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December 2021
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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
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10 February 2022
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22 February 2022
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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
