Brought to you by Jeff Thoren, DVM  

The opportunity to make a significant difference by equipping today’s leaders and those who aspire to serve in leadership roles is incredibly compelling to me.  In thinking about the qualities that characterize effective leaders, I was reminded of this month’s feature article.

Now is indeed the time for leaders of integrity and character, leaders who live the values, who are healers and unifiers, and who bring hope to the people and the work of the enterprise.  Bringing hope, healing, and unity within the organization as well as beyond its walls are essential qualities required of leaders of the future.

Here’s this month’s feature ...

The Leaders We Need
by Frances Hesselbein

From - Leader to Leader, No. 35, Winter 2005

Highlights from the article:

Frances Hesselbein, chairman of the Board of Governors of the Leader to Leader Institute and former chief executive of the Girl Scouts of the USA, poses the question, “What kind of leaders do people deserve and require?”  Here’s her checklist:

• We need leaders who practice dispersed leadership, leaders at every level of the enterprise, so that we are relying not on the leader but on leaders throughout the organization.
    

• We need leaders who believe and embody in concept, language, and action that leadership is a matter of how to be, not how to do, knowing in the end that it is the quality and character of the leader that is most important.
    

• We need leaders who believe and demonstrate that the people of the organization are the organization’s greatest asset - making that a reality, not a slogan.
    

• We need leaders who effectively communicate in a way that connects with and inspires people, leaders who invest in building a mission-focused and values-driven organization.
    

• We need leaders who practice the art of listening, building consensus, appreciating differences, finding common concepts, common language, and common ground.
    

• We need leaders who in their own lives try to find work-life balance and make work-life balance a reality in the lives of their people.
    

• Perhaps most of all, we need leaders who share successes widely while accepting responsibility for shortfalls and failures.

These are all qualities that I attempt to model, teach, and encourage in others.  While the concept of distributed leadership and an entire team or organization functioning cooperatively to achieve exceptional results is easy to understand, it’s a much greater challenge to bring to fruition.

• How do you rate yourself related to the aptitudes on the above checklist? 
    

• How would those that you seek to influence and lead rate you?  Why not ask them?

For the full text article, go to ...
http://www.leadertoleader.org/knowledgecenter/journal.aspx?ArticleID=43

The Lone Ranger is Dead

Nothing about the world today is any simpler or slower, which makes the ability to collaborate and facilitate great collaboration more vital than ever.  In sync with Frances Hesselbein’s words, Warren Bennis shares the following comments in his classic book, On Becoming a Leader:

“Great leaders and followers are always engaged in a creative collaboration.  We still tend to think of leaders, like artists, as solitary geniuses.  In fact, the days when a single individual, however gifted, can solve our problems are long gone.  The problems we face today come at us so fast and are so complex, that we need groups of talented people to tackle them, led by gifted leaders, or even teams of leaders.  As co-author Patricia Ward Biederman and I write in our book, Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration, ‘The Lone Ranger is dead.’  In order to lead a great group, a leader need not possess all the individual skills of the group members.  What he or she must have are vision, the ability to rally others, and integrity.”

Bennis' use of the term "gifted leaders" obviously caught my eye as well as the connection between this kind of leader and creative collaboration.  What's interesting is that while the days of the Lone Ranger style of leadership - according to Bennis and many others - are long gone, it's still pretty common.  In fact, it's still highly valued in many organizations.  What will it take to change that? 

For starters, we'll need a different approach to leadership - a relational approach that emphasizes integrity, authenticity and building trust.  Effective leaders will need coaching skills to bring out the best in others, communication skills to mediate conflict and give everyone a voice, and the passion to make a difference. 

Next Month

A study of 125 successful leaders reveals that their common denominator was a transformative passage through which they recognized that leadership wasn’t about their own success or about getting others to follow them.  They had to come face to face with the limits of what they had done before, confront the necessity to change, and move from “I” to “We.”

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