By Wendy Lambourne, director, Legitimate Leadership.
Question: To grow someone at work, does a leader need to promote her, move her to another job or give her new responsibilities?
Answer: Clearly there are opportunities for a person to grow from all three of these. But there is no need to either move a person or reconfigure her role in order for her to grow. Leaders enable their people to grow on a continuous basis in their current jobs through helping them when they get stuck; helping them to view their jobs differently (the means and ends switch); helping them to focus on and build their abilities (by the leader watching the game and giving feedback); and by setting them tasks which keep them in their learning zone …Read the full answer by clicking here
Basic Legitimate Leadership principles were encapsulated for general life application in a three-afternoon programme for high school learners – and the principles were surprisingly easily understood by them, according to the facilitators. The programme, called Give to Grow, is applied in South African townships by one of South Africa’s largest non-governmental welfare organisations, Afrika Tikkun.
Afrika Tikkun, founded in 1994 by the late Chief Rabbi of South Africa, Cyril Harris, and businessman/philanthropist the late Dr Bertie Lubner, provides, education, health and social services to young people and their families through five centres of excellence in South African townships.
The Legitimate Leadership Model has been applied in Afrika Tikkun’s operations for the past five years. Its application there has been championed by Leonie van Tonder, its former general manager; she had also previously applied the model in a number of situations in the South African commercial banking industry.
Legitimate Leadership has thus gained considerable currency among Afrika Tikkun’s employees (see Afrika Tikkun – An Astounding Culture Shift in One Year). But because Legitimate Leadership principles are also applicable to many areas of general life, ways were sought to also impart them to township children – see Give to Grow Leadership Workbook.
ARTICLE: THE APPROPRIATE RESPONSE TO EXCEPTIONS IN A BUSINESS
By Wendy Lambourne, director, Legitimate Leadership.
An exception is anything outside the norm – something which is unusual, untypical, not what we expect or have become used to.
We should learn from both positive and negative exceptions and apply the learnings to ensure a more positive future result. More specifically, we should unpack the command or leadership actions which sit behind all exceptions. In doing so we enable those in leadership roles to gain clarity regarding what they should be doing to better enable each of their direct reports.
Exceptions, in other words, should be seen as golden opportunities to learn about and enhance the quality of leadership in an enterprise. They should be used to raise the calibre of leadership at every level in the line of command.
VIDEO: HAVE A JUST CAUSE (THE SECOND OF SIMON SINEK’S 5 PRACTICES OF LEADERSHIP)
By Simon Sinek, American author on leadership and motivational speaker.
COMMENT BY WENDY LAMBOURNE, LEGITIMATE LEADERSHIP, ON THIS VIDEO: Simon Sinek makes a valid point that there is an absolute connection between trust and feeling “safe”. There is an erosion of trust in an environment where people do not feel “safe”; this in turn leads to decreased commitment, decreased discretionary effort, decreased openness, and decreased initiative. What makes people “safe” is a conviction that those in charge of the enterprise are acting in the best interests of their people – as opposed to in pursuit of their own interests. Trust is built over time, in increments, and into perpetuity. When managers compromise on what is the right thing to do, in order to further their own interests, this is immediately apparent to their people. Their people instantly conclude that management is self-serving and cannot be trusted. Conversely, when management contradicts their interests in order to do the right thing, their people experience them as sincere. They see management as values-driven rather than needs-driven, and therefore trust them.
OUR SUMMARY OF THIS VIDEO: Does your organization offer your people a cause so just that they would be willing to sacrifice themselves and their interests in order to advance that cause?
An example of a Just Cause was the United States’ Declaration of Independence. The founding fathers wrote down reasons why they wanted to go to war and create their own country. All men are created equal, they said – endowed with unalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In other words they presented an ideal vision of a future state that did not yet exist – an ideal so inspiring that they were willing to commit their honor, their fortunes and their lives in order to advance it.
They will never actually achieve that ideal but they will die trying – and that is the point.
ARTICLE: THE APPROPRIATE RESPONSE TO EXCEPTIONS IN A BUSINESS
VIDEO: HAVE A JUST CAUSE (THE SECOND OF SIMON SINEK’S 5 PRACTICES OF LEADERSHIP)