• Leadership is an Art
• Results Based Leadership
• The Performance Challenge

Results-Based Leadership

by Dave Ulrich, Jack Zenger, Norm Smallwood

In Results Based Leadership, Ulrich, Zenger and Smallwood say that it is faddish to think of leaders as people who master competencies and emanate character. While agreeing with this perspective, they believe that it falls short of assuring that leaders lead. The authors' position is that leaders do much more than demonstrate attributes. Effective leaders get results.

Ultimately, they say, all leadership development is self-development, and the most powerful self-development takes place on the job. To become a results-based leader, they recommend focus on the following fourteen points:

1. Begin with an absolute focus on results
2. Take complete and personal responsibility for your group's results.
3. Clearly and specifically communicate expectations and targets to the people in your group.
4. Determine what you need to do personally to improve your results.
5. Use results as the litmus test for continuing or implementing leadership practice.
6. Engage in developmental activities and opportunities that will help you produce better results.
7. Know and use every group member's capabilities to the fullest and provide everyone with appropriate developmental opportunities.
8. Experiment and innovate in every realm under our influence, looking constantly for new ways to improve performance.
9. Measure the right standards and increase the rigor with which you measure them.
10. Constantly take action; results won't improve without it.
11. Increase the pace or tempo of your group.
12. Seek feedback from others in the organization about ways you and your group can improve your outcomes.
13. Ensure that your subordinates and colleagues perceive that your motivation for being a leader is the achievement of positive results, not personal gain.
14. Model the methods and strive for the results you want your group to use and attain.

The Performance Challenge

Jerry W. Gilley; Nathaniel W. Boughton; Ann Maycunich

A different perspective from Ulrich, Zenger and Smallwood is provided in the book 'The Performance Challenge'.

Gilley, Boughton and Maycunich make the case that when examining a leader's impact on an organization's ability to address performance, the following four critical competencies surface and that these competencies help leaders transform traditional, short term-oriented organizations into developmental organizations.

Critical Reflective Skills

The ability to understand one's values and beliefs, and to know why one behaves in a particular manner. Critically reflective leaders, know when changes are consistent with their guiding principles and when they are not.

Without this self-awareness competency, leaders have difficulty motivating employees, as they are perceived as lacking personal integrity.

Strategic Thinking Skills

Strategic thinking is a conceptual-level activity requiring leaders to establish organizational priorities. In this way, effective leaders create an organizational vision while accounting for the perceptions of others.

Effective leaders hold a clear vision of the future and use their objectivity to remain practically focused while understanding the impact of employees' perceptions on decision making.

Interpersonal Skills

Effective leaders possess strong interpersonal skills that allow them to motivate employees and achieve desired results. To demonstrate interpersonal skills, one must successfully perform four supportive competencies: team building, relationship building, communication skills, and empathy.

Performance-enhancing Skills

Performance enhancers improve organizational results by improving the individual performance of each and every employee. While it is important to increase the performance and productivity of employees, it must be done while maintaining their dignity and respect.

Furthermore, performance improvement efforts must be linked to the organization's strategic business goals and objectives in order to positively impact the bottom line.

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• Are your followers reaching their potential?
• Are they learning? Serving?
• Do they achieve the required results?
• Do they change with grace? Manage conflict?

• Integrity,
• Building and nurturing relationships and
• Community building.

• assets and legacy,
• momentum and effectiveness,
• civility and values.

• financial health and the relationships and reputation that enable the continuity of that financial health;
• the appropriate services, products, tools and equipment that people in the organization need in order to be accountable;
• the institutional value system that leads to the principles and standards that guide the practices of the people in the organization;
• future leadership - to identify, develop and nurture future leaders;
• a sense of quality in the institution
• an organization that is open to influence and to change.

1. enabling others to reach their potential - both personal potential and organizational potential.
2. encouraging roving leadership.

Participative Management

Participative management is a central tenet of De Pree's approach to leadership as he believes it is the most effective contemporary management process. However, he strongly makes the point that you can't institute participative management by reading about theory in a few journals.

It begins with a belief in the potential of people. He points out that participative management without a belief in that potential and without convictions about the gifts people bring to the organization is a contradiction in terms. Participative management arises out of the heart and out of a personal philosophy about people. In this management process, everyone has the right and the duty to influence decision making and to understand the results and it guarantees that decisions will not be arbitrary, secret or closed to questioning.

However it is not democratic and having a say differs from having a vote. Healthy relationships among the members of the group are key and one of the tasks of leadership is to foster this environment.

Fostering the Environment

De Pree proposes a five step process for fostering this relationship centric environment:

1. Respect people - understand the diversity of their gifts and strengths
2. Understand that what we believe precedes policy and practice - in terms of corporate and personal value systems
3. Agree on the rights of work - to be needed, to be involved, to have a covenantal relationship, to affect our destiny, to be accountable, to make a commitment
4. Understand the respective role and relationship of contractual agreements and covenants - eg expectations, objectives, compensation, working conditions, etc apply to contractual; covenantal enable participation to be practiced and inclusive groups to be formed
5. Understand that relationships count more than structure

Eight Essential Rights

De Pree makes the point that the subject of effectiveness and productivity are too often considered only from the manager's point of view. The perspective of the ones who are supposed to produce this effectiveness and productivity must also be understood. He outlines eight essential rights that need to be honoured if you want to maximize effectiveness:

1. The right to be needed
2. The right to be involved
3. The right to a covenantal relationship
4. The right to understand
5. The right to affect one's own destiny
6. The right to be accountable
7. The right to appeal
8. The right to make a commitment

Many leaders might maintain that their employees have these rights by default because they can think of instances where their employees have or receive these things. This is deceptive thinking, however. Leaders also need to think how often these rights are violated and to know whether or not their employees believe that they have these rights.

Simple in Concept, Complex in Actualization

The concept of eight essential rights, like many others in this book, can be gliblyglossed over as self-evident. However, if you take the time to truly consider how you would bring this concept to life and embed it throughout your organization, the notion of 'theory being easier than reality' will probably spring to mind.

For example, De Pree points out that one of the key inhibitors to the right to commitment in corporations today occurs when, in the perception of those who follow, the leadership is not rational. And it's not every manager who spends a great deal of time worrying about whether or not his/her employees consider their demands or actions rational.

Roving Leadership

De Pree believes that participative management leads to the day-to-day expression of a process he calls 'roving leadership'. More than simple initiative, roving leadership is exhibited by those individuals who, enabled by their environment, are willing and able to assume positions of leadership in order to accomplish goals that appear before them.

They don't refer things up a chain of command and wait for direction. They see what needs to be done, envision how to accomplish it and then rally people around them to do it. This behaviour flows from a participative management environment because people have the opportunity and responsibility to have a say in their job and to have influence over the management of organizational resources based on their own competence and their willingness to accept problem ownership.

Central to Distributed Leadership

Leadership is an Art is a small but comprehensive work that all leaders should read and think on carefully. Like many great truths that appear deceptively simple on the surface but difficult to actualize, De Pree's principles require reflection and dedication to implement. But if you want to accomplish the goal of leadership distributed throughout your organization and to the lowest levels of your organization, it will be worth the effort.

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