March 2010

Collaboration is now the order of the day, with people inside organizations, their customers, suppliers and even competitors. While widely viewed as beneficial, effective collaboration can be very difficult to achieve. The challenges to effective collaboration become more complex as the number of people and organizations in the collaboration effort increase. Collaborative partnerships, therefore, are the most complex and challenging to manage.Collaborative partnerships are complex relationships that require deliberate formation and maintenance. By focusing on a set of foundational and sustaining elements right from the start, collaborative leadership can get started faster and with less difficulty. Existing collaborators can assess whether they have overlooked any of the elements that might be contributing to current difficulties.

Either way, in new or established collaborations, time is required to build a foundation from  which these elements yield the behaviors and discipline for high performance partnerships and collaborative relationships.

I invite you to take a look at your current experience with collaboration. Take some time to “sit and think” about how things are going, what you could do to improve, and actions that have the best chances for creating impact and improvement.

How are you experiencing collaboration now?

Increasingly, any kind of achievement requires the crossing of boundaries, often bringing improbable partners together for a free exchange of knowledge, skills and resources across disciplines, cultures and organizational units.

Here a some key questions for ponder/

Describe a time when you were inspired by working with a person or a group in a collaboration that utilized everyone’s strengths.

What did you learn about connecting across boundaries?

What were the outcomes?

What behaviors would you expect?

What kinds of organizational systems, norms, or practices would make it possible?

How are your collaborative relationships going. What can we do to improve, enhance, expand them?

We’ve been posting recently about our L3 Leadership Development process and our belief that leadership is really a “state of being”.  Our client work has validated this belief and it has made a genuine difference in how we approach our development and coaching.  Here is a bit more on the subject of the L1 portion, Leading Self or achieving Personal Mastery.

Leadership does not depend on pay or position. It depends on character, integrity, authenticity, and above all, belief in oneself.

Life and work are fundamentally interrelated—human beings not only “work to live” but also, given the right conditions and opportunities, will “live to work.” In other words, how you spend most of your working hours, and create the resources to sustain yourself and your family, can be—ought to be—an activity which expresses your values, gives meaning to your life, and brings you enduring satisfaction.

If you picture “You, Inc.” from a previous post (your personal organization chart), you can see that this organization is headed by your top management team:

Physical Health and Energy

Emotional Intelligence

Values and Beliefs

Areas—that make up your You, Inc. organization’s “natural resources.” If this team isn’t operating effectively, the whole organization suffers from lack of drive and motivation, poor productivity, and insufficient energy.

The five departments reporting to You, Inc.’s top management team are:

Learning

Family

Social

Career

Financial

If any of these departments is operating below par, the organization as a whole won’t operate smoothly or optimally. So, as you can see,  “You, Inc.” shows us how important the different “departments” of life are and illustrates the relationships between them.

Leadership begins with an internal sense of self-confidence, emotional intelligence and balance that brings forth an authentic leadership presence.

We invite your comments and participation in the dialog.

Four Linchpins for Leadership:

They Have Bifocal Vision — True leaders mentally envision a better future for themselves,and for their followers.  They break down this vision into two parts, the execution and strategy required.

They Communicate and Enlist — Leaders who realize that  reaching their  success requires enlisting  those around them and helping the see what you see; you must be open and forthcoming about your motives, be transparent in your communication, and reach out to others in a way that they feel you have truly shared.

They Seize Authority and Take Responsibility — If you never step up, you consign yourself to a career of always following. Leaders stand up for what they envision, and are not afraid to occasionally take center stage.

They Plan and Implement — The gutters of business are littered with the great ideas of those who envision but cannot implement. Self-led people step up, seize the moment, and find ways to get things done.

They Build Succession and Continuity — The key ingredient to progress, to getting ahead, is to leave a foundation behind. Though we need heroic leaders from time to time, to truly thrive we must build self-sustaining approaches to create legacy.

What are you doing with your leadership linchpins?

While I was reading Transforming Your Leadership Culture by John B. McGuire, Gary B. Rhodes from The Center for Creative Leadership, Jossey-Bass, 2009,  the authors wrote, ”The three foundations of personal readiness—time sense, control source, and intentionality—are the keys to advancing your personal readiness for transformation.

“When leaders demonstrate through their decisions and actions willingness to counter traditional assumptions, they create the conditions for others to learn and advance, and they expand the areas of collaborative exploration, learning and development. These people will together pursue multiple right answers and advance collaborative relationships, thereby addressing more complex emergent issues and build readiness together for leadership in the emerging new world order.”  How will you find the time to prepare yourself to be ready for change?  In the past preparing for transformation emerged from an organizational design with timelines, education, resource and support.”

Today’s readiness is based on anticipating, preparing in the moment for changes from hour to hour, day to day, week to week and so on.  Personal readiness for change today has to be a personal leadership state of being.

We need on demand skills for situational leadership and change.

What do you think?

It’s not uncommon for an organization’s senior executives to call themselves the “Leadership Team.” Yet frequently divisional self-interests drive their actions more so than teamwork—a lower-performing model for people at all levels of the enterprise. In contrast, members of high performing leadership teams watch out for each other, share resources and knowledge, trust each other, are brutally honest, embrace healthy conflict, and are committed to / accountable for results, individually and collectively. If this seems too good to be true, you probably have some work to do with your senior executive group. Assess the situation, identify changes that need to be made, and don’t settle for less. Doing so will increase the likelihood that your executives will achieve sustainable results, and set a most engaging example for everyone in the organization.

• Taking a hard look at your leadership “team”—and considering the elements described above, to what extent is your group operating as a high-performing team?
• If the self-interests of your executives tend to override the greater good of the leadership team as a whole, what factors are contributing to that pattern?
• Determine what help you may need to assess more thoroughly the leverage-able strengths, and tackle the key development areas of your leaders. Measure progress, and build mutual accountability into the process.

The foundational elements of our L3 Leadership model includes, authenticity, integrity and balance.This post explores dimension of authentic leadership.

This list of qualities is adapted from Michael Hyatt’s work.

Authentic leaders have insight. Sometimes we refer to this as vision, but that usually has exclusive reference to the future. While leaders must have vision, they need more. They need wisdom and discernment. They need to be able to look at complex situations, gain clarity, and determine a course of action.

Authentic leaders demonstrate initiative. They go first. They don’t sit on the sidelines. They don’t ask others to do what they are unwilling to do themselves.

Authentic leaders exert influence. It’s no coincidence that influence and influenza (the flu) come from the same root word. Real leaders are contagious. People “catch” what they have. People are drawn to their vision and their values. They are able to gather a following and move people to act. To change metaphors, they are like human wave pools, creating a ripple effect wherever they go.

Authentic leaders have impact. At the end of the day, leaders make a difference. The world is changed because of their leadership. They are able to create real and lasting change. Unless something has shifted, they aren’t leaders. They are only entertainers. There is a big difference. The measure of leadership cannot be found in the leader; it is found in the impact the leader has on his or her followers.

Authentic leaders exercise integrity. Not every leader is benevolent. Adolf Hitler was a leader, as was Josef Stalin. They had insight, initiative, influence, and impact. Yet their lives were not integrated with the highest values. Integrity—or the lack thereof—ultimately determines the quality of a person’s impact. In a sense, this is the foundation of authentic leadership.

No leader achieves anything of true, lasting value alone.

Whatever great things you aim to accomplish, whatever changes you’re determined to drive, you need others to help you make it happen: others who can serve on your Personal Board of Advisors. Therefore, building great team of personal advisors ought to be a high priority when it comes to Total Life Leadership. Let’s look at the make up of this team of advisors.  Your team should include advisors in eight key areas of work and life. These include Physical Health, Emotional Intelligence, Spiritual/Values, Family, Life Long Learning, Social Networks, Career Development, and Financial Health.

Continuing our theme of “Leading Self”, we all know a successful business needs a plan in order to succeed. Similarly, in order to manage the

Multiple demands in our personal and professional lives, we as individuals need a “business plan”— a Personal Life Plan.

This Personal Life Plan, or Total Life Leadership Plan as we commonly refer to it, addresses every aspect of your life and, when properly implemented and monitored can bring great success and joy to your life.

Another way of interpreting the various elements of our work and life can best be described in the wheel of life. The wheel is made up of the basic elements of the average person’s life. Each of these elements demands your attention, time, and energy. In order to feel you are living a fulfilling life, you need to be satisfied with how things are going in the areas that are most important to you. We show the Wheel as being made up of an inner “hub” and an outer “ring.” In the hub are your natural resources.

Mind

Body

Spirit/Values

Or in other words, our Body, Mind and Spirit. How well you maintain these vital resources largely determines what you achieve in your life.

In the outer ring are our choices and challenges. Again, what decisions are you making to “manage” these vital areas of life?

Money

Family

Learning

Social

Career

What can be done to ensure our “natural resources” are well maintained and our choices and challenges reflect our values and our natural talents?