Richard Stieglitz, who founded RGS, and I will be writing a leadership column for WashingtonExec over the coming year. The focus will be on developing and enhancing your management and leadership mindsets to conduct the conversations that will connect you with your team and other stakeholders; aligning them with your vision and goals. Our research comes from starting and running companies, the organizations in which we have consulted, the hundreds of leaders we have coached and from the executive students I taught at Georgetown, Wharton and other institutions.
We will show you how to create a virtuous cycle of building deep relationships, developing others, making great decisions and taking effective actions. I currently teach this information at Wharton Executive Education as a Learning Director and previously taught at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. It will be available in the spring of 2013 in a book to be released by Jossey-Bass entitled: Leadership Conversations; Challenging High Potential Managers to Become Great Leaders.
One basic finding is that to be a leader, you must connect and align with your followers. In addition, the conversations you hold will be the biggest determinant of your success…or failure as a manager or a leader. You must be able to convey accurate and timely information to build rapport and hold the conversations that motivate and inspire others. Conversations are not simple. They include planning and constant consideration of not only your point of view and the view of the other person in the conversation, but also the ‘big-picture’ perspective.
Most of you entered leadership from a technical occupation and our processes will enable you to refine and enhance your leadership style and results as you progress to, and increase your effectiveness in, higher levels of leadership. Virtually anyone can be a great leader if you are willing to grow and evolve. Organizations do not change, people do, and as the leader, change starts (and ends) with you. What made you successful as an independent contributor will not lead to success as a manager and management and leadership are two different activities.
Every time you get promoted, your job changes and when you cross into management or leadership for the first time, the change is especially profound. We also find that you are expected to manage this transition to leadership with few developmental resources at your disposal…until you start to fail, at which point it is usually too late. Approximately 50% of high potentials fail within 18 months of a major promotion – our goal is to see you be in the 50% that succeed.
By writing this column in parts, we also invite your feedback and questions to ensure that you are part of the leadership conversations and that this column is meaningful to, and actionable by, you.
To conclude, we now ask you: “How many people does it take to have a conversation?” Venture an answer before reading on….. If your answer was one person, yes, we have these internal conversations all of the time. The problem is that they are not effective until we complete the conversation by discussing our thoughts with at least one other person. If your answer was two people; this is also correct. Just make sure you also have those one-person, internal conversations to prepare you for your discussions with others. There is no one ‘right’ answer to most of the questions we will ask you over the next year. Our philosophy is to think “and” instead of “either/or”. The more options you consider, the greater your potential success will be.
For the next column: What is the most powerful type of relationship utilized in each of the management and leadership mindsets? Feel free to discuss this question with your peers in advance of the next column.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alan Berson, the author of this column is an author, leadership and change management professor, and an executive coach. Feel free to go to www.pulsepointcoaching.com for more information or email him at alan@pulsepointcoaching.com. He is located in Potomac, Maryland.
