Tag Archives: Leadership

The Three Altitudes of Leadership

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by Ian C. Woodward

Leaders must cultivate the seamless ability to mix forward-vision thinking, tactical execution and self-awareness – across the altitudes of leadership.

High altitudes hold a special place in the history of human achievement. We remember Sir Edmund Hillary and Nepalese sherpa, Tenzing Norgay as the first climbers to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Other altitude pioneers include Russian cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, the first human to fly in outer space, and Neil Armstrong, the first person on the moon. More recently, in 2012, Austrian Felix Baumgartner skydived from a capsule at 127,000 feet.

In the world of leadership, altitudes are significant, too. However, the concern is much less about how high a leader can go, than about how he or she can seamlessly move between three distinct altitudes of leadership thinking.

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Corporate Heaven: The ‘Authentizotic’ Organisation

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by  Manfred Kets de Vries

How to create an organisation where people find meaning in, and are captivated by, their work.

The CEO of Wickrott Corporation was known as a suspicious control freak. Symptomatic of his leadership style were the numerous “internal consultants” hired to keep him informed of the goings-on in the organisation. Staff described their work environment as a cutthroat, Darwinian “soup”. Information was power; secrecy was the norm; transparency and teamwork were conspicuous by their absence. To add to the company’s paranoid culture, the CEO demanded pre-signed resignation letters from all of his senior executives so that he could fire them on the spot if he felt that they had transgressed. At meetings, he frequently subjected them to abusive, even profane tirades. During these humiliating sessions, he made it quite clear that the firm owed every bit of its success to him alone.

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In search of a better stretch target

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By Ryan Davies, Hugues Lavandier, and Ken Schwartz

Aggressive goals can dramatically improve a company’s performance. But unachievable goals can do more harm than good. Here’s how to stretch without breaking.

The urge to improve is innate in most companies, where better service, stronger performance, and faster operations are inextricably tied to earnings, bonuses, and shareholder returns. The impetus is so strong, in fact, that the practice of setting stretch targets for a company’s performance has become emblematic for the grit and aggressiveness expected of a modern executive. Managers take pride in seeking to achieve the unthinkable.

Sometimes they succeed, surprising even themselves with how much stretch targets can improve performance. But there are limits to how far they can push. The wrong metrics can sap motivation and undermine performance.1 Targets set along one metric without regard for the effect on performance elsewhere can destroy value. And broad-based aggregate measures of profit margin, operating profit, and earnings per share are only loosely linked to valuation. One CFO recently admitted to us that his multibillion-dollar global company would hit its quarterly goals for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA), but only at the cost of reducing its operating cash flow. Signs of unhealthy stretch targets can be quite clear—and any of them can lead to poor behaviors, distracting senior managers and having no impact on value.

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Four pathways to authentic leadership

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By Peter Himmelman

I’m not at all pleased to report this, but even the good ol’ word leadership has become something of a buzzword — a term people bandy about without considering its deeper implications. It’s the same thing that’s happened with words like creativity, innovation and disruption.

In an attempt to service the ever-increasing demand for web content, the pace of creating content has also increased. Sadly, this is all too often accompanied by a decrease in serious analysis. To attract as many readers as possible to their sites marketers tend to overuse certain words that emerge as more eye-catching than others. The trouble is those words get used so often they begin to lose their inherent meaning. This is a problem for both society and individuals when it happens with words that deserve more, rather than less of our attention. To help refocus, here are four pathways to evincing more authentic… (and here comes the buzzword again) —leadership.

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Servant leadership: Who is ultimately responsible for your people’s success?

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By Ronald M. Allen

The emotional high of going to work and being among a group of productive associates, fellow employees with a common goal and supported by an understood incentive, moves people to act like no other force.

The key elements are that the employees feel part of something bigger than themselves. They have a sense of purpose. They are supported by the correct incentives to put forth their best efforts. They come each and every day to give so that the team will receive the benefit of their contribution and be recognized.

When a leader executes accordingly, this show of confidence in one’s fellow employees speaks to the security of the leader and the trust they show in their employees. But before you can learn how to improve your own leadership, you must understand what qualities make up a servant leader.

Here are some of the characteristics of successful servant leaders:

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