This weekend’s exclusive book excerpt comes from “Leadership Sustainability: Seven Disciplines to Achieve the Changes Great Leaders Know They Must Make” by Dave Ulrich, New York Times bestselling coauthor of “The Why of Work.”
Whether you’re a business owner or just part of the marketing team, you’re in charge of leading something. Do you lead your initiatives well? Do you create practical ways to complete tasks? This book provides how-tos on the seven disciplines of being an effective leader, no matter the industry.
Thanks to McGraw-Hill for the sneak peek!
“Most people have routines that they consciously or unconsciously follow. They drive to and from work on the same way every day. They eat the same food for breakfast – or they always skip breakfast because they are late. Routines such as this show up in many areas.
For example, there are lots of unwritten rules of conduct about being a good participant in a workshop, conference and training program. One of them is that people “own” their spot in the room after they have claimed it the first day. Experiment with this conventional wisdom by changing your seat during the day or the next day, and you will likely encounter a hostile glance, an impatient comment, or perhaps even a declaration of territory from the person who sat there first.
Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregerson, and Clayton Christensen argue that there is a difference between discovery and delivery skills among founder CEOs of companies that innovate successfully. Discovery skills allow innovators to come up with new ideas by thinking and acting different from others. Delivery skills emphasize executive though planning, organizing, implementing, and controlling. Founder CEOs of innovative companies tend to score high in both dimensions, whereas successor CEOs tend to score much higher in delivery skills. So what enables someone to become more innovative and to think and act differently from others? Dyer, Gregerson and Christensen discovered four individual actions that increase discovery in the innovation process: questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting.
The delivery skills that lead to sustainability had been discussed in other chapters. But even in the discovery process, leaders who experiment encourage sustainability. Experimenting leaders challenge themselves and others to try new and different ways of doing things, to learn from them, and to make them stick. They also run lots of pilot tests with the axioms:
- Think big. By thinking big, leaders want to get to the largest upside possible. What is the potential of what I want to get done?
- Test small. By testing small, leaders run pilots rather than taking big risks. Where can we test this potential with the smallest risk?
- Fail fast. By failing fast, leaders learn how the idea, product, or initiative might or might not meet its potential. What are the criteria for success, and how do we encourage success and learn from failure?
- Learn always. By constantly staying open to learning, leaders have a mind-set of continuous improvement with both successes and failures. What worked and what did not, and how can we learn from it?
Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood, Leadership Sustainability, ©2013, McGraw-Hill Professional; reprinted with permission of the publisher