What Happens When You Shift Focus From Results To Contribution

May 2017, updated 2021. In 2017 Legitimate Leadership conducted a 15-month leadership transformation project in a major automotive company’s retail operation. Over 100 of the business’s leaders, from the CEO to frontline dealership managers, participated in the project designed to help them understand and apply the Legitimate Leadership principles. The project gave us the opportunity...

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How Humble Leadership Really Works

By Dan Cable, writing in the Harvard Business Review. Cable is professor of organizational behaviour at London Business School. His book Exceptional helps people build a personal highlight reel to unlock potential; his book Alive at Work is about the neuroscience of why people love what they do. COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLE BY WENDY LAMBOURNE, LEGITIMATE LEADERSHIP: In...

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December 2021 – Question Of The Month

Question: Does Legitimate Leadership say that the results are not important compared to the contribution of individuals? Answer: Obviously the results are very important! Anyone who does anything seriously has goals and a strong desire to achieve them. And in any competitive environment, one competes to win, not lose. But the essential way to achieve...

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November 2021 – Question Of The Month

Question:  When recruiting staff, how do you select givers rather than takers? Answer: Firstly, if you want an organisation where you have more givers than takers, you need to have givers in charge. This is simply because givers beget givers. Whenever you appoint someone to a leadership role, therefore, it makes simple good sense to...

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How Managers Increase Trust And Regain Power

People choose to grant or withhold trust in other people based on how they perceive their intent or motive. That is, whether they believe that those people are in the relationship to ‘give’ or to ‘get’ from them. Further to this, people trust those they believe care for them, who trust them and are fair...

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Evoking The Value-Add, Rather Than The Activity, In A Job

I have been working with leaders in a private healthcare organisation which has been successfully applying the Legitimate Leadership principles for the past four years. I recently had an opportunity to interact with a group of four of its employees during one of our online programmes, Giving And Taking At Work. The group was made...

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Cows Don’t Give Milk

COMMENT ON THIS STORY BY WENDY LAMBOURNE, LEGITIMATE LEADERSHIP: There is nothing wrong with wanting a positive outcome. But the outcome is out of our hands because the result in any case is a function of extraneous factors outside of our control (luck always plays a part) – as well as what is done by...

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October 2021 – Question Of The Month

Question:  Should complacency be deemed as carelessness (the Means and Ability were in place)? Is this an accountability issue, and therefore should we censure for carelessness? Answer: For people to make a contribution to standard or better requires three things: the need to have the Means to do so (allowed); the Ability to do so...

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Getting Management Visibility Right

Management visibility programmes can contribute to increasing or decreasing legitimacy in an organisation. Having spoken to recipients of management visibility programmes over the years, I have heard anecdotes in equal measure about how these programmes have been both positively and negatively received by employees. In 2013 and 2014 I observed such a programme making a...

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September 2021 – Question Of The Month

Question:  What about if someone has deliberately chosen not to follow a safe system at work or a work instruction, but he did not mean for something bad to happen? As this is a breach of health and safety regulations, he having deliberately chosen to deviate from the work instruction, is disciplinary action the right...

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What Happens When You Shift Focus From Results To Contribution

May 2017, updated 2021. In 2017 Legitimate Leadership conducted a 15-month leadership transformation project in a major automotive company’s retail operation. Over 100 of the business’s leaders, from the CEO to frontline dealership managers, participated in the project designed to help them understand and apply the Legitimate Leadership principles. The project gave us the opportunity...

View full article