Leadership Excellence: Creating a New Dimension of Organizational Success

By Peter Hughes

If you’re stuck in an old leadership paradigm, get ready for marginal performance and disappointing results. With change quickening every day, it’s more important than ever to create a positive and enabling culture to thrive. In this business guidebook to leadership excellence, Peter Hughes explores how to: · motivate and engage employees; · fix problems that will have an immediate impact on your bottom line; · discern the differences between management and leadership; and · help employees overcome their greatest challenges. The author also examines whether leaders are born or whether anyone can become a successful leader, ways lean concepts are being applied differently in organizational settings, and why smart people so often fail after being promoted to the managerial ranks. Take a journey that leads to substantial improvements in performance and create a positive culture where everyone is poised to succeed with this leadership guidebook.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Dec 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9781483494203

Peter Hughes

Peter Hughes was born in Oxford in 1956. He lived in Italy for several years and continues to find inspiration in Italian literature. He is now based in Cambridge where he runs Oystercatcher Press. He was the 2016/17 Judith E. Wilson Visiting Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University and is a Visiting Fellow at Magdalene College. A Selected Poems came out from Shearsman in 2013 and his versions of the complete sonnets of Petrarch were published by Reality Street in 2015. He is currently working on a project inspired by Leopardi whilst continuing to collaborate with poets including John Hall and Simon Marsh.

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HUGHES

Copyright © 2019 Peter Hughes.

Interior Image Credit: Peter Hughes

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-9421-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-9420-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018913965

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 12/12/2018

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I must acknowledge and thank my lovely wife, Alicia. We have been together since we graduated high school. She is my soul mate, best friend, and inspiration. Without her love and support, I am nothing.

As with my first three books, Death of the American Heart, Rebirth of American Greatness, and Leadership and The Road to High Performance, I have asked my spiritual mentor, the Blessed Mother, to guide my hand and provide me with the ability and clarity to effectively communicate what it takes to build an excellent organization.

INTRODUCTION

Personal Challenge

I would like to challenge you as you read this book to take your personal performance and the performance of your team to a new level of success. I would like you to commit to achieve your personal leadership best. It is my hope that you find the ideas and contents of this book helpful in your quest to achieve your personal best. It is also my hope that you find inspiration and a wellspring of motivation in the words, comments, principles, and techniques contained in the various chapters.

The title of this book, Leadership Excellence, means exactly what the words express: through your leadership you will be able to reach a state of operational excellence in the organization or team that you oversee. The concepts and leadership philosophies contained in this book will provide you with the techniques and operating principles necessary for you and your team to reach a new level of success.

CHAPTER ONE

CURRENT TRENDS IN MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP

Dynamic forces in today’s work environment are radically changing how leaders manage, how employees perform their work, how organizations design their operating structures, how companies develop new products and services, and how customers conduct business transactions. From New Delhi to Denver and from Boston to Bangkok, for-profit and nonprofit organizations are transitioning to a new dimension of reality. We are living in a business environment that is measured in dog years. Organizations that survive and can sustain success will be faster, flatter, leaner, more flexible, and more responsive. Customers, global competitors, shareholders, and senior managers continue to raise the bar of performance. The vortex of change is ever present and represents two opposite energy forces; one is positive, and the other is negative. For sustainable success, organizations must create the positive vortex of organizational change and adaptability. This book will explore the latest leadership concepts, trends, and challenges that I am experiencing in the current business environment.

A major shift is taking place regarding how leaders manage their operations. The leadership paradigm has shifted, and for those leaders who have embraced the new leadership models and approaches, sustainable success will be their reward. For those leaders who are stuck in the old leadership paradigm, marginal performance awaits them and their organizations.

Current Thinking

Over the last five years, there has been increasing pressure on leaders to create lean operations through employee engagement. It used to be about doing more with less, and senior managers used this approach to justify their strategy for downsizing an organization. More recently, the rallying cry has been to go lean. Going lean used to be a manufacturing concept associated with Toyota Manufacturing in Japan. Not anymore. Most companies I have been associated with have some form of going lean as a strategic imperative. The concepts of lean are being applied differently in various organizational settings, but the overarching philosophy is permeating the operation cultures of these organizations. We will cover the principles of creating a lean operating culture in chapter 9.

Are leaders born (does your DNA dictate whether you will be a successful leader), or are leaders made (can you learn the skills to be an effective leader)? These two dramatically different leadership philosophies have been hotly debated over the years, with no clear winner emerging. That is because they both, in their extreme forms, are incorrect representations, or paradigms of leadership.

There is another leadership model (figure 1) that argues both are important—the DNA of a leader and the current situation the leader finds him- or herself in, which dictates how he or she will behave and the actions he or she will initiate. To be realistic, both the trait theory and behavioral theory have a lot of merit, but there needs to be a blend of both theories to create the environment where you can be successful as a leader. A basic level of capacity and competence is necessary to be considered eligible for a leadership position. Some people may refer to this as common sense, intuition, gut feeling, natural tendencies, or the right personality. This side of the equation needs to be balanced with the desire and motivation to want to lead. During my career as a consultant, I have seen a lot of highly technical people and people with high seniority rankings get promoted to a manager level and fail within a year. In the old days, people would seek a management position because it was the only way you could financially progress in an organization. Over the years, most progressive companies instituted a technical ladder because they recognized that even if someone is a great software engineer, nurse, salesperson, technician, or individual contributor, he or she might not make a good manager.

There is another major element in structuring the DNA of a good leader: desire and motivation. There are some people who just do not have the desire, passion, and motivation to lead operations or teams. Yet they, for whatever reason, are put into positions of leadership. Once again, they are not successful in the long run, but before they fail, they can do irreparable damage to their team’s performance and the overall organization.

Figure11.JPG

Figure 1.1

So let’s summarize. You need some basic competence (common sense) coupled with desire and motivation to ensure you are on the road to successful leadership. But even that is not enough to guarantee your success. Your behavior and the actions you take will be influenced by both internal and external forces for change—such as marketplace dynamics, the economy, and the organizational culture. These forces are multiplied by your senior management’s expectations of you and your team. Into this giant mix of forces, pressures, and management expectations, you blend your knowledge, skills, and experiences. At this point, you stand tall and say, Bring it on. We as a team and organization are going to achieve a new level of operational success.

Figure12.JPG

Figure 1.2

To fully understand high performance, one must understand that there is a rhythm and an ebb and flow from various performance zones.

Figure 3 identifies the four major performance zones that leaders find themselves operating from and are sometimes stuck in, regarding their inability or desire to transition to a new zone.

First is the zone of discomfort. Here you will find weak supervision with little added effort on the part of the employees. They are just getting by and do the minimal amount of work. The pace of activities is below the potential of the staff, and there are low levels of staff motivation, commitment, and corporate citizenship. The work environment is characterized by a high level of discontent and staff complaints. Employees just don’t care; to them, it is just a paycheck. There is a lack of timely, effective, and interesting communication. The main issue with being stuck in the discomfort zone is the amount of dysfunctional behavior and poor performance, which leads to an erosion of profits and high costs.

The second zone of performance is the comfort zone. The work environment is categorized by a good is good enough attitude. Again, there is a high level of compliancy and a low level of personal initiative. Communications are routine and unmotivating. This attitude permeates and adversely affects the quality and service-delivery philosophy of good companies. Acceptable performance is tolerated, and the team or organization reaches only a state of mediocracy. It is an average organization. We all know that in today’s dynamic and global environment, being just good or average is not acceptable. If you want to survive long-term, you need to become a great or high-performing organization.

That brings us to the third zone of performance: the stretch zone. Popularized by such executives as Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, and great companies, such as Johnson & Johnson, the stretch zone is associated with a high level of energy and a sense of positive anxiety. The team is pushing the envelope. Everyone is empowered to create continuous improvement opportunities. There is a high level of commitment, and when someone says he or she will do something, people trust it will get done. The goals require people to be at their best to achieve more than they thought possible. The main issue with the stretch zone is that if there is no positive recognition and there are no opportunities for people to have some fun, employees become frustrated over time and performance decreases.

Finally, reaching a state of high performance is the fourth performance zone in our model. Here is where you experience the cycle—the ebb and flow, if you will—from the stretch zone to the high-performance zone. It might be the launch of a new product, the end of a financial quarter, the delivery of a major project, or an initiative that allows the employees to reach and experience a peak level of performance. In the high-performance zone, employees are challenged to reach their full potential. They are operating at their personal best. There is a high level of energy and excitement for what the team is trying to achieve. The atmosphere is buzzing with activity. There not only is a sense of urgency but also a sense that great achievement is within grasp. There is energy, enthusiasm, esprit, and excitement. This high-performing work environment operates on a platform of trust, respect, teamwork, and shared ownership.

The big issue with being stuck in this zone is you need to take your foot off the pedal every so often and cycle back into the stretch zone to decompress, have some fun, celebrate the success of the team, and engage in the next quest for greatness. If you run at full throttle with the pedal to the metal all the time and do not celebrate success, have fun, and decompress from stress, people will burn out. During this slack period, you need to revisit your vision and guiding principles to make sure you and your team are still aligned around the vision for an ideal operating state and all team members are actively supporting the group’s guiding principles and behavioral norms.

Figure13.JPG

Figure 1.3

Reflect on and answer the following two questions regarding the model in figure 3:

• What zone are you personally in right now?

• What zone is your team in right now?

If either you or your team, as a whole, is not cycling from the stretch zone to the high-performance zone and back after a short respite, what do you need to do differently to make that transition?

As you can see from the current trends mentioned above, we are transitioning from management-centric behavior to employee-centric engagement facilitated by leadership behavior. The days of the micromanager are over. The days of giving employees orders are over. The days of comfort zone management are over. The days of good is good enough are over. It is a whole new competitive ball game. It’s about excelling for the customer. It’s about creating a culture of employee engagement where all staff members can proactively contribute to the success of the organization. It’s about operating in this new work environment that is