by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development
This summary note, based on recent conversations with coaching clients, is useful for any business owner who has grown beyond finding and fixing and is ready for the next stage of development.
Strategic Leadership
Developing people is your primary work product.
- Empowering others by holding a space that calls forth excellent performance
- Being open to & on the lookout for ways the strategic leader is limiting other people’s development, e.g. rescuing and intervening.
- Remember to share credit and responsibility.
Expecting relevant, actionable reports rather than chasing answers
- Training and then trusting your people to report also supports their development, i.e., learning which events, changes, and data matter to leadership
- Makes visible who is up for responsibility–or not
Standing in the future
- Vision.
- Strategy
- Opportunities.
- Structures.
- Positioning.
The key is, more and more, stepping out of operations, perhaps by putting someone else in charge of day-to-day, even month-to-month operations.
by Tony Mayo | Communication, Conversation, & Confrontation, For Business Owners, For Salespeople, Leadership Development, Quotes and Aphorisms, Sales Techniques, Team Manager Skills
Everyone’s favorite radio station is WII-FM
What’s
In
It –
For
Me
Broadcast on their frequency and they’ll tune in.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development, Quotes and Aphorisms
I have just read this and I want to share it with all of you as it describes the promise of who we are as human beings trying to discover identities for ourselves.
A few years ago in the Seattle Special Olympics nine people assembled at the start line for the 100m dash. This was an unusual bunch as they were all suffering from mental or physical handicaps. At the sound of the starters gun they all surged forward except one boy who fell on the asphalt, rolled over a few times and started crying.
The other eight up ahead heard the crying and all looked back to see what is happening. Everyone of them turned and ran back to the young boy. A girl with Downs Syndrome bent down and (more…)
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development, Quotes and Aphorisms
When you judge people’s worth only by the results they produce you elevate people whose ends justify the means.
We no longer elevate people of character but people of ruthless results. We are abdicating our right to evaluate character or methods.
The exclusionary rule is a vestige of the character school of public morality. Dirty Harry is the blossom of the anything goes replacement.
Only the modern age’s conviction that man can know only what he makes, that his allegedly higher capacities depend upon making and that he therefore is primarily homo faber and not an animal rationale, brought forth the much older implications of violence inherent in all interpretations of the realm of human affairs as a sphere of making. (p. 228).
We are perhaps the first generation which has become fully aware of the murderous consequences inherent in a line of thought that forces one to admit that all means, provided that they are efficient, are permissible and justified to pursue something defined as an end…
…for to make a statement about ends that do not justify all means is to speak in paradoxes, the definition of an end being precisely the justification of the means and paradoxes always indicate perplexities, they do not solve them and hence are never convincing. As long as we believe that we deal with ends and means in the political realm, we shall not be able to prevent anybody’s using all means to pursue recognized ends. (p. 229).
—Hannah Arendt, 1906-1975, in
The Human Condition
German-born American political scientist and philosopher
See also Gandhi on ends vs. means.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development
There’s this tendency to say to people: “I want you to get good results. But I also want to review you along the way, I want you to tell me how you’re getting those results and I want you to review all these processes and everything else.”
And what that does is, it turns experts into novices. The reason is that most expert knowledge is tacit knowledge. In order for me to permit you to use that passive knowledge, I can’t force you to make extremely explicit exactly what you’re doing.
So I need to be clear about what we’re trying to achieve and I need to share that with you; and then I need to let you go do it, and not impose all this monitoring on you along the way.
–Jeffrey Pfeffer
Stanford University
Strategy & Business 3Q1998
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development
The founder and CEO of Amazon seems to agree with Dan Pink’s famous TED video that incentive compensation plans can be detrimental to creativity, cooperation and–ultimately–companies.
We pay very low cash compensation relative to most companies. We also have no incentive compensation of any kind. And the reason we don’t is because it is detrimental to teamwork.
—Amazon’s Jeff Bezos:
The ultimate disrupter
in Fortune Management
The upside for workers is in Amazon stock. That is quite an incentive, amounting to $20+ billion for Bezos and millions for many individual employees.
by Tony Mayo | For Executive Coaches, Leadership Development
Vision Series: Transformational Leadership from GMU-TV on Vimeo.
Jorge Haddock, Dean, School of Management talks about Transformational Leadership. Change focuses on behavior, whereas transformation focuses on “beingness” or culture. Transformational leadership is about shifting the organizational conversations or interpretations to create different results or outcomes. Organizational culture can become transactional, but transformational leadership creates conversations that generate a culture of relationships, moods, and actions consistent with the desired outcomes. The axiom is that our power to transform our commitments and subsequent actions is directly determined by our ability to engage in powerful conversations – to generate transformation we must generate different conversations. These conversations utilize language, which is most commonly descriptive. However, leaders use language in a generative fashion to declare something with no evidence or authority. Using this type of language, transformational leaders create truly new possibilities.
by Tony Mayo | Leadership Development, Quotes and Aphorisms
Life is mainly froth and bubble.
Two things stand like stone:
Kindness in another’s trouble.
Courage in your own.
—Adam Lindsay Gordon
See also on this blog, Be Kind.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development
A transformational leadership style, one that conveys a sense of trust, meaningfulness, and individually challenges employees, contributes to greater employee well-being*
- Leading by example,
- Contributing to a common goal,
- Intellectual stimulation,
- Positive feedback for good performance,
- Recognizing the needs of others, &
- Resolving conflict
–Christine Jacobs, University of Cologne
in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine
via Transformational Leadership
Has Positive Effects on Employee Well-Being.
*Psychological well-being includes:
-
self-acceptance
-
the establishment of quality ties to other
-
a sense of autonomy in thought and action
-
the ability to manage complex environments to suit personal needs and values
-
the pursuit of meaningful goals and a sense of purpose in life
-
continued growth and development as a person
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, For Executive Coaches, Leadership Development
I have great respect for Dan Gallwey; he is a pioneer of coaching and really gets it. Heard him just yesterday on a video from the 70s or 80s, paraphrasing.
When an employee or competitor fails to deliver what you require, start by inquiring into what he sees as the requirement, what he saw in the performance. Growth comes from seeing the world differently, not from being criticized or corrected.
—Tim Gallwey in a conversation with
John Wooden, Red Auerbach,
George Allen, & Werner Erhard
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