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昨天做了Act Like a Leader 第二章Redefine Your Job部分摘要如下
2. Redefine Your Job
There is no doubt that the capacity to lead change is at the top of the list of leadership competencies.
Boiled down to its essence, strategy entails knowing what to do among the many things competing for our attention, how to get it done, and why.
How to reallocate your time to prioritize unfamiliar and nonroutine activities that will increase your capacity to act more strategically through a wider view of your business, your group’s place in the large organization, and your work’s contribution to outcomes that matter.
To avoid the kind of competency trap—doing the wrong things well, you need to understand how once-useful mind-sets and operating habits can persist long after they have outlived their usefulness.
Avoid the competency trap. We all like to do what we already do well. Like athletes and companies, managers and professionals overinvest in their strengths under the false assumption that what produced their past successes will necessarily lead to future wins. Eventually we become trapped in well-honed routines that no longer correspond to the requirements of a new environment.
We enjoy what we do well, so we do more of it and get still better at it. The more we do something, the more expert we become at it and the more we enjoy doing it. Such a feedback loop motivates us to get even more experience. The mastery we feel is like a drug, deepening both our enjoyment and our sense of self-efficacy.
“You work on things you like and think are important. It is a problem.”
When we allocate more time to what we do best, we devote less time to learning other things that are also important. The problem isn’t just what we are doing; it’s what we’re neglecting to do (and not learning to do) instead. So some leadership muscles get very strong while others remain underdeveloped. Over time, it gets more costly to invest in learning to do new things.
What are you failing to do? Not strategizing for a more stable medium term? Not taking into account the views and priorities of corporate support functions, not having difficult conversations with key members of the team or coaching them through the issues that got them in over their heads, not keeping the far-off boss adequately informed.
The effective managers spent most of their time working with their direct reports inside their teams. The successful managers spent much more time on networking activities with peers in other units and higher-ups throughout the organization.
Understand what leaders really do. At its essence, management entails doing today’s work as efficiently and competently as possible within established goals, procedures, and organizational structures. Leadership, in contract, is aimed at creating change in what we de and how we do it, which is why leadership requires working outsides established goals, procedures, and structures and explaining to others why it’s important to change—even when the reasons may be blatantly obvious to us.
When doing leadership work, we’re asking, “what should we be doing instead?” we spend our time on things that might not have any immediate payoff and may not even pay off at all. To act like leaders, we will have to devote much of our time to the following practices:
Bridging across diverse people and groups
Envisioning new possibilities
Engaging people in the change process
Embodying the change
Become a bridge. Consider the conventional wisdom about how to lead a team effectively: set clear goals; assign clear tasks to members; manage the team’s internal dynamics and norms; communicate regularly; pay attention to how members feel, and give them recognition; and so on. These are important things to do, but they may not make much of a difference to your results. Research found that the best leaders worked as bridges between the team and its external environment. They spent much of their time outside, not inside the team. They went out on reconnaissance, made sure the right information and resources were getting to the team, broadcasted accomplishments selectively, and secured buy-in from higher up when things got controversial. Moreover, successful leaders monitored what other teams—potential competitors, potential teams from whom they could learn and not reinvest the wheel—were doing.
Cox is a classic example of the leader as a bridge between her team and the relevant parties outside the team. She spent much of her time of talking to key people across and outside the firm to develop a strategic perspective on the nature of the threats and opportunities facing her nascent group and to sell the emerging notion of low-carbon power to then CEO and her peers. “It can be so helpful to make a comment here, have a conversation there—it’s the socialization of facts and ideas, creating a buzz. It’s much more important than presentations. If it works well, you create a demand for the information—they come to you to ask for more.”
When you play a hub role, your team and customers are at the center of your work; when you play a bridge role, as Cox did, you work to link your team to the rest of the relevant world.
Are you a hub or a bridge?
Hub roles: Set goals for the team; Assign roles to your people; Assign tasks; Monitor progress toward goals; Manage team member performance; Conduct performance evaluation.
Bridge roles: Align team goals with organizational priorities; Funnel critical information and resources into the team to ensure progress toward goals; Get the support of key allies outside the team; Enhance the external visibility and reputation of the team; Get recognition for good performers and place them in great next assignments.
No matter what kind of organization you work in, team leaders who scout ideas from outside the group, seek feedback from and coordinate with a range of outsiders, monitor the shifting winds within the organization, and obtain support and resources from top managers are able to build more innovative products and services faster than those who dedicate themselves solely to managing inside the team. Part of the secret of their success is that all their bridging activity gives them the outsight they need to develop a point of view on their business, see the big picture organizationally, and set direction accordingly.
Do the “Vision Thing”. The external perspective gained by redefining your work more broadly is a key determinant of whether you, as the leader, will have good strategic ideas. More importantly, an external perspective helps you translate your ideas into an attractive vision of the future for your team and organization. The ability to envision possibilities for the future and to share that vision with others distinguishes leaders from nonleaders.
Most everyone agrees that envisioning involves creating a compelling image of the future: what could be and, more importantly, what you, as a leader, would like the future to be.
What Does It Mean to Have Vision? The following capabilities or practices are some specific ways good leaders develop vision.
Sensing Opportunities and Threats in the Environment
Simplifying complex situations; Seeing patterns in seemingly unconnected phenomena; Foreseeing events that may affect the organization’s bottom line.
Setting Strategic Direction
Encouraging new business; Defining new strategies; Making decisions with an eye toward the big picture.
Inspiring Others to Look beyond Current Practice
Asking questions that challenge the status quo; Being open to new ways of doing things; Bringing an external perspective.
Crafting a vision entails developing and articulating an aspiration. Strategy involves using that aspiration to guide a set of choices about how to best invest time and resources to produce the result you actually want. In annual planning, there is a clear process for producing and presenting a document consisting of a list of initiatives with their associated time frames and assigned resources. At best, an annual plan produces incremental gains. Envisioning the future is a much more dynamic, creative, and collaborative process of imagining a transformation in what an organization does and how it does it.
Executives are required to shift their emphasis from improving current operations and performance indicators to shaping a common understanding of the organization’s present environment and its desired future direction.
Engage, Then Lead. “I had a vision, and I was waiting for everyone else to agree. I was not going to put my vision for revision—it would fly as it was, or not. I didn’t build any bridges to those who didn’t immediately agree with you.”
Three key components for success in leading change: The idea + the process + you=success in leading in change
Process is hugely important not because results are unimportant but because most change efforts have long-term horizons and because results take time. People make up their mind about whether they want to buy in much earlier, while the initiative is still in progress and the jury is still out on its ultimate success. Consciously or unconsciously, they are looking for clues about whether the initiative will succeed and what success means for them, and they use those clues to place their bets.
So, the bulk of people’s attention is devoted to the process the leader uses to come up with and implement the idea: Was the leader inclusive or exclusive, participative or directive? Did he or she involve the right people and enough of them? What levers is the leader using, and are they the right one?
Steps and Styles in Leading Change
Key steps in leading change
Create urgency; Form a guiding coalition; Craft a vision; Communicate the vision; Empower others to act on it; Secure short-term wins; Embed the change in the organization’s systems and processes.
Stylistic choices that influence the change process
Where do I get my information? How much do I involve others? What people do I involved? How many? How will I sell my ideas? What should my role be? How fast should we go?
People create a self-fulfilling prophecy: if they have faith in the leader, then they will cooperate and commit, thereby increasing the likelihood of success.
Embody the change. Charisma is less a quality of a person than a quality of a person’s relationships with others. Because charismatic leaders tend to bridge across organizational groups and external constituents, they are excellent at sensing trends, threats, and opportunities in the environment and therefore able to generate sounder, more appealing ideas. Specifically, charismatic leaders have three other things in common: (1)Strong conviction based on their personal experience; (2)Good and frequent communication, mostly through personal stories; (3)A strong coherence between what they believe, what they actually do, and who they are.
Make Your Job a Platform. How do you develop the capacities to bridge different groups, envision a future, engage others, and embody the change? How do you start learning to become a more effective change leader, right now where you are? You start by making your job a platform for doing and learning new things.
No matter what your current situation is, there are five things you can do to begin to make your job a platform for expanding your leadership: (1) Develop your situation sensors; (2)Get involved in projects outside your area; (3)Participate in extracurricular activities; (4)Communicate your personal why; (5) Create slack in your schedule.
Develop your Sensors. Leaders are constantly trying to understand the bigger context in which they operate. The more senior you become or the more widespread your responsibilities, the more your job requires you to sense the world around you. “A leader has to understand the world. You have to be far more external, more cosmopolitan, have a more global view than ever before, to define your company’s place in that, its purpose and value….” You need to have a very broad understanding of the business. You can’t wait and react all the time. It is a certain capacity to manage information. You have to have your information system well ordered, so that when my boss calls me and says, “I need an input into this or that,” I am able to convert my knowledge into value-adding stuff.
Find a Project Outside Your Area. In my survey about what most helped people step up to leadership, one of the top items was “experience in an internal project outside my usual responsibilities.” The new skills, the big-picture perspective, the extra-group connections, and the ideas about future opportunities that you gain form temporary assignments like these are well worth the investment.
Participate in Extracurricular Activities. Professional roles outside your organization can be invaluable for learning and practicing new ways of operating, raising your profile, and, maybe more importantly, revising your own limited view of yourself and improving your career prospects.
If you are feeling stuck or stale, raise your outsight by participating in industry conferences or other professional gatherings that bring together people from different companies and walks of life. Build from your interests, not just your experiences. Teach, speak, or blog on topics that you know something about, or about which you want to learn.
Communicate “Why”. A message is twenty times more likely to be remembered accurately and longer when it is conveyed through a well-constructed story than when it is based on facts or figures.
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