Leadership Advice

"...a key challenge to an employee rising up the organizational ranks is to find the proper balance between managment and leadership. 

Management is intrinsically result-oriented. Managers develop work schedules, set goals and delegate responsibility. They are there to answer questions and to assist employees in completing their tasks. Their orientation is tactical and geared to solving problems...

Leadership, on the other hand, is more process-oriented. Just as important as meeting deadlines is how the group gets there. If a bottom-line goal is achieved without involving and developing the entire team, the organization will not be prepared to meet future challenges and changing circumstances.

.... A connected and aligned team is one that is constantly learning, and thus better able to adapt to unforeseen changes. While managers are more likely to be answering questions, a great leader routinely asks them. Their orientation is strategic rather than tactical, with an emphasis not so much on solving problems as on generating possibilities.

Positive feedback is better for novices. Negative, for experts.

After years of debate, people still confuse these ideas - at their peril.

Failure is inevitable, so the key to success is to be good at learning from it. The ability to capitalize on hard-won experience is a hallmark of the greatest organizations — the ones that are most adept at turning knowledge into action, that are best at developing and implementing creative ideas, that engage in evidence-based (rather than faith- or fear-based) management, and that are populated with the best bosses.

Failure instructs. In fact, there is no learning without failure — and this includes failing at dangerous things like surgery and flying planes. Discovery of the moves that work well is always accompanied by discovery of moves that don't.

Most managers struggle against the flow of overly complex structures and systems and are often frustrated by an invisible force that undermines their attempts to affect positive change. Their instincts tell them that the organization’s culture and people are preventing them from getting the results they want, but “culture” remains one of the least understood aspects of organizational life. Organizational culture often acts like an Invisible Bureaucracy™ that frustrates and undermines effective business performance

Experts are among the least successful predictors in times of massive uncertainty. They tend to think they know more than they actually do and therefore exhibit more confidence than is warranted.

The best decision-makers (i.e. leaders) in times of uncertainty are people with some humility--who are aware of the limits of their knowledge.  

Goals have counterproductive side effects. There's a better way to hold yourself accountable.

There are many background similarities between Ken Lay, former CEO of Enron, and Jim Owens, former CEO of Caterpillar Inc, but how they handled mistakes was quite different. Owens achieved numerous successes in large part by learning from his own mistakes as well as the mistakes of others, In 2001 Lay attempted to hide his mistakes and those of others and as a consequence went from the top of the charts to ending as one of the most catastrophically flawed leaders in US business history.

So why is it that we don't we embrace challenges and become accepting of mistakes, learning from them and ultimately growing from them? And if learning from mistakes has so much value, why is it taboo to even talk about mistakes in the context of business and leadership? The answers aren't hard to find.