LEARNING LINKS
Closing the Leadership Gap
by Peter Blyde and Philip Ramsey

Have you ever wished that your organization had better leadership? The leadership shortage that most of us perceive in our companies today may be the result of our confusion about the nature of leadership itself. Many executives, for instance, tacitly sense what leadership is but have difficulty defining it and distinguishing it from management. Their uncertainty often leads them to invest in training programs that don't produce the results they want.

To surmount this leadership development crisis, we must clarify our mental models regarding leadership by looking at the relationship between leaders and their followers. When a follower responds to a leader's actions, or does something to stir the leader to act, he or she is also "doing leadership." From this perspective, we strengthen leadership by increasing the capacity of both leaders and followers to form healthy relationships that support a shared vision.

Building leadership capacity also requires that we recognize the ways in which management and leadership are interdependent, complementary, and equally valuable. Managers aim at producing predictability and order; leaders seek to produce change. Most organizations today require both functions. Effective management development, therefore, helps managers learn skills and techniques for dealing with organizational complexity; effective leadership development focuses on giving leaders the tools to sustain successful relationships by combining action with reflection and exploring values, motives, and assumptions. Thus, from a relationship view, whether you are in a position of influence or not, you can work to strengthen leadership skills that benefit your organization.

Read the complete article online or see The Systems Thinker, Vol. 9, No. 8 (October 1998).

Unlike most corporate executives, Iva Wilson is not afraid to say the "f" word—failure, that is. "It may be a cliché," she says, "but there's no success without mistakes. Unfortunately in organizations, we don't spend enough time publicly examining the unexpected results of our decisions—both positive and negative." Without that analysis, we can't learn from experience and are doomed to repeat the same errors time and again.

Wilson is the coauthor of The Power of Collaborative Leadership (Butterworth-Heinemann, 2000), president of Gyricon Media, Inc., and a partner in the Coaching Collaborative. In the interest of helping other leaders learn from her experiences, she openly discusses her efforts in the mid-1980s to salvage Philips Display Components (PDC), a major consumer electronics company that was bleeding red ink. As part of the process to turn the company around, Wilson sought to move the organization toward a collaborative style of leadership by implementing the principles and practices of organizational learning, originally introduced in Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline (Currency/Doubleday, 1990).

Her tenure at PDC was marked by roaring successes—quality improved, sales increased, and the company became profitable for the first time in five years—as well as surprising disappointments—worker satisfaction temporarily dropped, tensions with the parent company rose, and the unionized workforce engaged in a week-long strike during labor negotiations. By reflecting on what went right and wrong during her 10 years as president—especially around her initiative to transform the corporate environment—she has identified some lessons for other organizations interested in including distributed forms of leadership, decision-making, and accountability in their ways of doing business.
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Iva Wilson will be a presenter at this year's Pegasus conference, Leading in a Complex World: Systems Thinking in Action®. Learn more about the conference. Learn more about books and resources by Iva Wilson by reading Pegasus Highlights in the right column.

What is at the core of successful leadership? According to corporate CEO and author Christopher Hoenig, courage and integrity. Courage means bravely facing difficult situations, regardless of the risk. Integrity means doing what you think is right, despite your doubts. Fortunately, these characteristics are primarily learned, not innate; we can choose to cultivate them. How do we do so? Through practice, first on a small scale in private, and then in increasingly larger situations more publicly. Over time, our capability and inner resources will grow and serve us in crucial moments.

The biggest challenge in this process is learning how to use fear and doubt to our advantage. Fear can either paralyze innovation or provide self-awareness and information. Doubt can either lead to corruption and negligence or foster objectivity and learning. To build courage and integrity, we must capitalize on the motivating aspects of fear while moving beyond the paralyzing ones; come to rely on—and to serve—others; and know when discretion is more appropriate than direct confrontation. We must also accept the role of doubt, which lies at the core of reliable knowledge; articulate and uphold what we believe in; take the high road whenever possible; and continually work to improve ourselves.

Hoenig believes that a leader with courage and integrity consistently does the right things, when they need to be done. From this perspective, in the current global drive for infinite innovation and flexibility in the face of change, it behooves us to build enormous reserves of courage and integrity—we never know when we'll need them.
—KS

Source: Christopher Hoenig, "Brave Hearts," CIO Magazine, November 1, 2000