashioned word for the phenomenon: maturity.
• It’s important to emphasize that building one’s emotional intelligence cannot--will not--happen without sincere desire and concerted effort.
• A person who lacks self-awareness is apt to make decisions that bring on inner turmoil by treading on buried values.
• The decisions of self-aware people mesh with their values; consequently, they often find work to be energizing.
• How can one recognize self-awareness? First and foremost, it shows itself as candor and an ability to assess yourself realistically. People with high self-awareness are able to speak accurately and openly--although not necessarily effusively or confessionally--about their emotions and the impact they have on their work.
• One of the hallmarks of self-warewss is a self-deprecating sense of humor.
• Self-aware people know--and are comfortable talking about--their limitations and strengths, and they often demonstrate a thirst for constructive criticisms. By contrast, people with low self-awareness interpret the message that they need to improve as a threat or a sign of failure.
• Self-aware people can also be recognized by their self-confidence.
• People generally admire and respect candor.
• Why doe self-regulation matter so much for leaders? First of all, people who are in control of their feelings and impulses--that is, people who are reasonable--are able to create an environment of trust and fairness. In such an environment, peopltics and infighting are sharply reduced and productivity is high. Talented people flock to the organization and aren’t tempted to leave. And self-regulation has a trickle-down effect.
• The signs of emotional self-regulation, therefore, are easy to see: a propensity for reflection and thoughtfulness; comfort with ambiguity and change; and integrity--an ability to say no to impulsive urges.
• People who can master their emotions are sometimes seen as cold fish--their considered responses are taken as a lack of passion.
• In my research, extreme displays of negative emotions have never emerged as a driver of good leadership.
• If there is one trait that virtually all effective leaders have, it is motivation. They are driven to achieve beyond expectations--their own and everyone else’s. The key word here is achieve.
• Those with leadership potential are motivated by a deeply embedded desire to achieve for the sake of achievement.
• During performance reviews, people with high levels of motivation might ask to be “stretched” by their superiors.
• When people love their jobs for the work itself, they often feel committed to the organizations that make that work possible. Committed employees are likely to stay with an organizations even when they are pursued by headhunters waving money.
• Empathy is particularly important today as a component of leadership for at least three reasons: the increasing use of teams; the rapid pace of globalization; and the growing need to retain talent.
• A team’s leader must be able to sense and understand the viewpoints of everyone around the table.
• Finally, empathy plays a key role in the retention of talent, particularly in today’s information economy. Leaders have always needed empathy to develop and keep good people, but today the stakes are higher. When good people leave, they take the company’s knowledge with them.
• The first three components of emotional intelligence are self-management skills. The last two, empathy and social skill, concern a person’s ability to manage relationships with others.
• Social skill, rather, is friendliness with a purpose: moving people in the direction you desire, whether that’s agreement on a new marketing strategy or enthusiasm about a new product.
• The leader’s task is to get work done through other people, and social skill makes that possible.
• What made them all effective is that they followed the same eight practices:
• They asked, “What needs to be done?”
• They asked, “What is right for the enterprise?”
• They develop action plans.
• They took responsibility for decisions.
• They took responsibility for communicating.
• They were focused on opportunities rather than problems.
• They ran productive meetings.
• They thought and said “we” rather than “I”.
• The first two practices gave them the knowledge they needed. The next four helped them convert this knowledge into effective action. The last two ensured the whole organization felt responsible and accountable.
• Asking what has to be done, and taking the question seriously, is crucial for managerial success.
• The answer to the question “What needs to be done?” almost always contains more than one urgent task. But effective executives do not splinter themselves. They concentrate on one task if at all possible.
• So what do effective leaders have in common? THey get the right things done, in the right ways--by following eight simple rules:
• Ask what needs to be done.
• Ask what’s right for the enterprise.
• Develop action plans.
• Take responsibility for decisions.
• Take responsibility for communicating.
• Focus on opportunities, not problems.
• Run productive meetings.
• Think and say “We”, not “I”.
• Once you know what must be done, identify tasks you’re best at, concentrating on one at a time. After completing a task, reset priorities based on new realities.
• Decisions that are right for your enterprise are ultimately right for all stakeholders.
• Devise plans that specify desired results and constraints.
• Ensure that each decision specifies who’s accountable for carrying it out, when it must be implemented, who'll be affected by it, and who must be informed.
• You get results by exploiting opportunities, not solving problems.
• Terminate the meeting once the purpose is accomplished.
• Your authority comes from your organization’s trust in you. To get the best results, always consider your organization’s needs and opportunities before your own.
• Effective executives try to focus on jobs they’ll do especially well. They know that enterprises perform if top management performs--and don’t if it doesn’t.
• Asking “What is right for the enterprise?” does not guarantee that the right decision will be made. Even the most brilliant executive is juman and thus prone to mistakes and prejudices. But failure to ask the question virtually guarantees the wrong decision.
• Executives are doers; they execute. Knowledge is useless to executives until it has been translated into deeds. But before springing into action, the executive needs to plan his course. He needs to think about desired results, probable restraints, future revisions, check-in points, and implications for how he’ll spend his time.
• The action plan is a statement of intentions rather than a commitment. It must not become a straightjacket. It should be revises often, because every success creates new opportunities. So does every failure.
• Time is an executive’s scarcest and most precious resource.
• A decision has not been made until people know:
• The name of the person accountable for carrying it out
• The deadline
• The names of the people who will be affected by the decision and therefore have to know about, understand, and approve it--or at least not be strongly opposed to it
• The names of the people who have to be informed of the decisions, even if they are not directly affected by it
• People who have failed in a new job should be given the choice to go back to a job at their former level and salary.
• A systematic decision review can be a powerful tool for self-development, too. Checking the results of a decision against its expectations shows executives what their strengths are, where they need to improve, and where they lack knowledge or information. It shows them their biases.
• Allocating the best people to the right positions is a crucial, tough job that many executives slight, in part because they best people are already too busy.
• Decisions are made at every level of the organization, beginning with individual professional contributors and frontline supervisors.
• Making good decisions si a crucial skill at every level. It needs to be taught explicitly to everyone in organizations that are based on knowledge.
• Good executives focus on opportunities rather than problems. Problems have to be taken care of, of course; they must not be swept under the rug. But problem solving, how were necessary, does not produce results. It prevents damage. Exploiting opportunities produces results.
• Effective executives put their best people on opportunities rather than on problems.
• Even a conversation with only one other person is a meeting.
• The key to running an effective meeting is to decide in advance what kind of meeting it will be. Different kinds of meetings require different forms of preparation and different results.
• Making a meeting productive takes a good deal of self-discipline. It requires that executives determine what kind of meeting is appropriate and then stick to that format. It’s also necessary to terminate the meeting as soon as its specific purpose has been accomplished. Good executives don’t raise another matter for discussion. They sum up and adjourn.
• Effective executives know that any given meetings is either productive or a total waste of time.
• Effective executives know that they have ultimate responsibility, which can be neither shared not delegated. But they have authority only because they have the trust of the organization.
• Listen first, speak last.
• Effectiveness is a discipline. And, like every discipline, effectiveness can be learned and must be earned.
• Leadership is different from management, but not for the reasons most people think. Leadership isn’t mystical and mysterious.
• Leadership and management are two distinctive and complementary systems of action. Each has its own function and characteristic activities. Both are necessary for success in an increasingly complex and volatile business environment.
• Most U.S. corporations today are over-managed and underled.
• Successful corporations don't’ wait for leaders to come along. They actively seek out people with leadership potential and expose them to career experiences designed to develop that potential.
• Once companies understand the fundamental difference between leadership and management, they can begin to groom their top people to provide both.
• Management is about coping with complexity. It’s practices and procedures are largely a response to one of the most significant developments of the twentieth century: the emergence of large organizations. Without good management, complex enterprises tend to become chaotic in ways that threaten their very existence. Good management brings a degree of order and consistency to key dimensions like the quality and profitability of products.
• Leadership, by contrast, is about coping with change.
• Major changes are more and more necessary to survive and compete effectively in this new environment. More change always demands more leadership.
• The fact of the matter is that leaderships skills are not innate. They can be acquired, and honed.
• Management is about coping with complexity; it brings order and predictability to a situation.
• Leadership, then, is about learning how to cope with rapid change.
• Management involves planning and budgeting. Leadership involves setting direction.
• Management involves organizing and staffing. Leadership involves aligning people.
• Management provides control and solves problems. Leadership provides motivation.
• No one yet has figured out how to manage people effectively into battle; they must be led.
• The aim of management is predictability--orderly results. Leadership’s function is to produce change. Setting the direction of that change, therefore, is essential work.
• Sine the function of leadership is to produce change, setting the direction of that change is fundamental to leadership.
• What’s urcial about a vision is not its originality but how well it serves the interests of important constituencies--customers, stockholders, employees--and how easily it can be translated into a realistic competitive strategy.
• When a company that has never been better than a weak competitor in an industry suddenly starts talking about becoming number one, that is a pipe dream, not a vision.
• One of the most frequent mistakes that overmanaged and underled corporations make is to embrace long-term panning as a panacea for their lack of direction and inability to adapt to an increasingly competitive and dynamic business environment.
• Planning works best not as a substitute for direction setting but as a complement to it.
• Trying to get people to comprehend a vision of an alternative future is also a communications challenge of a completely different magnitude from organizing them to fulfill a short-term plan.
• Another big challenge in leadership efforts is credibility--getting people to believe the message.
• One of the reasons some organizations have difficulty adjusting to rapid changes in markets or technology is that so many people in those companies feel relatively powerless.
• Since change is the function of leadership, being able to generate highly energetic behavior is important for coping with the inevitable barriers to change.
• Achieving grand visions always requires a burst of energy.
• Leaders almost always have had opportunities during their twenties and thirties to actually try to lead, to take a risk, and to learn from both triumphs and failures. Such learning seems essential in developing a wide range of leadership skills and perspectives.
• People who provide effective leadership in important jobs always have a chance, before they get into those jobs, to grow beyond the narrow base that characterizes most managerial careers. This is usually the result of lateral career moves of of early promotes to unusually broad job assignments.
• Corporations that do a better-than-average job of developing leaders put an emphasis on creating challenging opportunities for relatively young employees.
• Institutionalizing a leadership-centered culture is the ultimate act of leadership.
• Adaptive work is required when our deeply held beliefs are challenged, when the values that made us successful become less relevant, and when legitimate yet competing perspectives emerge.
• Adaptive problems are often systemic problems with no ready answers.
• Rather than protecting people from outside threats, leaders should allow them to feel the pinch of reality in order to stimulate them to adapt.
• Adaptive work is tough on everyone. For leaders, it’s counterintuitive. Rather than providing solutions, you must ask tough questions and leverage employees collective intelligence.
• For your employees, adaptive work is painful--requiring unfamiliar flores, responsibilities, values, and ways of working.
• Instead of maintaining norms, leaders have to challenge “the way we do business” and help others distinguish immutable values from historical practices that must go.
• Drawing on our experience with managers from around the world, we offer six principles for leading adaptive work: “getting on the balcony”, identifying the adaptive challenge, regulating distress, maintaining disciplined attention, giving the work back to people, and protecting voices of leadership from below.
• Control the rate of change: Don’t start too many initiatives simultaneously without stopping others.
• Encourage risk taking and responsibility---then back people up if they err.
• When businesses cannot learn quickly to adapt to new challenges, they are likely to face their own form of extinction.
• No executive can hide from the fact that his or her team reflects the best and the worst of the company’s values and norms, and therefore provides a case in point for insight into the nature of the adaptive work ahead.
• Adaptive work generates distress. Before putting people to work on challenges for which there are no ready solutions, a leader must realize that people can learn only so much so fast.
• A leader must sequence and pace the work. Too often, senior managers convey that everything is important. They start new initiatives without stopping other activities, or they start too many initiatives at the same time. They overwhelm and disorient the very people who need to take responsibility for the work.
• A leader provides direction by identifying the organization’s adaptive challenge and framing the key questions and issues. A leader protects people by managing the rate of change. A leader orients people to new roles and responsibilities by clarifying business realities and key values. A leader helps expose conflict, viewing it as the engine of creativity and learning.
• A leader has to have the emotional capacity to tolerate uncertainty, frustration, and pain.
• No one learns anything without being open to contrasting points of view.
• The work of the leader is to get conflict out into the open and use it as a source of creativity.
• Because work avoidance is rampant in organizations, a leader has to counteract distractions that prevent people from dealing with adaptive issues.
• Distractions have to be identified when they occur so that people will regain focus.
• People need leadership to help them maintain their focus on the tough questions. Disciplined attention is the currency of leadership.
• Everyone in the organization has special access to information that comes from his or her particular vantage point.
• When people do not act on their special knowledge, businesses fail to adapt.
• All too often, people look up the chain of command, expecting senior management to meet market challenges for which they themselves are responsible.
• Letting people take the initiative in defining and solving problems means that management needs to learn to support rather than control.
• A leader has to let people bear the weight of responsibility.
• Leadership has to take place every day. It cannot be the responsibility of the few, a rare event, or a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
• If you want to silence a room of executives, try this small trick Ask them, “Why would anyone want to be led by you?”
• But we’ve discovered that inspirational leaders also share four unexpected qualities:
• They selectively show their weaknesses.
• They rely heavily on intuition to gauge the appropriate timing and course of their actions.
• They manage employees with something we call tough empathy.
• They reveal their differences.
• Show you’re human, selectively revealing weaknesses.
• Be a “sensor”, collecting soft people data that lets you rely on intuition.
• Manage employees with “tough empathy”.
• Dare to be different, capitalizing on your uniqueness.
• Exposing a weakness establishes trust and thus helps get folks on board.
• Sharing an imperfection is so effective because it underscores a human being’s authenticity.
• Don’t expose a weakness that others see as fatal. Choose a tangential weakness instead.
• Capitalizing on what’s unique about yourself lets you signal your separateness as a leader, and motivates others to perform better.
• Knowing which weakness to disclose is a highly honed art. The golden rule is never to expose a weakness that will be seen as a fatal flaw--by which we mean a flaw that jeopardizes central aspects of your professional role.
• By definition, sensins a situation involves projection--that state of mind when you attribute your own ideas to other people and things. When a person “projects”, his thoughts may interfere with the truth.
• Tough empathy means giving people what they need, not what they want.
• At its best, taught empathy balances respect for the individual and for the task at hand.
• People do not commit to executives who merely lie up to the obligations of their jobs.
• Another quality of inspirational leaders is that they capitalize on what’s unique about themselves.
• The most effective leaders deliberately use differences to keep a social distance. Even as they are drawing their followers close to them, inspirational leaders signal their separateness.
• Inspirational leaders use separateness to motivate others to perform better. It is not that they are being Machiavellian but that they recognize instinctively that followers will push themselves if their leader is just a little aloof. Leadership, after all, is not a popularity contest.
• No one can just ape another leaders. So the challenge facing prospective leaders is for them to be themselves, but with more skill. That can be done by making yourself increasingly aware of the four leadership qualities we describe and by manipulating these qualities to come up with a personal style that works for you. Remember, there is no universal formula, and what’s needed will vary from context to context.
• Extraordinary leaders find meaning in--and learn from--the most negative events.
• Crucibles are intense, often traumatic--and always unplanned.
• Four skills enable leaders to learn from adversity:
• Engage others in shared meaning.
• A distinctive, compelling voice.
• Integrity.
• Adaptive capacity.
• A crucible is, by definition, a transformative experience through which an individual comes to a new or an altered sense of identity.
• We believe that great leaders possess four essential skills, and, we were surprised to learn, these happen to be the same skills that allow a person to find meaning in what could be a debilitating experience. First is the ability to engage others in shared meaning. Second is a distinctive and compelling voice. Third is a sense of integrity (including a strong set of values). But by far the most critical skill of the four is what we call “adaptive capacity”.
• This [adaptive capacity]  is, in essence, applied creativity--an almost magical ability to transcend adversity, with all its attendant stresses, and to emerge stronger than before. It’s composed of two primary qualities: the ability to grasp context, and hardiness. The ability to grasp context implies an ability to weight a welter of factors, ranging from how very different groups of people will interpret a gesture to being able to put a situation in perspective. Without this, leaders are utterly lost, because they cannot connect with their constituents.
• Hardiness is just what it sounds like--the perseverance and toughness that enable people to emerge from devastating circumstances without losing hope.
• It is the combination of hardiness and ability to grasp context that, above all, allows a person to not only survive an ordeal, but to learn from it, and to emerge stronger, more engage, and more committed than ever.
• “Level 5” reference to the highest level in a hierarchy of executive capabilities that we identified during our research. Leaders at the other four levels in the hierarchy can produce high degrees of success but not enough to elevate companies from mediocrity to sustained excellence.
• The Level 5 hierarchy:
• Level 5--Executive: Builds enduring greatness through a paradoxical combination of personal humility plus professional will.
• Level 4--Effective Leader: Catalyzes commitment to and vigorous pursuit of a clear and compelling vision; stimulates the group to high performance standards.
• Level 3--Competent Manager: Organizes people and resources toward the effective and efficient pursuit of predetermined objectives.
• Level 2--Contributing Team Member: Contributes to the achievement of group objectives; works effectively with others in a group setting.
• Level 1--Highly Capable Individual: Makes productive contributions through talent, knowledge, skills, and good work habits.
• Level 5 leaders blend the paradoxical combination of deep personal humility with intense professional will.
• Good-to-great transformations don’t happen without Level 5 leaders at the helm. They just don’t.
• Humility + Will = Level 5
• Attend to people first, strategy second. Get the right people on the bus and the wrong people off--then figure out where to drive it.
• Deal with the brutal facts of your current reality--while maintaining absolute faith that you’ll prevail.
• Keep pushing your organizational “flywheel”. With consistent effort, momentum increases until--bang!--the wheel hits the breakthrough point.
• Think of your company as three intersecting circles: what it can be best at, how its economics work best, and what ignites its people’s passions. Eliminate everything else.
• Level 5 leaders are a study in duality: modest and willful, shy and fearless.
• The fox knows a little about many things, but the hedgehog knows only one big thing very well. The fox is complex; the hedgehog simple. And the hedgehog wins. Our research shows that breakthroughs require simple, hedgehog-like understanding of three intersecting circles: what a company can be the best in the world at, how its economics work best, and what best ignites the passions of its people. Breakthroughs happen when you get the hedgehog concept and become systematic and consistent with it, eliminating virtually anything that does not fit in the three circles.
• Besides extreme humility, Level 5 leaders also display tremendous professional will.
• Because Level 5 leaders have ambition not for themselves but for their companies, they routinely select superb successors.
• The great irony is that the animus and personal ambition that often drives people to become a Level 4 leaders stands at odds with the humility required to rise to Level 5.
• Most developmental psychologists agree that what differentiates leaders is not su much their philosophy of leadership, their personality, or thier style of management. Rather, it’s their internal “action logic”--how they interpret their surroundings and react when their power or safety is challenged.
• Recognize that great leaders are differentiated not by their personality or philosophy but by their action logic--how they interpret their own and others’ behavior and how they maintain power or protect against threats.
• The least effective [type of leader] for organizational leadership are the Opportunists and Diplomat; the most effective, the strategist and Alchemist.
• The largest category of leader is that of Experts, who account for 38% of all professional in our sample. In contrast to Opportunists, who vosuns on trying to control the world around them, and Diplomats, who concentrate on controlling their own behavior, Experts try to exercise control by perfecting their knowledge, both in their professional and personal lives. Exercising watertight thinking is extremely important to Experts.
• Experts are great individual contributors because of their pursuit of continuous improvement, efficiency, and perfection. But as managers, they can be problematic because they are so completely sure they are right.
• Achievers often find themselves clashing with Experts. The Expert subordinate, in particular, finds the Achiever leader hard to take because he cannot deny the reality of the Achiever’s success even though he feels superior.
• What sets Individualists apart from Achievers is their awareness of a possible conflict between their principles and their actions, or between the organization’s values and its implementation of those values. This conflict becomes the source of tension, creativity, and a growing desire for further development.
• Individualists also tend to ignore rules they regard as irrelevant, which often makes them a source of irritation to both colleagues and bosses.
• Strategists account for just 4% of leaders. What sets them apart from Individualists is their focus on organizational constraints and perceptions, which they treat as discussable and transformable.
• The most remarkable--and encouraging--finding from our research is that leaders can transform from one action logic to another.
• In both business and personal relationships, speaking and listening must come to be experienced not as necessary, taken-for-granted ways of communicating predetermined ideas but as intrinsically forward-thinking, creative actions.
• Over the long term, the most effective teams are those with a Strategists culture, in which the group sees business challenges as opportunities for growth and learning on the part of both individuals and the organization.
• Those who are willing to work at developing themselves and becoming more self-aware can almost certainly evolve over time into truly transformational leaders.
• No one can be authentic by trying to imitate someone else. You can learn from other’s experiences, but there is no way you can be successful when you are trying to be like them. People trust you when you are genuine and authentic, not a replica of someone else.
• Authentic leaders demonstrate a passion for their purpose, practice their values consistently, and lead with their hearts as well as their heads. They establish long-term, meaningful relationships and have the self-discipline to get results. They know who they are.
• All of us have the spark of leadership in us, whether it is in business, in government, or as a nonprofit volunteer. The challenge is to understand ourselves well enough to discover where we can use our leadership gifts to serve others.
• Discovering your authentic leadership requires a commitment to developing yourself.
• Authentic leaders act on that awareness by practicing their values and principles, sometimes at substantial risk to themselves. They are careful to balance their motivations so that they are driven by these inner values as much as by a desire for external rewards or recognition. Authentic leaders also keep a strong support team around them, ensuring that they live integrated, grounded lives.
• Denial can be the greatest hurdle that leaders face in becoming self-aware.
• Authentic leaders realize that they have to be willing to listen to feedback--especially the kind they don’t want to hear.
• Leadership principles are values translated into action. Having a solid base of values and testing them under fire enables you to develop the principles you will use in leading.
• Because authentic leaders need to sustain high levels of motivation and keep their lives in balance, it is critically important for them to understand what drives them. There are two types of motivations--extrinsic and intrinsic. Although they are reluctant to admit it, any leaders are proplledded to achieve by measuring their success against the outside world’s parameters. They enjoy the recognition and status that come with promotions and financial rewards. Intrinsic motivations, on the other hand, are derived from their sense of the meaning of their life. They are closely linked to one’s life story and the wya one frames it.
• The only way to avoid getting caught up in materialism is to understand where you find happiness and fulfillment.
• Intrinsic motivations are congruent with your values and are more fulfilling than extrinsic motivations.
• Leaders cannot succeed on their own; even the most outwardly confident executives need support and advice. Without strong relationships to provide perspective, it is very easy to lose your way.
• Integrating their lives is one of the greatest challenges leaders can face. To lead a balanced life, you need to bring together all of its constituent elements--work, family, community, and friends--so that you can be the same person in each environment.
• The world can shape you if you let it. To have a sense of yourself as you live, you must make conscious choices. Sometimes the choices are really hard, and you make a lot of mistakes.
• Authentic leaders have a steady and confident presence. They do not show up as one person on eday and another person the next. Integration takes discipline, particularly during stressful times when it is easy to become reactive and slip back into bad habits.
• Leading is high-stress work. There is no way to avoid stress when you are responsible for people, organizations, outcomes, and managing the constant uncertainties of the environment. The higher you go, the greater your freedom to control your destiny but also the higher the degree of stress. The question is not whether you can avoid stress but how you can control it to maintain your own sense of equilibrium.
• Authentic leaders recognize that leadership is not about their successes or about getting loyal subordinates to follow them. They know the key to a successful organization is having empower leaders at all levels, including those who have no direct reports. They not only inspire those around them, they empower those individuals to step up and lead.
• All leaders have to deliver bottom-line results.
• It may be possible to drive short-term outcomes without being authentic, but authentic leadership is the only way we know to create sustainable long-term results.
• It’s time to end the myth of the complete leader: the flawless person at the trop who’s got it all figured out. In fact, the sooner leaders stop trying to be all things to all people, the better off their organizations will be.
• Only when leaders come to see themselves as incomplete--as having both strengths and weaknesses--will they be able to make up for their missing skills by relying on others.
• Accept that you’re human, with strengths and weaknesses.
• Then find and work with others who can provide the capabilities you’re missing.
• Leaders need to have the courage to present a map that highlights features they believe to be critical, even if their map doesn’t conform to the dominant perspective.
• Good leaders distinguish their observations from their opinions and judgements and explain their reasoning without aggression or defensiveness.
• Visioning involves creating compelling images of the future.
• Fundamentally, visioning gives people a sense of meaning in their work. Leaders who are skilled in this capability are able to get people excited about their view of the future while inviting others to help crystalize that image.
• Leaders who excel in visioning walk the walk; they work to embody the core values and ideas contained in the vision.
• Even the most compelling vision will lose its power if it floats, unconnected, above the everyday reality of organizational ife. To transform a vision of the future into a present-day reality, leaders need to devisse processes that will give it life. This inventing is what moves a business from the abstract world of ideas to the concrete world of implementation.
• Don’t assume that the way things have always been done is the best way to do them.
• In sum, leaders must be able to succeed at inventing, and this requires both attention to detail and creativity.
• It’s the leader’s responsibility to create an environment that lets people complement one another’s strengths and offset one another’s weaknesses. In this way, leadership is distributed across multiple people throughout the organization.
• Even the most talented leaders require the input and leadership of others, constructively solicited and creatively applied.