Featured
Does Legitimate Leadership say that the results are not important compared to the contribution of individuals?
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.
When you’re a leader — no matter how long you’ve been in your role or how hard the journey was to get there — you are merely an overhead unless you’re bringing out the best in your employees. Unfortunately, many leaders lose sight of this.
Legitimate Leadership Programme
February 2022
In Conversation With – Webinar
10 February 2022
Zoom
Executive Overview Of The Legitimate Leadership Model
One Day Programme
22 February 2022
Houghton Golf Club, Johannesburg, South Africa
Introduction To The Legitimate Leadership Model
Two Day Programme
23 & 24 February 2022
Zoom
For more information regarding the above, please
E-mail events@legitimateleadership.com
Question of the Month
By Wendy Lambourne, Director, Legitimate Leadership
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 the result is neither to focus on it nor to obsessively measure progress against it. A desire to stand on the top of the world and a determination of how far short of the top one is does not get the relatively few people who succeed in conquering Everest to do so. Similarly, a fixation on the score on the scoreboard, relative to other athletes’ scores, is not what gains a winning score for the athlete. Nor does an ambition to progress up the hierarchy assure promotion to the desired position.
What determines whether or not mountaineers reach the summit, other than luck (and luck plays a part in every result), is all that they do to get there – how well they prepare for the ascent, the choice of the right path to take, that they pace themselves correctly and then overcome the inevitable obstacles along the way.
All of these things are themselves a reflection on those leading the expedition – their ability to select high-calibre team members and then enable them both in preparation for and throughout the climb.
Similarly, “games are won by players who focus on the playing field, not by those whose eyes are glued to the scoreboard” (Warren Buffett). More accurately, games are won by talented players who have exceptional coaches.
Finally, what produces the desired organisational result is that people at every level in the organisation make the contribution required of them to produce the result. Enabling people to make the contribution required of them, to be the best that they can be, and to be prepared to go above and beyond in pursuit of the organisation’s objectives, is the job of those in leadership positions in the organisation.
In my experience of corporations, middle and senior managers spend well over 50% of their time in setting, measuring and mincing about whether they and their subordinates are achieving the targeted results. In contrast, they spend far less time ensuring that their subordinates have the means, ability and accountability to achieve those results. If the ratio was the other way round, better results would be achieved with much greater job satisfaction for all concerned.
VIGNETTE CASE STUDY: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU SHIFT FOCUS FROM RESULTS TO CONTRIBUTION
By Josh Hayman, senior associate, Legitimate Leadership.
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 to witness many successes in shifting leader’s intent from taking to giving, but one particular story has stood out for me. It is about a dealership sales manager in Pretoria, South Africa – Francois Fourie.
READ THE FULL CASE STUDY BY CLICKING HERE
ARTICLE: 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 BY WENDY LAMBOURNE OF LEGITIMATE LEADERSHIP ON THIS VIDEO: : In both the food delivery service example as well as the banking example, what is depicted in simple and practical terms is a shift in a leader’s intent from using control (sticks and carrots) to ‘get’ results out over the unwilling, to being in the relationship to enable those in the frontline to make an above-and-beyond contribution. Being in the relationship to ‘give’ however requires leaders to go beyond asking their people how they can help them, listening to and responding to their ideas. It requires delivering in full on both criteria for legitimate power: care and growth.
OUR SUMMARY OF THIS ARTICLE: When you’re a leader — no matter how long you’ve been in your role or how hard the journey was to get there — you are merely an overhead unless you’re bringing out the best in your employees. Unfortunately, many leaders lose sight of this.
Power can cause leaders to become overly obsessed with outcomes and control, and therefore treat their employees as means to an end. As I’ve discovered in my own research, this ramps up people’s fear — fear of not hitting targets, fear of losing bonuses, fear of failing — and as a consequence people stop feeling positive emotions and their drive to experiment and learn is stifled.
READ THE FULL SUMMARY OF THIS ARTICLE BY CLICKING HERE
Featured
When recruiting staff, how do you select givers rather than takers?
OKRs are about setting inspirational goals and pursuing them with discipline; Legitimate Leadership is about intent and culture. OKRs are a system for identifying and working towards desired outcomes. A company should first build a team and a culture, then elevate its performance through goals or OKRs.
“Service, giving to another, having their back, is what makes the highest-performing teams in the world – not their strength or their intelligence, but their willingness to be there for each other.”
For more information regarding the above, please
E-mail events@legitimateleadership.com
Question of the Month
By Wendy Lambourne, Director, Legitimate Leadership
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 appoint givers rather than takers.
Legitimate Leadership has developed a process to help client organisations select first line managers who are givers. It begins with giving the candidates a half-day of input on the basics of the Legitimate Leadership Model, then testing their comprehension via a multiple choice questionnaire. The next step in the selection process is to give candidates a series of accountability scenarios which test not whether they would do the right leadership thing in practice, but whether they at least know what the right leadership action is (right being ‘aligned to the Legitimate Leadership Model’). The final step in the process is structured interviews which probe for and determine the candidates’ willingness to embrace this kind of approach to leading others, and also their basic ability to lead in this way.
The Legitimate Leadership Model fundamentally changes the traditional view of what the real job of those in authority is – namely, to care for and cultivate exceptional people (which is a precondition for legitimate power). Succeeding as a leader requires holding people appropriately accountable. It is the hardest part of caring for and growing people. Legitimate Leadership’s accountability scenarios test the candidate’s understanding of what holding people fairly accountable really means. There are givers at work but the give they want to make is to the task, not other people. Not everyone either wants to be or can be a leader. So the last step in the selection process gauges the candidates’ desire and ability to lead.
WEBINAR: LEGITIMATE LEADERSHIP AND OKRS CAN ENHANCE AND CEMENT EACH OTHERV
The pursuit of objectives promoted by goal management systems such as OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and the enablement promoted by Legitimate Leadership sometimes fit uncomfortably together. But with conscious design, they can be integrated to enhance and cement each other and become two sides of an equation.
OKRs are about setting inspirational goals and pursuing them with discipline; Legitimate Leadership is about intent and culture. OKRs are a system for identifying and working towards desired outcomes. A company should first build a team and a culture, then elevate its performance through goals or OKRs.
Both Legitimate Leadership and OKRs are journeys and neither is done in the short term.
These were among the insights shared in a Legitimate Leadership webinar entitled OKRs And Legitimate Leadership: Competing Or Complementary? held on 14 October 2021. The webinar was attended by about 70 people.
READ THE FULL REPORT ON THIS WEBINAR BY CLICKING HERE
VIDEO: WHAT IS NEEDED FOR A HIGH-PERFORMING TEAM
By Simon Sinek, American author on leadership and motivational speaker.
COMMENT BY WENDY LAMBOURNE OF LEGITIMATE LEADERSHIP ON THIS VIDEO: We totally agree with Simon Sinek here. The following is what Legitimate Leadership believes about teams. First, a team succeeds to the degree to which the individuals on the team are committed to the team’s objectives (all things being equal, a group of motivated and willing people outperforms a group of less motivated and willing people). Second, a team succeeds to the degree to which individuals in the team are prepared to suspend their own agendas for the bigger interests of the team. Further, a team succeeds when the average interaction between individuals in the team is collaborative rather than competitive. And where individuals in the team deliberately set up other members of the team to succeed.
OUR SUMMARY OF THIS VIDEO: The Navy SEALs (the United States Navy Sea, Air, and Land Teams), are one of the highest-performing organizations on the planet. A former Navy SEAL was asked who makes it through the selection process to become a SEAL.
He said, “I can’t tell you who gets through, who makes it, but I can tell you the kind of people who don’t make it.
READ THE FULL SUMMARY OF THIS VIDEO BY CLICKING HERE