It’s been a while since I wrote on this blog. I have been busy setting up VIPCG in Nigeria. Nigeria is an interesting place to blog from. Especially on the subject of leadership.
Any leader worth his salt knows that leadership is a mandate that is bestowed on those perceived to be worthy of it. Once given the mandate, leaders have to continuously work to earn their right to lead. To achieve this in a unionized environment, the leadership has to demonstrate an ability to listen, or risk finding out the hard way that the populace will make itself heard. History is replete with instances where organized labor has had to freeze everything in place until leadership learned to listen. Often this is the case in environments where leaders act or think they can act with impunity, usually under authoritarian/autocratic leadership. In such instances, the labor would call on a strike or a sit-in (in some cases civil disobedience to outs the leadership). The result is loss of productivity, and leadership being stripped of the mandate that it was given. And labor always wins, leaving leadership to find ways to save face (if it has any left). Continue reading ‘Leadership Needs to Listen, and feel the pulse of the Workforce - Especially in a Unionized Environment’
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If your formal role demands that you provide leadership, you’ve got to deal with the people thing. In fact, your impact, your effectiveness, and your performance depend on your ability to influence, work with and/or through others effectively. As obvious as this sounds, it is the primary failure of most leaders. In this musing, I am pondering this whole thing about leading people effectively.
Peter Drucker wrote in an article in Harvard Business Review â€Its incumbent on the people who work with them (leaders, bosses) to observe them, to find out how they work, and to adapt themselves to (the bosses’ style.)..†In following this popular management thought, most leaders today expect their people to change their styles to match the leaders’. This is old school management thinking. It doesn’t work today. Continue reading ‘There Is No Way For The Leader To Get Around Learning To Lead People Effectively’
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I haven’t written this blog in the last two weeks. Part of it has been that I have been overwhelmed, and part of it is that I have had to pull back and take stock.
We are struggling with performance. First, there’s deciding what our performance should be measured by. Impact, effectiveness, or revenue? We have done well in the first two, but revenue has not been what we forecasted. Naturally the decision was that we needed to pull back and re-evaluate our focus, our attack, and our approach. We decided to also look more closely at what we are saying and what we are doing, to look at where we are spending our time, and how we are putting ourselves out there.
Continue reading ‘Lessons in Leading Change’
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I woke up yesterday morning feeling like my performance is slipping. I don’t have any real data to support this feeling, but I can tell you, it is not nice feeling to feel on Monday morning. Lately I have been working harder and harder, putting in more time, sometimes more than 12 hours daily and finding that I don’t even make a dent in the workload. Like most Executives, I am finding that the pressure to perform is high and the need to focus my energy and time on activities that have the highest impact on my organization’s goals get more critical by the day.
Continue reading ‘A Dozen Ways to Regain Control of Your In-box and Gain Some Personal Time’
“The only constant in life is change.†Nowhere is this truer than in leadership. Because the environment in which we must do business today is constantly in flux, the organization that cannot change dies. In times past, an organization’s death was usually so slow in coming that the leader often had a fair chance to arrest it. Not today. As much as we know about this and as much as has been written about managing and leading change, a large number of leaders still fail miserably at it. Continue reading ‘Why Is Change So Difficult To Lead And How Can A Leader Do Better?’
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