A couple of months ago, I was presenting to a group of future student leaders at St. Mark’s School, a private boarding school in Massachusetts. The topic for the day was inspired leadership.   While developing my presentation, I stumbled upon a great video that provides a rather elegant example of how to be so inspirational as to build a movement.   In short, while every great movement has a visionary leader at its beginning, it is the first group of early followers that give the leader’s crazy dream legitimacy.  Never overlook the power of being the first follower.

In the past year I have written on ways of diagnosing bad leadership, techniques for leaders to inspire, and given examples of both good and bad leadership.  Taken in aggregate, you might, with a bit of mental wrangling, be able to piece together some sort of rubric for being a good leader.  Well, allow me to save you that cognitive energy by sharing Seven questions for leaders, from blogger/author extraordinaire Seth Godin.  While i am sure there are more explicit and academic examinations of leadership in existence, these seven questions are a good start for leadership in the digital age.  Enjoy!

Seven questions for leaders

Do you let the facts get in the way of a good story?

What do you do with people who disagree with you… do you call them names in order to shut them down?

Are you open to multiple points of view or you demand compliance and uniformity? [Bonus: Are you willing to walk away from a project or customer or employee who has values that don’t match yours?]

Is it okay if someone else gets the credit?

How often are you able to change your position?

Do you have a goal that can be reached in multiple ways?

If someone else can get us there faster, are you willing to let them?

In my last blog post, I wrote that one of the core responsibilities of leadership is the inspirational selling of ideas to others.  In this short clip, adapted from a talk given at the RSA by Sir Ken Robinson, renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA’s Benjamin Franklin award, witness an engaging and innovative presentation on changing paradigms in education.

One could say that every successful leader is ultimately great marketer.   The challenge of getting others to follow is one of communicating beyond the rational, objective facts of a situation.  Great leadership is about having a dream, a vision, an inspired view of  the future, and then selling the entirety of that dream to others.  At Archos Advisors, we often talk about leading from your Dynamic Essence.What ever you choose to call it, when it is done well, you can feel the moment that the message connects with one or more of the audiences 6 Desires, and inspiration happens.In this Ted Talks video, Simon Sinek, author of “Start with Why?”, provides a great presentation on how this type of inspired leadership can happen.  Enjoy.

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”

- Eleanor Roosevelt

During a recent dinner with friends, the conversation turned to the difficulty of working in an organization that lacks strong leadership.  One of my friends was particularly engaged and exasperated by the conversation.  He remarked that only one individual had been honest with him about the critical lack of senior leadership in his current organization while he was hiring into the firm.  This got me thinking about the definitive signs of weak leadership and how one might spot them during an interview.  So, here it is, the Archos Advisors 5 warning signs of critically weak leadership.

1) Lack of a clear organizational mission, vision or strategy

During the interview process, can all of your interviewers speak about the mission and vision of the organization?  If they pull a card out of their wallet, it is not necessarily a bad sign.  Just make sure that they can then tell you how the organization lives up to that mission, and more importantly how they see themselves and your position living up to it as well.

2) Micromanagement or Tyrannical Management

While different types of leaders exhibit different leadership styles, extreme micromanagement or even worse, tyrannical management styles are warning signs of leadership that is having difficulty defining and then executing against the big picture.  Unfortunately, this type of management can become contagious within organizations as the lack of a clearly defined strategy or mission impacts more than just the C-level.  When interviewing, ask individuals to describe their supervisors leadership style.   If their leader is truly corrosive, you might not get a straight answer.  That is a sign, in and of itself.

3) Poor communication

The inability to communicate is often cited as one of the biggest impediments to organizational success.  Successfully sharing ideas, information and inspiration within an organization is increasingly a mark of even middle of the pack leadership.   Leaders must not only be effective communicators in their own right, but they must also create an environment that values frictionless communication.   Ask your interviewers to describe communication in the organization.  Is information shared freely from the top down?  Do people say that they often know what they need to know, in a timely fashion?  Do they both understand and trust the messages they are getting from leadership?  If the answer is no, then perhaps there is a problem.

4)Lack of conflict or corrosive conflict.

Understanding how an organization deals with conflict will give you a clear sense of the organization’s leadership.  And unless you are working in the military under a command and control structure, conflict should be an innate and integral part of any successful team.  Leaders that fear conflict, tend to create organizations that lack diverse thinking, or worse they create passive aggressive behaviors on the part of their frustrated employees.   Ask how the organization deals with differences in opinion.  What is their model for collaboration and consensus?  You want to hear that different voices and opinions are welcome, even though they may create conflict. Even better, if they can report that better outcomes are reached as a result of recognizing different voices you likely have strong leadership in place.

5) Lack of organizational resilience

How does the organization respond to setbacks?  Solid leadership recognizes that change and challenge are unavoidable parts of running an organization.  Resilient leaders find ways of turning those events into learning opportunities, and  eventually competitive advantage.   This requires leadership to do more than react to setbacks.  Leaders should create a culture that uses even small challenges as opportunities to grow and thrive. Simply inquire about how the organization and its leadership handled its most recent setback.

A couple of additional thoughts.

First, I didn’t bother to include issues such as unethical behavior on the part of the leadership because we were just describing weak leadership, as opposed to illegal or immoral leadership.  Second, while this might seem like a lot to ask during the interview process, remember that the presence of adequate leadership in an organization is a good predictor of long-term job satisfaction.

Are there any other signs of weak leadership that I should have included?  Feel free to leave comments and let me know.

Leaders are more powerful role models when they learn than when they teach.
~Rosabeth Moss Kantor

One night last week, my wife was putting the finishing touches on an article she was writing when she realized that she needed a copy of SPSS, a statistics program,  to complete some last bit of analysis.  Unfortunately, we did’t own a working copy of SPSS, and we didn’t really want to spend hundreds of dollars to purchase a software that would only be used for two or three weeks over the next couple of years. Searching the internet for an open source alternative we found PSPP.  According to the Wikipedia article on PSPP, the original author of the program, when confronted with the expensive, time-limited license of programs like SPSS  “considered this to be ethically unacceptable, [and] decided to write a program which would be functionally identical to SPSS, except that there would be no license expiry, and everyone would be permitted to copy, modify and share the program.”  Our story ends with my wife using PSPP, and immediately posting to her Facebook status something about her  “geeky husband” finding this amazing open source replacement for SPSS.   It is also interesting to note that a number of her friends immediately asked how they could get access to the same program. and their own geeky husband.

Now, did the company that provides SPSS feel a sharp pain at the moment my wife posted of her open source find.  Probably not, but they should have.  And they should not be alone in their alarm.  Open source as an idea and philosophy has begun to spill over the walls of computer programming and into the larger culture.  Take the story of the groundskeepers who are choosing to “go green”, not only because of the desire to use fewer potentially harmful chemicals, but because they are tired of being beholden to the proprietary relationships involved with using more mainstream commercial fertilizers and pest control methods.  Organic growers as a group have historically relied upon a collaborative approach to developing solutions to common problems. If someone finds a solution, they share it with the group, with the understanding that others will do so in turn.   Who amongst us is not using Wikipedia as an open source for sharing information in the way that World Book or Encyclopedia Britannica did when i was a child in the 70’s and 80’s.  I have heard numerous cases of teachers around the globe making it mandatory that their students not only know how to utilize the information provided by Wikipedia, but also requiring that they become part of the community of content creators and editors.    And of course, there is this blog post, and other provided by content experts around the globe.  Blogging as a means of demonstrating ones expertise  may appear counter intuitive to some and downright cynical by others,  but I for one can’t count the number of times that I have been grateful for some freely shared piece of business insight that I have discovered on someone’s blog.

So, if open source is increasingly a part of our culture, what are some of the future  implications for leadership represented by this change?

- Leaders must create environments that support a frictionless sharing of ideas. 

Particularly in traditionally hierarchical organizations, there is a tremendous temptation on the part of leaders to share information on an “as needed” basis.  In our new, open source world, successful organizations will find ways of increasing access to broader sets of information.  By increasing access to their information, organizations reduce costs of needless duplication while increasing the chances of others finding new ways of creating value from it.

- Leaders must increasingly manager from a place of generosity and mutual benefit.  

Throughout my own career I have learned the most, and been the most effective when I have been able to develop the careers of those around me.  In a world increasingly driven by the benefits of open source culture, it stands to reason that our new engineers, programmers, content creators, and designers  will expect to work in environments that foster collaboration, idea sharing and openness. Open organization get closer to creating true meritocracy while flattening needless hierarchy.  Good ideas, regardless of origin will have value.  Organizations and leaders who fail to understand this will be left wondering why their best talent is constantly escaping to more creative, open, and collaborative organizations.

- Leaders must learn be open to new sources of great ideas, great talent, and great opportunities, regardless of its origin.

Back in the early 80’s, I had the opportunity to sit and chat with a few college basketball scouts.  At one point, the conversation centered on how hard it was for a player to be a walk-on, (an un-recruited player), for a Division 1 basketball team.  Almost unanimously, the scouts noted that most teams would find it difficult to acknowledge that they might had missed a great prospect, and so the walk-on student athlete would find it difficult to find a place on the roster. This is no longer the case however,.  As the money in college sports has exploded, and the number of great athletes has not grown in kind, competition for talent has driven more and more teams to be open to talent from anywhere.   Business is no different.   Competition is increasing.  So to is the speed with which innovation, product development, and strategic decision making needs to occur.   Great leaders will leverage technology and corporate culture to open the pipeline into their organizations, creating greater access to talent, ideas, and opportunity. 

During the fifth century, the bishops of  Constantinople, known as the new Rome and the new Jerusalem, capitol of the Byzantium, took responsibility to crown the new emperor in the coronation ritual for the first time. This practice continued in Europe up to our own time, and was last seen in 1953 when Queen Elizabeth II ascended to the throne of England. She in turn invests each new prime minister.

Now, what on earth do foreign bishops, monarchs and prime ministers have to with business leadership looking to sustain peak performance here and now? Only this: the bishops represent vision and values, the big picture and the long story across time and place; the monarch represents identity and community, the self understanding of the organization (nation); and the prime minister represents strategy in action, meeting the demands of the current situation. And power passes from one to the next, in that order!

This provides a powerful lesson for contemporary leaders. First, start with vision and values, defining and nurturing a rich story that all employees, partners and audiences buy into. Next, manage and maintain their self-understanding and sense of community. And only in that context take strategic action. Without the first two, the latter has no ground to stand on, and no force behind it. This is a recipe for unsustainability.

Here’s the exception that proves the rule: Napoleon Bonaparte, always seeking radical change, ascribed to the great-man-alone theory, presuming to impose and imprint his will on all comers. No bishops for him, Napoleon crowned himself, becoming the emperor after having at one time gladly settled for the title “first citizen.”  He died in exile, a prisoner on a remote island 2000 km away.

Fifth century Byzantium is a long time ago and a long way away. But until it fell in 1453 to the Ottoman Turks, the “new Romans” held it together in a way that was the envy of the time and a lesson to the ages. They knew how to sustain a civilixation. Until they lost the ability to innovate, but that’s another story.

They taught us this that all masterful leaders and critical teams must make real: Vision & Values > Identity & Community > Strategy & Action.

In that order.

I was just reading through the results of the 2010 IBM Global CEO study.  The study interviews roughly 1500 CEOs, section heads, and division leaders from around the globe.  Anyone who has worked with leaders over the past  decade will be familiar with the 3 of the 4 key results.

• Today’s complexity is only expected to rise and more than half of CEOs doubt their ability to manage it. Seventy-nine percent of CEOs anticipate even greater complexity ahead. However, one set of organisations we call them ‘Standouts’ has turned increased complexity into financial advantage over the past five years.
• Creativity is the most important leadership quality, according to CEOs. Standouts practice and encourage experimentation and innovation throughout their organisations. Creative leaders expect to make deeper business model changes to realise their strategies. To succeed, they take more calculated risks, find new ideas and keep innovating in how they lead and communicate.
• The most successful organisations co-create products and services with customers, and integrate customers into core processes. They are adopting new channels to engage and stay in tune with customers. By drawing more insight from the available data, successful CEOs make customer intimacy their number one priority.
• Better performers manage complexity on behalf of their organisations, customers and partners. They do so by simplifying operations and products, and increasing dexterity to change the way they work, access resources and enter markets around the world. Compared to other CEOs, dexterous leaders expect 20 percent more future revenue to come from new sources.

Discussions of increasing complexity, new product creation, and integrating customer needs have been happening for most of the last decade.  What struck me as new however was the recognition on part of business leaders that creativity may prove to be the most important leadership quality.   Leaders around the globe are recognizing that winners in a knowledge based economy will themselves think creatively, and more importantly, will be organizing their businesses to leverage creativity at all levels.