Taking Charge - Three Ingredients for Success
In this article, the authors describe how successful new leaders develop their leadership skills. They say that, for skills development, it is essential that new leaders are up and running straight away. Such 'rapid-cycle CEO development' is the most important determinant of organizational success. Underpinning this, are three steps to being an effective new leader:
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'Developing a crystal-clear blueprint for the social architecture of the organization'. This includes the leader's values, ideas about the business, emotional energy, and 'edge' (i.e. decision making abilities and style). The 'blueprint' can be lengthy, with charts and graphs, or like a hand-written letter (e.g. John Reed's "On the Beach" memo, which outlined the birth of the automatic teller machine).
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'Rapid diffusion of their teachable point of view'. This is a concept proposed by the authors. The leader must share their teachable point of view with their senior colleagues, creating teaching and learning through 'leader-teacher exchanges'. In this way, teachable points of view are developed at multiple organizational levels all at once. With the present rate of change and competition, the need for the leader to develop themselves and others is extremely pressing,. Superior CEOs have a passion for teaching and also energise others to be teachers. They clearly articulate to others in order to motivate action - this can be achieved equally well in a 30-second drill or a two-day seminar.
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'Relentlessly executing their strategies'. Effective leadership requires vast amounts of emotional energy which helps leaders speak with 'vitality' and 'intensity' and use their energy to activate energy in others. For example, Jack Welch constantly restructured General Electric to weed out bureaucracy, facilitate informality and face-to-face interactions; he provided new challenges to stretch people and created continuous change to energise them. He also had 'edge' - the drive and ability to make tough, empirically-based decisions that will benefit the company in the long-term: "You have to go along with a can of fertilizer in one hand and water in the other and constantly throw both on the flowers. If they grow, you have a beautiful garden. If they don't, you cut them out. That's what management is all about".
Case Study - Tom Tiller, Polaris Industries Inc. (a 45-year-old U.S. company):
In 1998, 37-year-old Tom Tiller (previously of General Electric) was selected by his predecessor, W. Hall Wendel, to be the next CEO of Polaris. On joining, he stated that "The first 90 days are everything". He began with a series of one-to-one interviews to help understand people's values and ideas, finding out what they liked and did not like about the company and how they were treated, "to get a sense of where people were at an emotional level". He introduced GE's four-step new manager assimilation process. First, a facilitator met staff to obtain information. Tiller reviewed the comments and responded, raising new questions. Finally, Tiller and the facilitator met to review what they had found and what could be learned. Through this, Tiller was confident that he was cross-validating what he heard in his interviews. He widely communicated his strategy through his 'one-page chart'. This became inspirational throughout the company. Soon after joining, he recruited Polaris' first vice president of human resources. Together, they taught leaders the basics of 360-degree feedback, "weed and seed", and emphasis on relating peoples' values to performance. During his first 18 months at Polaris, Tiller taught people about effective implementation of his strategy as well as doing it himself. He focused strongly on partnership, executing over a dozen alliances. Finally, he taught his team to demonstrate extremely fast response times: "We'll get together and we'll decide on Monday and we'll implement on Tuesday".
This article provides interesting examples of the issues that arise when new CEOs come in from outside and the critical role that speed, learning and communication can play in making an impact as a new leader. However, I was left feeling that the essence is not much more than a re-packaging of widely-accepted ideas, such as the principles of transformational leadership.
Reference
Barnett, C. & Tichy, N. (2000). Rapid-Cycle CEO Development: How New Leaders Learn to Take Charge. Organizational Dynamics, 29, 16-32.
Newsletter: 2003