Brought to you by Jeff Thoren, DVM, ACC  

No one leader can be all things to all people. Unfortunately, many of us in leadership roles feel that we need to try to live up to some lofty ideal (either our own or someone else’s) which can result in frustration and burnout.

“It’s time to end the myth of the complete leader; the flawless person at the top who’s got it all figured out,” say the authors of this month’s feature article. No leader is perfect. The best ones don’t try to be - they concentrate on honing their strengths and find others who can make up for their limitations.

Only by embracing the ways in which they are incomplete can leaders fill in the gaps in their abilities with the skills of others. The incomplete leader has the confidence and humility to recognize unique talents and perspectives throughout their team or organization - and to let those qualities shine.

Here’s this month’s feature ...

In Praise of the Incomplete Leader by Deborah Ancona, Thomas Malone, Wanda Orlikowski, and Peter Senge 

From CIO New Zealand - March 2007

Highlights from the article:

• The sooner leaders stop trying to be all things to all people, the better off their organizations will be. The leader’s job is no longer to command and control but to cultivate and coordinate the actions of others. Only when leaders come to see themselves as incomplete - as having both strengths and weaknesses - will they be able to make up for their missing skills by relying on others.
    

• No one person could possibly stay on top of everything. But the myth of the complete leader (and the attendant fear of appearing incompetent) makes many people try to do just that, exhausting themselves and damaging their organizations in the process.
    

• The incomplete leader knows that leadership exists throughout the organizational hierarchy - wherever expertise, vision, new ideas, and commitment are found.
    

• The authors' study of leadership over the past six years has led them to develop a framework of distributed leadership that consists of four capabilities:

1. Sensemaking involves understanding and mapping the context in which a company and its people operate. It means constantly observing and understanding changes in the business environment and interpreting the ramifications. A leader skilled in this area can quickly identify the complexities of a given situation and explain them to others.

2. Relating means being able to build trusting relationships with others through inquiring (listening to understand other’s viewpoints), advocating (respectfully explaining your own viewpoints), and connecting (cultivating networks of supportive confidants). Because no one person can possibly have all the answers, or indeed, know all the right questions to ask, it’s critical that leaders be able to tap into a network of people who can fill in the gaps.

3. Visioning means coming up with a credible and compelling image of a desired future. It is a collaborative process that articulates what the members of an organization want to create together. Visioning gives people a sense of meaning in their work.

4. Inventing involves developing new ways to bring that vision to life. To realize a new vision, people usually can’t keep doing the same things they’ve been doing so inventing means creating new ways of approaching tasks or overcoming seemingly insurmountable problems to turn the vision into reality.

• Rarely will a single person be skilled in all four areas. That's why it's critical that leaders find others who can offset their limitations and complement their strengths. Those who don't will not only bear the burden of leadership alone but will find themselves at the helm of an unbalanced ship.
    

• Teams and organizations - not just individuals - can use this four-part framework to diagnose their strengths and weaknesses and find ways to balance their skill sets.

  
For the full text article, go to ...
http://cio.co.nz/cio.nsf/read/9071DC1ACD9BAD75CC2572AD007631EE

   
Go Ahead, Take Off Your Mask and Stop Trying to Be All Things to All People

The myth of the complete leader goads some people into a futile effort to be all things to all people. The result can be damaging to the person and the organization, says Deborah Ancona, professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. In a 2007 Harvard Business Review article, In Praise of the Incomplete Leader (http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/), Ancona and her coauthors admit that the myth is very alluring.  “But,” they say, “in today’s world of increasingly complex problems, no human being can meet this standard.”

Jim Kouzes, co-author of The Leadership Challenge and A Leader’s Legacy, is very familiar with the pressure leaders feel to be “super human.”  Here are his thoughts and recommendations:

Regarding the expectation to be "super-human," perhaps what is most needed is the courage to be simply human. Anyone who's ever been in a leadership role quickly learns that you're squeezed between other's lofty expectations and your own personal limitations.

You realize that while others want you to be of impeccable character, you're not always without fault. You learn that you can't see around every corner, and even if you know your way forward everyone may not end up at the same destination, let alone be on time. You discover that despite your best efforts to introduce brilliant innovations, most of them don't succeed. You find that you sometimes get angry and short, and that you don't always listen carefully to what others have to say. You're reminded that you don't always treat everyone with dignity and respect. You recognize that others deserve more credit than they get, and that you've failed to say "thank you." You know that sometimes you get, and take, more credit than you deserve.

In other words, you realize that you're human.

The courage to be human is the courage to be humble. It takes a lot of courage to admit that you aren't always right, that you can't always anticipate every possibility, that you can't envision every future, that you can't solve every problem, that you can't control every variable, that you aren't always congenial, that you make mistakes, and that you are, well, human.

It takes courage to admit all these things to others, but it may take even more courage to admit them to ourselves. If you can find the humility to do that, however, you invite others into a courageous conversation. When you let down your guard and open yourself up to others, you invite them to join you in creating something that you alone could not create. When you become more modest and unpretentious, others have the chance themselves to become visible and noticed.

 
Next Month

Every great team has a special breed of leader. This new breed of “high-performance leader” is radically different from leaders in traditional, hierarchical organizations. These leaders have made the transition to a model where all team members - as well as the leader - are held equally accountable.

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