An effective leader is an ethical leader first.

It is proverbially noted that leadership is influence. Many leaders and managers exert a significant amount of time and energy trying to convince every member of their team to support an initiative. Most of the time it is important to have everyone understand what the initiative is all about, but rarely is it critical for every member to fully “buy in” to the plan.

…but you can communicate so that everyone understands.

Communicating with the goal of everyone understanding – that is effective communication. Trying to persuade everyone – that is an act in futility; as William G. McAdoo put it, “It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.” (Okay, so just because someone doesn’t agree with you, it doesn’t make them ignorant; despite what political pundits purport!) However, to effectively communicate with your team, focus on whether they understand first and foremost. Full understanding is the first step. Getting buy in” to the plan is secondary and is less likely to happen if it is not understood first.

This is true on the small scale as well as one an international relations stage. Mikhail Gorbachev observed what Ronald Reagan used to describe the Soviet Union and used those descriptions to help push through reforms of Perestroika and Glasnost in the 1980s.

As much as the Western world may detest and deplore Osama bin Laden, if we want to succeed in the struggle with terrorism (which is more a struggle of the minds than a struggle of battlefields) we have to observe and learn from the terrorists as well. Osama bin Laden described his viewpoint of power by saying, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.”

Some may cite the failure of the IMF to stave off the financial crisis, but this is short sighted since the failure rests on multiple shoulders in a complex basket of contributing factors. It is quite unfortunate that major multilateral initiatives (such as the proposal of the IMF) only get implemented after a painful and destructive disaster. But alas, such is the hard-headed nature of mankind – wait until a fork in the road to stop and think about the direction that one is heading.

Leadership lesson: don’t be so hard-headed. Leaders need to always think about the direction that they are headed and the direction that they are leading their organizations. You can’t wait until a problem arises, until your market share is diminishing, until your competitor comes out with a revolutionizing product, or until your core business is irrelevant. Leaders need to look around the corners and anticipate the future. This is a main difference between leadership and management: managers seek to continually improve what the business is doing; leaders seek to continually drive what the business is improving.

“Managers are people who do things right, while leaders are people who do the right thing.”
Warren Bennis

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”
Peter Drucker

“Leaders manage change. Managers control process.”
Anonymous

“Managers think about today. Leaders think about tomorrow.”
Dan McCreary

Blog articles:

What is the Difference Between Leadership and Management

Seth Godin, the well known marketing author, wrote about how people sometimes have a lot of failures, but just one success builds a successful career (read here). There’s definitely more to understand about failure and success, but the message is the same – don’t fail to do anything by trying to avoid failure. Start trying to accomplish something and accept that there may be failures on the path to attaining success.

If you’re low on the totam pole today, start leading where you are. Don’t wait for the management position or until you’re a manager of managers to start leading. By then, you won’t have the experience learned from leading where you are now. On the flip side, dealing with people and learning how to contribute and influence will provide you with invaluable experience for when your job requires you to lead. Don’t worry about failing for failure is an experience on the path of learning how to succeed.

If you are in a leadership position, foster leadership at every level of your organization.

If you visit Knowledge@Wharton’s website (http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu), by the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, you may note the categories of articles listed on the left-hand side of the page. While there is great information in every category and one could spend hours reading and learning, I have always been struck by the category – Leadership and Change – and how it associates change with leadership.

Leadership and Change

Perhaps I could expound more on change and I have already written several articles about leadership and change, but for this post, I just want to share with you a viewpoint of change from Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor in AD 161-180, in his phenomenal work, Meditations:

“Is any man afraid of change? Why, what can take place without change? What then is more pleasing or more suitable to the universal nature? And cast thou take a bath unless the wood undergoes a change? And canst thou be nourished unless the food undergoes a change? And can anything else that is useful be accomplished without change? Dost thou not see then that for thy self also to change is just the same, and equally necessary for the universal nature?”

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Effective managers/leaders are consistent, but at the same time they are adaptive to conditions and often drive change. Some of the greatest leaders take the time to reflect and ponder if, where they are going and how they are going there, still line up with where they should be at and where they should be going.

A company that I have worked with changes (reorganizes) the core competencies every two to four years. To some, this change is perceived as just shaking things up and borders on erratic, jerky maneuvers. The problem is not the change itself, but rather the execution and communication of the change – not what was done, but how it was done.

Leaders need to be acutely aware of perception. What people perceive is what people believe regardless of what is actually the case.

This is what I call the ‘Perception Dynamic.’

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