White Papers Archive
  The Accidental Leader
  Its lonely at the top
 
  Ten functions of today's planners
  In our experience, corporate planning departments
 
  Focus Group Results
  Ever wonder how your views on leadership stack up against those of your peers?
 
  The Challenge of Strategy: Seven Lessons
  Managing Major Organizational Change: Key Elements
 
  Of Teams and Teambuilding
  All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way
 
  Three Dimensions of Leadership
  Knowledge is the distilled essence of our intuition, corroborated by experience
 
  Having a Great Company
  Want to have a great company? Across all industries and in a surprisingly broad range of economic conditions, only 6% - that’s about one in 17 - consistently out-perform their peers.
 
  Strategic Planning Committee
  Developing an Appropriate Fact-Base for Strategy Making
 
  Managing Major Organizational Change
  These principles give rise to approaches calling for the involvement of larger groups than are typically involved in a change process.
 
  Business Innovation…Table Stakes for "Stayin Alive"
  We often begin engagements with an intergroup competition calling for teams of people to assemble a "product" or achieve a goal by working together toward a "best of breed" solution.
 
  Kipp & Associates

Three Dimensions of Leadership -
"Knowledge is the distilled essence of our intuition, corroborated by experience." Albert Hubble

Over 2,000 books and 60,000 articles have been written on leadership…just since World War II! Hundreds of courses to enhance one’s leadership skills are offered each year. Beyond that, everyone either called to lead or dependent upon leadership has ideas on the question of leader effectiveness. Everyone agrees that leadership matters …to the situation, to be sure, and to the leader as well. But how does one distill all the noise in this arena? We have found a three dimensional framework…contextual, behavioral and personal…to be highly useful for thinking, acting and coaching in this vitally important area.

Contextual - Leaders are always more effective when they attend to what is really happening rather than relying on remembered formulas and prescriptions. The challenge of context is the cognitive work of leaders, co-existing with the motivational work of pointing, rallying and nurturing. It involves reading the emerging situation, articulating a grounded vision of “the best we can become,” and describing what the journey will require of us.

When I was at HCA in the early 80’s, our firm was cited by Forbes as “One of the Five Best Managed Companies in America.” Then Chairman Don McNaughton took pains to remind us that International Harvester, struggling to recover from Chapter 11at the time, had been similarly designated only a few short years before. What ensued was a probing discussion of shifts in the vanishing world in which we’d made our mark. This was the start of our effort to reframe strategy. (See our earlier newsletter on “The Challenge of Strategy: Seven Lessons”).

Behavioral - This is often the focus of leader development and the core of the literature to date. In fact, leadership style has become something of a “packaged goods industry.”

Scan any of the hundreds of books written just since the early 90’s and you’ll find a behavioral checklist:

· Develop a vision
· Challenge current practice
· Take action
· Generate confidence
· Give thanks

In practice, however, leadership goes well beyond such recipes. Sometimes the right thing to do is not to drive a group into action, but to lead them into reflection. Behaviors must always be guided by judgment, and leaders must constantly develop their ability to sense, enroll and respond.

The behaviors we have found most useful are listening, synthesizing, anticipative thinking, conflict validation and yes, storytelling. In his landmark 1995 treatment of Leading Minds, Howard Gardner illustrates convincingly that leaders achieve their effectiveness chiefly through the creation and embodiment of an effective story…a portrayal that helps members think through issues of identity and destiny

Personal - One of the handiest coping mechanisms for leaders is to appropriate somebody else’s style...preferably somebody who looks like they’ve got the world by the fanny...and to borrow their behavioral tricks in the bargain.

Remember when you used to change the spelling of your name? As a college student, I used to be Myke, reaching for a uniqueness that wasn’t part of the original package. Early in my career I would get in a jam and try to recreate the style of Ray, my first mentor. The advanced stages of this strategy involve attempting to carry yourself like Lou Gerstner...or talking tough like Al Dunlap.

There is a wonderful Yiddish story about a good man who tried all his life to do what he thought was right by behaving like the people who were most admired in his community. When he died and stood before God he was asked, “Why weren’t you Zoysha? You’re the only one who could have been.”

Another favored strategy is to reach back to a template that worked for you in the past…often with disastrous results. Joseph Campbell used to say that “if you see your path laid out before you, step by step by step, then you know it’s not your path. It’s someone else’s that you’ve mistaken for your own.” Tempting as it is, it is impossible to sustain a borrowed life. We believe you can learn a great deal about leadership by studying leaders, but can only become a leader by studying yourself. Only then are leaders able to be fresh to the challenges of their role and truly authentic in their performance.20

Throughout 1998, our intention is to offer a comprehensive perspective on leadership. While this edition conveyed the basic architecture, next time we will explore the avenues to authenticity. That issue will describe a phenomena we have come to know as “the accidental leader.” Fall’s offering will profile the results of focus groups we have been conducting among company Presidents. Collectively, these notions form the scaffolding for our work in Executive Coaching. Stay with us.