I will focus on preventative actions for those projects and activities I am involved in.

I will focus on innovation; coming up with new processes and solutions to increase throughput.

In addition I will:

• Epitomize values
• Develop my people
• Understand the customer needs
• Set and implement strategy: choose the right objectives
• Celebrate victories
• Leave time available for legitimate crisis, and unanticipated problems

From http://www.businessballs.com/leadership.htm

1. Always, when leaders say that the people are not following, it’s the leaders who are lost, not the people.
2. Leaders get lost because of isolation, delusion, arrogance, plain stupidity, etc., but above all because they become obsessed with imposing their authority, instead of truly leading.
3. Incidentally, leading is helping people achieve a shared vision, not telling people what to do.
4. It is not possible for a leader to understand and lead people when the leader’s head is high in the clouds or stuck firmly up his backside.
5. That is to say – loyalty to leadership relies on the leader having a connection with and understanding of people’s needs and wishes and possibilities. Solutions to leadership challenges do not lie in the leader’s needs and wishes. Leadership solutions lie in the needs and wishes of the followers.
6. The suggestion that loyalty and a following can be built by simply asking or forcing people to be loyal is not any basis for effective leadership.
7. Prior to expecting anyone to follow, a leader first needs to demonstrate a vision and values worthy of a following.
8. A given type of leadership inevitably attracts the same type of followers. Put another way, a leadership cannot behave in any way that it asks its people not to.
9. In other words, for people to embrace and follow modern compassionate, honest, ethical, peaceful, and fair principles, they must see these qualities demonstrated by their leadership.
10. People are a lot cleverer than most leaders think.
11. People have a much keener sense of truth than most leaders think.
12. People quickly lose faith in a leader who behaves as if points 10 and 11 do not exist.
13. People generally have the answers which elude the leaders – they just have better things to do than help the leader to lead – like getting on with their own lives.
14. A leadership which screws up in a big way should come clean and admit their errors. People will generally forgive mistakes but they do not tolerate being treated like idiots by leaders.
15. And on the question of mistakes, a mistake is an opportunity to be better, and to show remorse and a lesson learned. This is how civilisation progresses.
16. A leader should be brave enough to talk when lesser people want to fight. Anyone can resort to threats and aggression. Being aggressive is not leading. It might have been a couple of thousand years ago, but it’s not now. The nature of humankind and civilisation is to become more civilised. Leaders should enable not obstruct this process.

Pay particular attention to point number one. The fish stinks from the head down. In every instance leadership influences everything, and that leadership starts with self. Stop blaming others and ask what it is I need to learn to improve. For things to change first I must change.

What do you need to change?

Leadership is about awareness.

Styles Of Leadership
As with any activity the type of behaviour must be adjusted for the environment. And so it is with leadership, different circumstances call for different leadership styles. As a concept a psychologist Vroom introduced this view that great leaders were easily able to move through various styles as and when required. This ability generated what he coined a ‘referent leadership’.

Followers of referent leaders have an innate respect for the leader. They believe the leader has their best interests at heart and that decisions are being made accordingly, even if they are difficult. Charisma is not the same as referent leadership, and neither does it have to be characteristic of leadership. Although it may, if charisma is miss used it will engender poor relations.

People will follow other leadership styles such as autocratic where the leader uses the carrot & stick approach, or the leader who is the pace setter and wields power & influence because of superior knowledge or skills. However long-term results will invariably be compromised as a result.

Employee turn over will be high, client service will be lower – generally due to lower employ morale – and people wont be utilizing and developing their highest and best skills.

Note that these leadership styles are particularly prevalent in technical fields such as lawyers, accountants and engineering. The key here and everywhere, is to promote people to managerial positions because they will make great managers, not because they are great technicians and require more challenge. The former will always do more damage than harm to all concerned.

Often highly competent specialists will put their hand up for managerial roles as commonly this is the only career path available. Employee development programs must broader than this. Otherwise pace setters and autocratic leaders will find themselves in positions of leadership, unable to expand their capabilities as leaders.

Characteristic of Leaders:
To summarize the characteristics of referent leaders. They are:

• Exemplars
• Firm but Fair
• Objective
• Empathetic
• Inspiring

Leaders As Coaches
In sporting circles, the ‘coach’ is the leader. The coach sets the example of discipline, sets the strategy for the season and for each game. They set the vision for the team. They hire assistants, recruit the talent, and arrange for the development of their talent. They front the media. They imbue their teams with their values, and then live by the numbers. Which these days, the metrics are numerous.

Leadership is about helping others reach decisions them selves. Helping people develop thinking styles that empower them now and in the future to improve results.

Instead, work to create the conditions under which people will WANT to work, which appeals to their own self-interest and where they will thrive.

The first step is this more effectual approach is to articulate your purpose, your values and guidelines and the vision you have for the business. Work out and agree to the results and behaviours you expect.

It is rare that you have employed ‘bad people’. If you were to sack all your staff and then hire new people applying state of the art behavioural interviewing techniques, you would still end up with a normal distribution of people.

Instead focus on the processes and systems. Focus on the tools. My father is a carpenter; he says you can do almost any job with the right tools and skills.

Have you provided the right training? The right tools? Have you looked at the processes; do they support your people and customers?

The report is quite damning. In uncertain economic times the successful businesses will be placing a emphasis on Leadership Development. Economic downturns always create the next wave of market leaders as wannabe’s and those without the driving will to succeed are pushed out of business.

These are among the key findings of the Global Leadership Forecast 2008|2009 by consultants DDI, which sets out to examine why confidence in leaders is declining despite a heightened focus on developing leadership talent.

The study quizzed almost 1,500 HR professionals and more than 12,000 leaders from 76 countries, revealing what it described as “major shortfalls in leadership development initiatives around the world”.

Although three-quarters of the executives surveyed said that improving leadership talent was a top business priority, just four out of 10 were satisfied with what their organizations were actually doing to help them, a decline of 12 percentage points since the last Leadership Forecast was published two years ago.

Meanwhile, confidence in leaders has fallen to a 10-year-low, with only 35 percent of the HR professionals citing high confidence in the latest survey.

“This deterioration of confidence is a sign that leaders aren’t meeting the needs of the organization.” said Rich Wellins, senior vice president at DDI and co-author of the report.

“Every business leader needs to take note of this if they want to grow their organization.”

Yet what emerges from the report is a clear message that while executives want more opportunities to learn on the job, such as special projects or moving to a new assignment, their senior management seldom takes responsibility for making this happen.

For example, almost six out of 10 executives said that they and their manager had not agreed on a formal written plan for their development, while only around a third of senior managers were held accountable for the success of leadership development programs.

Moreover, just a quarter of organizations monitor their leadership development programs or formally measure their results.

“Great leadership doesn’t happen by accident – organizations need to start listening to their leaders and make the right development investments if they want different results than they’re getting now,” Wellins said.

More surprising still is the fact that only three out of 10 multinational organizations had processes to help executives who cross borders are unprepared – which explains why six out of 10 considered their preparation for international assignments to be only fair or poor.

Nearly half also had an equally negative view of the support they had received from the organization on their multinational assignments, leading the report to suggest that by both accounts, multinational leaders are neglected leaders.

Another problem area seems to be succession planning, with only half of organizations globally have succession plans for their leadership team and US organizations even lower than the global sample.

“This is scary, considering the high rate of retirements we’re expecting over the next 5-10 years,” Wellins said. “Organizations will have empty seats in key leadership roles if they don’t begin planning for their future leadership.”

But having succession plans isn’t the whole story – HR professionals indicated that one in three succession candidates fail.

“These aren’t good odds for programs that are supposed to increase success,” Wellins explained. “Organizations need to look at how they’re developing those individuals and identify why the failure rate is so high.”

Steve Newhall, vice president Europe for DDI, added: “When times get tough, leadership skills are really put to the test and organizations with the right quality and quantity of leaders will weather the storm better than those less well- prepared.

“In the face of pressure to reduce costs, organizations must remain firm in their commitment to invest in leader assessment and development.”

Take-away: The most important comment from this report is that “Great leadership doesn’t happen by accident.” And when you consider that only 4 out of 10 companies are doing anything about it, it is not hard to see an opportunity for competitive advantage. Most people do things half way.

What are you doing to develop your leadership?