Monday, July 7, 2014

Motivating, engaging, and authentic


John Coleman and Jim Whitehurst tell us in this posting that if -- as a leader -- you're looking to move from "command and control", then you could do a lot worse than moving to a style with these attributes:
  • Motivating to impart purpose: a great way to attract followers, especially followers who have genuine choice (if you have no followers, are you a leader?)
  • Engaging and adapting to the pace of business change. Of course that advice has been around since the first industrial revolution and the invention of industries to replace cottages, but Lord knows every time you look up somebody's got a better plan than you do, and
  • Being authentic. Some leaders just are not people-oriented, and they don't look authentic trying to be. 
So, among these three, I can relate best to the first one; my thinking (call it a bias) was summed up nicely by AliFarquhar, one of those who commented on the posting:
Leaders need to shift their identity from all-knowing experts with the right answers to adders of value through culture stewardship, vision, influence, and the right questions.

Meanwhile, those lower in the chain need to shift from a mentality of "it's theirs and anything that goes wrong can be blamed by pointing the finger upwards" to "it's ours and we own the results as well".




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