LEADERSHIP PRINCIPLES
To be successful, a business leader must be effective in:
- Creating an agenda
- Developing a human network for achieving the agenda
- Execution / Implementation
EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP PRACTICES
- Understanding the differences between: LEADERSHIP & MANAGEMENT
Leadership which produces change, often to a dramatic degree.
Management which produces a degree of predictability, consistency & order.
2. Balancing the tasks of...
LEADERSHIP
Establishing direction
Aligning people
Motivating & Inspiring
(Kotter)
MANAGEMENT
Planning & Budgeting
Organising & Staffing
Controlling & Problem solving
3. Critical Leadership skills required:
- Challenging the status quo
- Inspiring a shared vision
- Encouraging the heart
- Modelling the way
- Enabling others to act
Plus a willingness to take prudent business risks.
(Kotter)
4. Communications / Communications / Communications
5. Participative decision-making
6. An openness to challenge and to be challenged
7. “Where people grow, profits grow.” (Koestenblatt)
8. “Effective expense control is an essential business function, however, a company in a technology-driven industry cannot save its way to success.”
Some Insightful Quotations on Leadership:
"No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself, or to get all the credit for doing it."
- Andrew Carnegie
"The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he/she wants done, and is self-restrained enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it."
- Theodore Roosevelt
"We herd sheep, we drive cattle, but we lead people."
- Mary Kay
"You can learn a great deal about leadership from terrible bosses."
- Mary Kay
"You are a leader if, and only if, people follow your leadership when they have the freedom not to."
- Peter Drucker
"The art of Leadership is to generate Followership."
- John C. Maxwell
"People don't care how much you know - until they know how much you care."
- John C. Maxwell
"Hindsight is good. Foresight is better. Insight is best."
- Thomas J. Watson Jr.
"A man flattened by an opponent can get up again. A man flattened by conformity stays down for good."
- Thomas J. Watson Jr.
"Leadership is all about people. It is not about organisations. It is not about plans. It is not about strategies. It is all about people - motivating people to get the job done. You have to be people-centred.
- Colin Powell
"Trust is the essence of leadership"
- Colin Powell
"It takes leaders to grow leaders."
- Ray Blunt
"Leaders learn to lead as apprentices in the classroom of experience with senior leaders."
- Ray Blunt
"Take time to deliberate; but when the time for action arrives, stop thinking and go in."
- Andrew Jackson
"Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do."
- John Wooden
"Thousands of companies today are over-managed and under-led, not because managers lack charisma, but because far too few executives have a clear understanding of what leadership is, and what it can accomplish. Without such vision, even the most capable people have great difficulty trying to lead effectively and to create the cultures which will help others to lead."
- John Kotter
"Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity."
- General George S. Patten Jr.
“You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man’s initiative and independence.”
- Abraham Lincoln
“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Executives owe it to the organisation and to their fellow workers not to tolerate non-performing individuals in important jobs.”
- Peter Drucker
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
- Aldous Huxley
“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.”
- Albert Einstein