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There are two sides to leadership: the constructive side and the destructive side. Both are evident in organizations, but only one seems to get all the attention. Implicit in contemporary approaches to leadership, particularly the leadership of change, is the assumption that leaders are a constructive force that have a positive impact on organization and employee Continue reading The Two Sides of Leadership  For the past several months, I have been conducting research into the leadership of change to learn more about the role leadership plays in successful change. Frankly, I have been disappointed in what I have found. More accurately, I have been disappointed in what I haven’t found – an access to leadership. The primary focus of Continue reading Where Is the Access to Leadership? I believe a cornerstone of personal leadership effectiveness is operating with integrity. Michael Jensen, the Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus, at Harvard Business School contends that without integrity, nothing works. Jensen defines integrity as honoring your word, which means that (1) you keep your word, and (2) just as soon as you Continue reading Where Do You Keep Your Word after You Give It? When it comes to the leadership of change, which is more important, leadership style or following the “right” steps for implementation? For the past several months, I have been conducting research into the leadership of change. My interest is in finding out what differentiates effective leading of change from ineffective. Although my research is far from Continue reading Leadership of Change: Do Steps Trump Style? MBA students frequently tell me they would be far more effective if only they had authority over certain people. Unfortunately, years of research, such as a forthcoming study in Organization Science, indicates that having authority may actually reduce a manager’s effectiveness, not improve it. When managers have authority over resources important to subordinates (e.g., hiring and Continue reading Does Authority Reduce Leader Effectiveness? Contemporary approaches to leadership emphasize the actions and behaviors – the “speaking” – of leaders. But what about their “listening”, why don’t we focus on that as well? In any conversational interaction, such as those between “leader” and “follower”, there is speaking and listening. Someone is talking or engaged in doing things (speaking) and someone is Continue reading Where Is the Listening? One of the more startling statistics in the business world is that approximately 70% of organizational changes fail to produce the results for which they were undertaken. In her book The Last Word on Power, Tracy Goss reports that when interviewed, sixty-two percent (62%) of the managers from companies whose change efforts failed listed resistance Continue reading Do Leaders Cause Resistance? I recently read a study on change leadership in which the authors reported that different types or styles of leadership were effective with different types of organization changes. Although this “situational approach” to leadership is well established in the traditional leadership literature, this is one of the first studies to examine the impact of leader Continue reading What If You Can’t Match Leader and Situation? We all know that whether a particular action is effective or not depends on the situation or circumstance in which it is taken. Giving a group of soldiers an order to fire on unarmed civilians is much different than giving the same order when faced with an armed and attacking enemy. Same order, different context. When Continue reading Context Matters A recent article in The Economist (Mar 26 – Leaders) said that President Obama had shown indecisiveness regarding intervening in Libya on behalf of the “rebels”. Now, I don’t know if Obama was or wasn’t indecisive and this post isn’t about Obama, it’s about personal leadership effectiveness and what exactly it means to be decisive Continue reading What Do You Mean Indecisive? |
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