Leading from the Heart: What Workers Say About Good Leaders

By John Heie

In Leading from the Heart, an experienced executive provides valuable insight for current and future leaders on managerial techniques for achieving worker satisfaction and higher productivity.

John Heie relies on more than thirty-five years of corporate business experience that included leading a staff of over 1,000; to share the lessons he discovered in the trenches while learning to become an effective leader. Heie offers sound leadership principles, ways to embrace and implement change, and shares the twelve attributes workers really want from their leaders that include:

A say in shaping vision
Conversations about values
Rewards for effecting constructive change
Freedom to make decisions
Encouragement and resources that enable growth
Recognition of accomplishments
An open invitation to speak and be heard

As Heie leads beginning managers through the steps to become caring leaders, he proves time and time again that workers are the key to an organizations success because when the workers are fulfilled, happy, and loved, the rewards are enormous for everyone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 15, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450204422

John Heie

John Heie has had thirty-five years of corporate business experience that included a role as Director of Business Operations at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he led a staff of 1,300. He currently is a consultant in the area of strategic planning.

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Copyright © 2010 John Heie

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ISBN: 978-1-4502-0443-9 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-0444-6 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-0442-2 (ebk)

iUniverse rev. date: 4/8/2010

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Preface

Chapter 1   The L Word

Chapter 2   Fly Me to the Moon

Chapter 3   You Are Your Values

Chapter 4   All We Need Is a Little Culture

Chapter 5   Can You Spare Some Change?

Chapter 6   Getting It Done the Best Way

Chapter 7   Power to the People

Chapter 8   How Am I Doing?

Chapter 9   A Little Applause Please

Chapter 10   Training + Development = Growth

Chapter 11   Who Should I Make Happy?

Chapter 12   Are You Being Heard?

Chapter 13   Integrity, Trust, and Concern

References

Recommended Reading

About the Author

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Larry Dumas, retired deputy director of Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), who I had the privilege of reporting to for several years. As he led the operational work of the laboratory, Larry modeled the style of leadership that I admired. He did an excellent critique of my work in its early stages and honored me by writing the foreword to the book.

Thanks to Dr. Ken Peeders, a childhood friend in Brooklyn, who retired as president of Minnesota State Community and Technical College in Fergus Falls, Minnesota. He did an excellent critique of my work based on his management experience and the fact that he started his academic career as an English professor.

Thanks to my publisher, iUniverse, for excellent editing and design work and leading a first-time author through the process of publishing a book. Thanks also to my twin brother, Dr. Harold Heie, who has had five books published, for his sage advice during this process. Thanks also to Mary Klock, who helped me with the graphics, and Kim Van Es, who helped with editorial work.

Thank you to my wife and three children. First and foremost, I’m thankful for the love we have for each other. Those relationships transcend this book, but each one of them made an important contribution to this effort. My wife of fifty years, Dorine, had the wisdom to not interrupt me too many times when I was writing. That may have something to do with the fact that I encouraged her to go shopping while I was laboring in deep concentration. I think she got the best part of the deal. She would wake up many mornings and ask, Are you going to work on your book today?

Tami, a worker in the nursing profession, was an encouragement when, after she read a draft, she said, I would like to give this to a few of my bosses. Troy, a newspaperman, gave me good advice periodically and helped with my book references. Todd, a leader, encouraged me when he said he was going to implement some of my ideas whether I published the book or not.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also thank everybody who I have learned from in my lifetime, mostly from listening. This includes parents, teachers, and students. In the workplace, these were bosses, peers, and, most important of all, workers, who had dreams and aspirations, just as I did.

I want to say thank you to those leaders who truly care for their workers and want them to feel fulfilled and be successful. I hope the ranks of these types of leaders will grow in the future.

Finally, Christian teachings about love have largely shaped my beliefs about leadership, for which I am thankful.

Foreword

There is no shortage of books, articles, and training material on leadership and management. These range from simple treatises advocating a specific management technique to comprehensive reference manuals comprising extensive management theory and history. Why is there this bounty of available resources? Well, among other things, leaders establish direction and make decisions, and effective leaders both need and desire a firm basis for these. Management literature implicitly offers (or claims to provide) this basis. So, in this context, if there is room for one more book on leadership, how might this one fit in?

First, I have a word about the author’s career at JPL. JPL is managed under a contract from NASA by Caltech. The laboratory’s culture is strongly imprinted by its status as an operating division of Caltech, which prides itself in upholding the value of academic freedom and relentless peer review. Two-thirds of the laboratory’s staff are technical professionals, over half of whom hold advanced degrees. The upper management of JPL reflects this same background in science and engineering. This is not an environment naturally receptive to humanistic management styles, and JPL’s history of success in its mission tends to build in a resistance to changing the practices that brought them that success. Yet, by the late 1980s, change was in the air. The cold war was over, the space race was won, the role and need for national laboratories was in question, and JPL was being asked to more directly address current national priorities and do more for less.

As the leader of the laboratory’s business operations, John Heie’s challenge and inclination was not just to survive, but also to thrive in this environment. During the period of his service, JPL was to achieve preeminence as the world’s leading center for planetary exploration and, among other accomplishments, conceive, develop, and operate the family of spacecraft that first reached Mars, Mercury, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The administrative and infrastructure organizations under John’s direction were essential to the success of these complex and expensive projects, which were carried out in concert with industry, academia, and American and foreign agencies. While all this was underway, John was also engaged in overhauling the laboratory’s business operations.

Leaders, like everyone else, come in all sizes, shapes, dispositions, and degrees of natural abilities. If they’re lucky, they will be the right people in the right place at the right time with an opportunity to make extraordinary contributions to worthwhile causes. Whether they do so or not depends on their ability to effectively enlist and lead other people. That ability then depends largely on mutual trust. Would-be leaders are closely observed by those whose well-being depends on their leaders’ direction and judgment. Inept, self-serving, and manipulative management behavior destroys trust, usually for good. This book offers a road map to effective leadership based on the core belief that human beings are naturally driven to make constructive contributions when they are treated with the respect and dignity to which they are entitled. It contains lessons learned from the experiences of others, thoughtful interpretation of the management literature, and an honest assessment of the author’s own classwork as a pupil in the school of hard knocks. This is the loving testament of a man who was the right person in the right place at the right time, and it speaks from the heart.

Larry Dumas

Deputy Director and Chief Operating Officer (Retired)

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology

Preface

What can these pages possibly add to the 19,000-plus books on leadership noted on the Barnes & Noble Web site?

•   The vast majority of books on leadership are written from the perspective of the leader, identifying the attributes that leaders should have to get what they want. This book focuses on the perspective of the worker, asking the questions, What do workers want from their leaders so they feel fulfilled in their jobs? What will motivate them? In learning what workers want and need, you, as a leader, will gain invaluable insight to help your team meet its objectives and, ultimately, help your organization succeed and prosper.

•   Many books on leadership focus on one slice of the leadership pie, such as the pros and cons of empowerment or the benefits of rewarding and recognizing employees. This book takes a holistic view by pointing to the connections between the slices. How is vision related to values? How are values related to institutional culture? What is the proper linkage between performance and rewards and recognition? How is communication related to trust? There are at least twelve pieces to the leadership puzzle, all of which need to cohere.

•   The commonsense principles enumerated in this book are not the result of armchair speculation in an ivy-covered tower. They reflect some lessons learned in the trenches while trying to be an effective leader, as well as some things I now wish I had tried during my managerial experience. My thirty-five years in the corporate world helped me to develop managerial techniques for achieving worker satisfaction and productivity that I will unveil.

•   I wish I had been exposed to such concise statements of sound leadership principles before I took the managerial plunge. Because of that shortcoming in my own preparation for leadership positions, I have written this short primer primarily for beginners, who are taking similar managerial plunges. It is not my intention to provide detailed elaborations on any aspects of the overview I present. (The titles on the Barnes & Noble Web site can do that.) Rather, my intention is to present a holistic outline that will provide a framework for you, filling in the details that are pertinent to your new leadership responsibilities. The degree of applicability of these principles will depend on the nature of your organization. I hasten to