Leadership

A GROOM used to spend whole days in currycombing and rubbing down his Horse, but at the same time stole his oats and sold them for his own profit. “Alas!” said the Horse, “if you really wish me to be in good condition, you should groom me less, and feed me more.”

This Aesop’s fable describes exactly what happens when someone with poor management skills gets put in charge of an organization. It is easy to create the illusion of care while depriving people of the very things they need to grow and stay strong.

There was an organization that I once worked with where the maintenance department had monthly breakfasts. This involved about 25 employees from the department and was generally handled pretty frugally so the cost per person was fairly low.  Management launched two initiatives. The first was to cut costs and the second was to create a better sense of teamwork in the organization. They did this by cutting the budget for the maintenance department breakfasts and starting monthly team building dinners for the executives.

I don’t know if the team building dinners helped the managers, but I do know that the cost in morale and productivity was much greater than any savings that came by canceling the breakfasts for the maintenance workers.

Great Leadership by Dan is written by Dan McCarthy. Dan work for the University of New Hampshire as the  Director of Executive Development Programs at  Whittemore School of Business and Economics. Dan’s blog is well worth following (atom feed), regularly updated and offers a great perspective on leadership challenges.  Here are some links to interesting entries along with some of my thoughts.

Simple High Performance Model – This is a nice graphic showing the interplay of technical ability and emotional intelligence. I can spot a good quadrant graphic when I instantly start plotting everyone I have every worked with on it. Take a look at it.  Where do your co-workers fall?  More importantly, what point would represent you?

10 Mistakes Every Leader Should Make (and learn from) before they Die – This post could probably make a great tool to interview leaders. Go through the list and ask the prospect to identify when they made that particular mistake and what they learned from it. Experienced leaders will probably have made every mistake at least once and can articulate the consequences and what they learned from the experience.

“Fun” At Work – In this post, Dan looks at some of the things that leaders and managers do to try to create a “fun” workplace and concludes that most of them are simply wasted. He suggests that becoming a genuine, happy person yourself will do more to create a happy working environment than the long list of efforts most of us have experienced. I agree in principle, but think it is important to not simply discount everything on the list, just because they have been used by managers attempting to fake a “fun” environment. For example, he mentions that putting in a air hockey table is a waste of time and makes people feel like slackers while others work.  I can see that happening, but it can also be used carefully. Here is a story from my experience.

I was working as the manager of an IT department with about 11 employees. Over the years we developed a pretty fun work environment. This was something I intentionally tried to foster, but of course much of it was from having a group of people who were fun loving to start with. After a particularly busy week finishing up a large project, I asked the maintenance department to move a hockey table into the center of our shared office space, so when everyone came in that morning, there was this hockey table sitting there. I announced that we were going to have an air hockey tournament at lunch. Office conversation that morning centered around boasting and talking “smack” to each other.  We spent about an hour working through our brackets to find the air hockey champion.

Air Hockey In The Office

In that situation, I think the air hockey table was actually helpful in creating a fun work environment. Here is why:

1. It was genuinely fun and came at the end of a bunch of very long hours and recognized everyone’s hard work with an hour of diversion.
2. It was surprising and interesting. No one else in the department knew what was going on. Everyone who came in asked “What is going on?”
3. It helped my team interact outside of the stress and conflict of the normal work process.

There are five leadership traits that have been identified as the most important thing followers look for in accessing a leader. These traits are:

1. Honesty
2. Forward-looking
3. Intelligence
4. Competence
5. Inspiring

Donald Clark has put together a very detailed leadership guide called The Art and Science of Leadership. It is designed to be used as a curriculum for a leadership training course and includes exercises, self-assessments and other activities along with the core content. Best of all, you can use it freely as long as you aren’t selling it and give proper credit.

The curriculum is an excellent resource for self-study. While most of the content is text, there are a number of helpful images, self-assessments and even some videos. Together this makes for an ideal learning experience with enough variation to keep learners engaged.

The site also provides an excellent foundation to use in training.  It is pretty indepth and detailed, so you’ll probably want to customize it for your organization by selecting the modules and activities that are most relevant to the particular needs of your class.

The Art and Science of Leadership is probably one of the best free leadership resources available on the Internet today and well worth spending some time studying. Also check out Don’s list of leadership links.