Regenerate!

Leadership is not just about vision, values, and communication. Important though these are,  great leaders do much more -create brands, create great products, and achieve process breakthroughs. Here is an example. The Tata Swach. Design Directions, our associates, provided industrial design to Tata Chemicals for Swatch -water purifier based on nano technology and rice husk.

I work with Design Directions on several projects involving branding, user interface design, industrial design, and product design.  You get a lot with us… Leadership Learning, process breakthroughs, product, UI, and communication design!

Read on for more details….

The Regenerative Leadership achieves more from less, it embraces changes before they threaten existence, and it sets the organization on to the virtuous loop of higher and higher performance.

The Regenerative Leadership is a loop consisting of activities such as:
-making sense of reality
-understanding, articulating, and implementing general and specific values
-Leveraging small and big ideas
-learning and teaching
-articulating larger vision
-coming up with actions and taking actions that change reality (bias for actions)
-Learning from all above and revisiting all above periodically (the regenerative loop)

I have found that this loop releases energies for change and transformation in organizations that take up such leadership development programs.

For knowing how the regenerative leadrship helps you develop your leadership pipeline read about career planning.

Hemant

Leadership is often described in terms of vision, inspiration, courage, passion, dynamism, motivation, change & transformation, mobilization etc. While all these are important outcomes or facets of leadership they do not offer many clues about how to get there if one wants to develop leadership skills.

When I think about leadership, I can think about feeling responsible and doing something about it. If I think of leadership in the context of organizations I can say that to improve leadership skills one needs to get better at a range of competencies.

A leader should be able to grasp and face reality in all its complexities. The reality must cover ‘own and internal’ reality. The leader should be able to both handle and harness emotions well. He \ she should be able to identify and implement values.  The leader should be able to generate and harness small and big ideas, generate excitement and develop them into overarching vision. The leader should be able to connect with the organization’s goals and generate breakthroughs in projects and processes. He \ she should be able to learn quickly and teach for developing people. The leader should be able to develop an agenda covering all above and should be able to communicate it simply and directly.

At different points of an executive’s career and depending on the organization’s situation the emphasis would shift, but I have come to believe that above competencies remain core.

Having defined the competencies in these specific terms it easier to think about ways of getting there.

There are many facets of leadership -vision, values, transformation, and others. Leadership competencies include ability to understand reality, ability to see the larger picture, ability to marshal resources, passion for developing people, and more.

But if I am asked,  “what is a leader’s ‘output’” or “what is the ‘outcome’ of leadership?”, I will say that on a day-today basis the outcome of ‘good’ leadership is inspiring people to accomplish something, making a routine job worthwhile.

And what is ‘inspiration’? It is feeling which gives that booster dose of energy. If the primary outcome of good leadership is inspiration, can there be able leadership without good emotional capabilities?

Emotional capability is that X-factor behind successful leadership. Emotional capability is not just emotional intelligence.

Without the ability to understand emotions, without the ability to deal with them, and without the ability to harness them, much of a leader’s thinking will remain just thinking and every action will need exercise of formal authority. No matter, what position a leader occupies there are many crucial aspects that are beyond his formal powers. He or she must have that X-factor.

Given the way in which people get their education and ‘training’ on the job, most have learned and have come to believe that emotions are bad, particularly in business or in serious work. This becomes a major factor that hinders capable people from realising full potential -theirs’ and others’.

Development of this X-factor, therefore, is one of the cornerstones of developing leadership skills.

If yes, then give it a little more thought. Your business metrics can make a big impact on your strategic and tactical decisions.

Metrics or measurements used for reviewing and planning various aspects of business have a lot of bearing on the results because what is measured and inspected is considered important by people. Metrics can be classified as historical or forward looking. Bias for historical data and analysis needs to be overcome. Customers, employees, and cash flows can provide vital clues to CEOs aiming to establish more forward looking signals and metrics. One can derive actionable points from even historical metrics if root-cause analysis for coming up with pro-active actions is done. Will all this take CEO’s attention away from vision, innovation, and inspiring people? No. The above methods provide a springboard for day to day innovation and path breaking ideas. They also support realizing the vision.

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Read my full article at ezinearticle.com

Leadership and branding are hot topics. Leadership development programs are quite popular. There are many conferences and seminars on the subject of branding. Leadership development and brand development consume a lot of resources of businesses.

Leadership means different things to different people. It means ability to inspire. Leadership is charisma, courage, and even sacrifice. Leadership requires vision. Leadership is talked about in rarefied atmosphere of CEO conferences, business schools, HR meets, and strategy meets. There seems to be an unstated and unanimous agreement that leadership is too important, too-sweeping-in-its-scope, too-good-to-be-described, and therefore too-complex-to-be-systematically-deployed concept. Everyone is convinced that such indescribable leadership must be good for any organization.

Branding too captures imagination of people. For some CEO s it is a reverential bowing item to be ticked off the agenda. For CFO s it is a black hole of cash. Sales people think it is a watering hole for unsuccessful ex-salesmen. For M & A specialists it is a valuation game. It is a playground of creativity for advertising agencies. It is PR first for PR agencies. For many, branding means eye catching, entertaining, beautiful visual and audio communications or smart copy. Everyone knows branding and everyone has definite opinions about it.

Is there then any connection between leadership and branding? Leaders are responsible for branding. But they are also responsible for many other things. Are there any fundamental linkages?

Read my full article at ezinearticle.com

Here is an excellent article for our troubled times…

Column : The purpose-driven company - The Financial Express

The conventional view is that, in hard times, business leaders have a responsibility to keep their eyes firmly on the bottom line, protecting workers’ jobs and shareholders’ investment. To do this, business leaders often focus on cutting costs since it is difficult to raise prices in times when consumers are especially price conscious. An auto manufacturer may use lower quality inputs, a consulting firm may staff fewer resources for a client, or a consumer goods manufacturer may cut back on quality checks. Alternately, or sometimes in parallel, businesses will try to raise prices through hidden fees

Do read the complete article. Vikram Akula, who runs SKS Microfinance, writes about his approach and experience. One would expect that a microfinance company would cave in to market pressures when the big and the ‘best’ (till yesterday) have fallen.

My take is that a leader must ask and answer this question: “what are we there in this business for?” He must stick it out. That is tough but if done consistently across the organization and also across it’s partners, employees, vendors and customers it is possible emerge as much stronger entity.

At Learning Leadership, our workouts aim to  integrate these principles into Leader’s Agenda.

Hemant