If you really want to become a faster leader, you have to create what I think of as a leadership ecosystem around you. Faster leaders rely upon a strong supporting cast, efficient and effective systems, a well-mapped-out strategy, and organizational structures that are clean and non-hierarchical. The paradox is that it takes time, energy, and patience. You don’t build a leadership ecosystem by just flipping a switch or wishing for its existence—you have to put the work in. The way I look at it, there really is no way to shortcut the process. You have to put in the investment before you can savor the rewards. If you are impatient or need instant feedback and gratification, you will be challenged. While our culture emphasizes the immediate more and more, faster leaders understand that the best investments take time to realize their gains
An effective ecosystem may take months or years to build. It takes time to assemble the right building blocks and to put them in the right order or sequence. It takes time for your ecosystem to get up and running efficiently. It takes time to find the right people. Like an F-14 Tomcat pilot, it takes hours of practice and time spent in the simulator to get really good. You can’t become a faster leader by yourself.
The real challenge for leaders is to budget the time and exercise the discipline to build an ecosystem in environments where time is at a premium. The pace of work makes building an ecosystem even more challenging. Many leaders are under the gun and feel they simply don’t have the time to invest. Organizations make it worse by continually asking us to do more and treating everything as urgent and important. Building a leadership ecosystem has to become a personal priority or it won’t happen. If you invest wisely, you will become a faster leader.
]]>In-Depth Interviews with America’s Top Leadership Experts
SEVIERVILLE, TENNESSEE— Dr. Arlen Burger, keynote speaker and author, has been selected from a nationwide search to be featured in Leadership: Helping Others to Succeed; a highly successful book series from Tennessee-based Insight Publishing. The book features best-selling authors Dr. George Bennis, Rep. Pat Schroeder, and Senator George Mitchell.
Dr. Arlen Burger, Bennis, and Mitchell, are joined by other well known authors and speakers, each offering time-tested strategies for success in frank and intimate interviews.
Dr. Arlen Burger, CEO of Leadership Coaching, has been an advisor and coach to executives and leaders for over 20 years. He is well known and respected for his work with CEOs, Board of Directors and other Senior Managers. He specializes in working with leaders who have to manage complex, fast-paced and demanding businesses. Understanding that executives have more demands on their time than they can typically address, he coaches leaders to maintain a rigorous focus on critical path variables that can mean the difference between business success and failure.
For more information on Dr. Arlen Burger and to pre-order your copy of Leadership: Helping Others to Succeed, contact: Dr. Arlen Burger via email at arlen@leadershipc.com. Visit his website www.leadershipcode.com or phone him directly at 408-483-1800
]]>Step 1: Examine your personal bias and understand the consequences of both approaches. Do you consistently fall on the side of management and control, or do you prefer the coaching approach? Do you have the temperament to be a coach (patient and understanding), or do you have a strong appetite for taking action? Avoid the tendency to answer this question in terms of how you like to think of yourself and answer the question as you actually behave. Coaching is getting a lot of positive press in the management literature and management sometimes gets a bad rap. Don’t let the court of public opinion in this area sway your self-assessment. If necessary, monitor your behavior over a period of time so that you can get a better sense of what side of the scale you end up on.
As you self-assess it is important that you understand the pros and cons of both approaches. Management is quicker but tends to create a state of dependency. If you tell someone to do something and then tell them how to do it, you have effectively retained ownership for the issue. The person may do what you tell them, but by over specifying how you want it done you effectively get compliance. Compliance rapidly breaks down when pressure or stress is applied. And many a leader has been negatively impacted by mistaking compliance for commitment.
While coaching improves the skills of people around you it takes more time. By treating everything as a coaching situation you can fail to act decisively when the situation demands it. Your team can come to see you as a leader who is unwilling or unable to take decisive action or resolve disagreement efficiently.
To be a truly effective faster leader, you will have to develop proficiency in both approaches and be able to deploy either approach quickly.
Step 2: Understand the person you are dealing with. Some people are not coachable-at least by you. They might not see you as credible or be open to your input. Or they may simply be resistant to change or feedback. Resistance slows you down. People vary in their appetite for learning. Individuals who are receptive to feedback and seek out opportunities to get better and improve are more favorable coaching candidates. In the accelerating world we live in, receptivity to coaching is an important attribute in your team members. It allows you to coach faster.
While all of your team members have value- some have more value than others. Because of their position in the work food chain or the value of their skills, some team members are more important than others. Everyone is not equal in terms of their impact. While you don’t necessarily want to broadcast this fact at a high level, you want to remember it when making a coach/manage decision. Be sure to cultivate your high value team members.
Another important variable to consider when making the decision is the size of the skill gap or discrepancy you are dealing with. Think of it as the distance between the actual and the desired behavior. If the individual is performing at a fairly basic level and the goal is to get them to perform at higher level you will need to budget more coaching time. Where the gap is small, you are more able to do surgical coaching. Also think also about the complexity of the skill or behavior. Complex behaviors are more challenging to coach and take longer to manifest.
Finally, remember this important point. The biggest mistake a leader can make is spending large amounts of time coaching a poor performer and neglecting a top performer. This is exactly the opposite of what it should be. Don’t let yourself get bogged down in a protracted coaching scenario with someone who is a low performer. These situations have a real tendency to end up being a time management disaster. We often make the mistake of neglecting our top performers because of their performance. Coach your high performers and manage your low performers.
Step 3: Assess the situation. Sometimes the urgency of the situation demands quick action. For example, a crisis generally requires quick and decisive action by the leader to prevent events from spiraling out of control. You don’t have a lot of time to make decisions and the consequences can be quite significant. At other times, the pace of events allows you to take a more measured approach. Every situation has its own set of unique demands. When making the decision to coach/manage be sure to evaluate the environment for level of urgency.
The expectations of others is another variable to consider when assessing the environment. Management may have expectations that you personally manage a situation versus you coaching someone else on how to handle it. They may expect you to be personally involved at a high level and to take control of the situation.
Think of the environment as your runway. Sometimes you have a long runway and other times you don’t. Will you be able to get the plane in the air before you run out of runway? While you might be able to coach someone to a desired skill level if you had infinite time-you don’t. You don’t determine the length of runway you have. The environment does.
Here is a pre-flight decision checklist you can use to speed your decision making: