Global Leadership Conundrums

 Recently attending the Global Leadership Summit, I was wishing for a big of debate or rebuttal talks. Sometimes speakers gave us a formula for leadership success that contradicts others' talks in previous years or were counter to other good advice.

Craig Groeschel started out with a leadership formula: (Consistency + Faithfulness)xTime = Lasting Impact. And his talk mostly focused on some "atomic habits" (James Clear's work). In 2023, Groeschel gave us Consistency + Empathy + Transparency = Trust. That's a lot of work for consistency. However, in business, while consistency is good, it's in danger of keeping us in an unsuccessful rut. What if innovation is needed? What if breaking a routine leads to new insights, new efficiencies, captures new markets? We shouldn't rest on our laurels--as some other speakers this year also encouraged--and we should: 

  • Evaluate whether some practices are “waste” (Lean/Six Sigma)

 • Evaluate whether some practices are medium gear performance [James Hewitt categorized some practices as low gear (rest, recuperate), medium gear (emails, mtgs) or high gear (deliberate focus, productivity)]

• Strategize reduction of extraneous efforts, instead of prioritizing or improving non-mission-critical efforts. For example, move daily actions to weekly/weekly to monthly and so on for "nice" but not necessary efforts to create space for focusing on the important things. One well-known company has 184 items on a "dashboard" including how many people interact with the dashboard! Too many! (Juliet Funt's Reductive Mindset)
• Ensure that we are really helping team members make progress on a project/performance improvement, or creating "busy work". High motivation happens when people are making forward progress, while managers fail to recognize this aspect (Teresa Amabile's "Progress Principle")

Similarly, Groeschel asserted that consistency keeps the heat going till 210 deg turns into 212 and boiling point success. But what if your efforts remain at "simmer." How do you determine a necessary ending (Dr. Henry Cloud)? There are times to quit when the rut is only getting deeper. 

Tasha Eurich talked about going beyond resilience and what factors take us forward, and not stopping at "bouncing back." Most people bounce back. Only a few get better after a disaster. We have a resilience ceiling. But we can call on confidence, making choices and strong connections to thrive. She mentioned how there's so much "grit gaslighting" and I wanted to have Angela Duckworth (author of "Grit") come out in rebuttal. 

John Maxwell was touted as doing a multitude of great things. My rebuttal is that if we change the vector of someone's life, we have done a great thing for that person and the generations to follow. And we won't know the total impact of one word of encouragement, one challenge, one hand-up, one promotion, one bit of support in one person's life until we get to heaven.

We are all capable of great leadership things if we serve and love one another. 

 

Leadership Problems: Ten Toughest?

 In a soon-to-be published book, Ten Toughest Leadership Problems, Dr. Best provides a good framework for analyzing common leadership problems. Though the list is not extensive, many other problems can be categorized with the ten on which she expounds here: personal effectiveness, decision-making, influence, engagement, etc. The framework she lays out is similar to others like OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act), PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) and other variants, Kepner Tregoe techniques and so on. The author uses SOLVE (S = State the problem…). The framework can be applied to many situations, especially if they follow Dr. Best’s practice of asking open-ended questions about it.

The chapter on Influence may be worth the price of the book alone. How much are we trying to influence others based on our preferred style or ways we want others to approach us?

While I found many of the chapters helpful, I found them to be limited in scope. Decision-making, for example, has other elements and perhaps should start with the question: “Do I even need to make this decision or to whom can I delegate it?” Often we catch ourselves in the trap of telling and selling the decision, which limits engagement, instead of consulting and joining others to provide more input and ownership in the decision. While she talks about discerning the need for quick decisions or the possibility of slowing it down, she refrains from putting that choice in terms of risk (capital, social, competitive, environmental, etc.). Likewise, she deals with trust in another chapter, but not in the engagement chapter and has ignored some other research noting other critical elements: trust, making progress/performance improvements, more autonomy for two. However, though she has not encompassed all the aspects of the ten leadership issues, the author does encourage more learning (E = Elevate your learning).

Too many times, as she has observed, leaders are left to chart their own development path, perhaps with a book here and there, a seminar every year or five, and so on. Dr. Best’s book is practical and provides ongoing guidance with her framework for dealing with leadership problems.

I’m appreciative for the publisher providing an advanced copy.