JWI510 WK2 Leadership Journey Using the Wall Street Journal menu link, select an article that relates to this week’s readings, videos, and discussions. Bri

JWI510 WK2 Leadership Journey Using the Wall Street Journal menu link, select an article that relates to this week’s readings, videos, and discussions. Briefly explain why you chose the article and how it relates to your leadership journey.https://www.wsj.com/ 5
Leadership
IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT YOU
O
N E D A Y,
you become a leader.
On Monday, you’re doing what comes naturally, enjoying
your job, running a project, talking and laughing with colleagues
about life and work, and gossiping about how stupid management
can be. Then on Tuesday, you are management. You’re a boss.
Suddenly, everything feels different—because it is different.
Leadership requires distinct behaviors and attitudes, and for many
people, they debut with the job.
Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself.
When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.
Without question, there are lots of ways to be a leader. You
need to look only as far as the freewheeling, straight-talking Herb
Kelleher, who ran Southwest Airlines for thirty years, and Microsoft’s quiet innovator, Bill Gates, to know that leaders come in
all varieties. In politics, take Churchill and Gandhi. In football, take
Lombardi and Belichick.
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Each of these leaders would give you a different list of leadership “rules.”
If asked, I would give you eight. They didn’t feel like rules
when I was using them. They just felt like the right way to lead.
This is not the last you will hear of leadership in this book.
Virtually every chapter touches on the subject, from crisis management to strategy to work-life balance.
But I’m starting with a separate chapter on leadership because
it is always on people’s minds. Over the past three years, during
my talks with students, managers, and entrepreneurs, leadership
questions invariably were asked. “What does a leader really do?”
for instance, and “I was just promoted and I’ve never run anything
before. How can I be a good leader?” Micromanagement often
comes up as an area of concern, as in, “My boss feels as if he has to
control everything—is that leadership or babysitting?” Similarly,
charisma gets a lot of queries; people ask, “Can you be introverted,
quiet, or just plain shy and still get results out of your people?”
Once, in Chicago, an audience member said, “I have at least two
direct reports who are smarter than I am. How can I possibly
appraise them?”
These kinds of questions have pushed me to make sense of my
own leadership experiences over forty years. Across the decades,
circumstances varied widely. I ran teams with three people and
divisions with thirty thousand. I managed businesses that were
dying and ones that were bursting with growth. There were
acquisitions, divestitures, organizational crises, moments of unexpected luck, good economies and bad.
And yet, some ways of leading always seemed to work. They
became my “rules.”
■
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■
WHAT LEADERS DO
1. Leaders relentlessly upgrade their team, using every
encounter as an opportunity to evaluate, coach, and
build self-confidence.
2. Leaders make sure people not only see the vision,
they live and breathe it.
3. Leaders get into everyone’s skin, exuding positive
energy and optimism.
4. Leaders establish trust with candor, transparency,
and credit.
5. Leaders have the courage to make unpopular decisions and gut calls.
6. Leaders probe and push with a curiosity that borders on skepticism, making sure their questions are
answered with action.
7. Leaders inspire risk taking and learning by setting
the example.
8. Leaders celebrate.
■
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THE DAILY BALANCING ACT
Before we look at each rule, a word on paradoxes. Leadership is
loaded with them.
The granddaddy of them all is the short-long paradox, as in the
question I often get: “How can I manage quarterly results and still
do what’s right for my business five years out?”
My answer is, “Welcome to the job!”
Look, anyone can manage for the short term—just keep
squeezing the lemon. And anyone can manage for the long—just
keep dreaming. You were made a leader because someone
believed you could squeeze and dream at the same time. They saw
in you a person with enough insight, experience, and rigor to
balance the conflicting demands of short- and long-term results.
Performing balancing acts every day is leadership.
Take rule 3 and rule 6. One says you should show positive
energy and optimism, showering your people with a can-do attitude. The other says you should constantly question your people
and take nothing they say for granted.
Or take rule 5 and rule 7. One says you need to act like a boss,
asserting authority. The other says you need to admit mistakes and
embrace people who take risks, especially when they fail.
Of course, life would be easier if leadership was just a list of
simple rules, but paradoxes are inherent to the trade.
That’s part of the fun of leading, though—each day is a challenge. It is a brand-new chance to get better at a job that, when all
is said and done, you can never be perfect at.
You can only give it everything you’ve got.
Here’s how.
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RULE 1. Leaders relentlessly upgrade their team,
using every encounter as an opportunity to evaluate,
coach, and build self-confidence.
After the Boston Red Sox finally broke an eighty-six–year
drought and won the World Series, you couldn’t turn on the TV
or open a paper without hearing speculation as to why 2004 was
“the year.” There were theories about everything, from centerfielder Johnny Damon’s hairstyle to the lunar eclipse!
Most people agreed, however, that the reason wasn’t mysterious at all. The Red Sox had the best players. The pitching staff was
the league’s best, the fielders were good enough, and the hitters
. . . well, they were sensational. And they were all bound together
by a winning spirit so palpable you could feel it in the air.
There are lucky breaks and bad calls in any season, but the team
with the best players usually does win. And that is why, very simply, you need to invest the vast majority of your time and energy as
a leader in three activities.
■ You have to evaluate—making sure the right
people are in the right jobs, supporting and
advancing those who are, and moving out those who
are not.
■ You have to coach—guiding, critiquing, and
helping people to improve their performance in
every way.
■ And finally, you have to build self-confidence—
pouring out encouragement, caring, and recognition.
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Self-confidence energizes, and it gives your people
the courage to stretch, take risks, and achieve
beyond their dreams. It is the fuel of winning teams.
Too often, managers think that people development occurs once a
year in performance reviews. That’s not even close.
People development should be a daily event, integrated into
every aspect of your regular goings-on.
Take budget reviews. They are a perfect occasion to focus on
people. That’s right, people. Yes, you need to talk about the business and its results, but in a budget review you can really see team
dynamics in action. If everyone around the table sits silent and
frozen while the team leader pontificates, you’ve got some serious
coaching to do. If everyone’s involved in the presentation and the
whole team is alive, you’ve got a great opportunity to give immediate feedback that you like what you see. If the team has a real star
or a dud in its midst, share your impressions with its leader as soon
as you can.
There is no event in your day that cannot be used for people
development.
Customer visits are a chance to evaluate your sales force. Plant
tours are an opportunity to meet
promising new line managers and
Take every opportunity
see if they have the ability to run
to inject self-confidence
something bigger. A coffee break at
into those who have
a meeting is an opening to coach a
team member who is about to give
earned it. Use ample
his first major presentation.
praise, the more specific
And remember in all these
the better.
encounters, evaluating and coaching are great, but building self-
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confidence is, in the end, probably the most important thing you
can do. Take every opportunity to inject self-confidence into
those who have earned it. Use ample praise, the more specific the
better.
Besides its huge impact on upgrading the team, the best thing
about using every encounter for people development is how
much fun it is. Instead of mind-numbing meetings about numbers
and plant tours showing off new machines, every day is about
growing people. In fact, think of yourself as a gardener, with a
watering can in one hand and a can of fertilizer in the other.
Occasionally you have to pull some weeds, but most of the time,
you just nurture and tend.
Then watch everything bloom.
RULE 2. Leaders make sure people not only see the
vision, they live and breathe it.
It goes without saying that leaders have to set the team’s vision and
most do. But there’s so much more to the “vision thing” than that.
As a leader, you have to make the vision come alive.
How do you achieve that? First of all, no jargon. Goals cannot
sound noble but vague. Targets cannot be so blurry they can’t be
hit. Your direction has to be so vivid that if you randomly woke
one of your employees in the middle of the night and asked him,
“Where are we going?” he could still answer in a half-asleep stupor,“We’re going to keep improving our service to individual
contractors and expand our market by aggressively reaching out to
small wholesalers.”
I had just that kind of experience last year when I was out
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hawking an investment fund for
Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, where I
There were times I
consult. At one dinner session in
talked about the
Chicago, the room was filled with
company’s direction so
about a dozen investors, all focused
many times in one day
on our investment criteria and projections for returns.
that I was completely
Steve Klimkowski, the chief
sick of hearing it myself.
investment officer of Northwestern
Memorial HealthCare, was one of
them. But in the midst of all the financial chatter, he was just as
interested in talking about his hospital’s mission to deliver “excellent patient care—from the patient’s perspective.” He had examples of how employees at every level—including him, the
investment guy—had transformed their work to fulfill the vision.
He had been coached, for example, never to give outpatients
directions to a location in the hospital, but to walk them there. At
his performance review, Steve had been asked to list several ways
in which he personally had improved the patient’s experience at
Northwestern Memorial. In fact, Steve’s understanding of his role
in achieving the mission, and his passion for it, were so real that
after talking to him for fifteen minutes, you could wake me in the
middle of the night and I could tell you about it!
Clearly, Northwestern Memorial’s leaders had communicated
the hospital’s vision with amazing clarity and consistency. And
that’s the point. You have to talk about vision constantly—
basically, to the point of gagging. There were times I talked about
the company’s direction so many times in one day that I was
completely sick of hearing it myself. But I realized the message
was always new to someone. And so, you keep on repeating it.
And you talk to everyone.
One of the most common problems in organizations is that
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leaders communicate the vision to their closest colleagues and its
implications never filter down to people in frontline positions.
Think about all the times you have bumped into a rude or harried
clerk at a high-service department store, or been put on hold by a
call center operator at a company that promises speed and convenience.
Somehow, they haven’t heard the mission, maybe because it
wasn’t shouted in their direction, loud enough or often enough.
Or maybe their rewards weren’t aligned.
And that’s the final piece of this particular leadership rule. If
you want people to live and breathe the vision, “show them the
money” when they do, be it with salary, bonus, or significant
recognition of some sort. To quote a friend of mine, Chuck Ames,
the former chairman and CEO of Reliance Electric, “Show me a
company’s various compensation plans, and I’ll show you how its
people behave.”
Vision is an essential element of the leader’s job. But no vision
is worth the paper it’s printed on unless it is communicated constantly and reinforced with rewards. Only then will it leap off the
page—and come to life.
RULE 3. Leaders get into everyone’s skin, exuding
positive energy and optimism.
You know that old saying “The fish rots from the head.” It’s mainly
used to refer to how politics and corruption filter down into an
organization, but it could just as easily be used to describe the
effect of a bad attitude at the top of any team, large or small. Eventually, everyone’s infected.
The leader’s mood is, for lack of a better word, catching. You’ve
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seen the dynamic a hundred times. An upbeat manager who goes
through the day with a positive outlook somehow ends up running a team or organization filled with . . . well, upbeat people
with positive outlooks. A pessimistic sourpuss somehow ends up
with an unhappy tribe all his own.
Unhappy tribes have a tough time winning.
Of course, sometimes there are good reasons to be down. The
economy is bad, competition is brutal—whatever. Work can be
hard.
But your job as leader is to fight the gravitational pull of negativism. That doesn’t mean you sugarcoat the challenges your team
faces. It does mean you display an energizing, can-do attitude
about overcoming them. It means you get out of your office and
into everyone’s skin, really caring about what they’re doing and
how they’re faring as you take the hill together.
Now, you might be thinking, “That kind of emotional bonding—it just ain’t me.”
And it isn’t for some people. I’ve seen a few capable managers
run their businesses while keeping their people at arm’s length.
These managers often demonstrated the right values, like candor
and rigor, and they delivered good results.
But in never really getting inside their people, something was
lost. Work stayed work.
The right attitude could have made it so much more.
Make that attitude yours.
RULE 4. Leaders establish trust with candor, transparency, and credit.
For some people, becoming a leader can be a real power trip. They
relish the feeling of control over both people and information.
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And so they keep secrets, reveal little
of their thinking about people and Leaders never score off
their performance, and hoard what their own people by
they know about the business and its
stealing an idea and
future.
This kind of behavior certainly claiming it as their own.
establishes the leader as boss, but it
drains trust right out of a team.
What is trust? I could give you a dictionary definition, but you
know it when you feel it. Trust happens when leaders are transparent, candid, and keep their word. It’s that simple.
Your people should always know where they stand in terms of
their performance. They have to know how the business is doing.
And sometimes the news is not good—such as imminent layoffs—
and any normal person would rather avoid delivering it. But you
have to fight the impulse to pad or diminish hard messages or
you’ll pay with your team’s confidence and energy.
Leaders also establish trust by giving credit where credit is due.
They never score off their own people by stealing an idea and
claiming it as their own. They don’t kiss up and kick down
because they are self-confident and mature enough to know that
their team’s success will get them recognition, and sooner rather
than later. In bad times, leaders take responsibility for what’s gone
wrong. In good times, they generously pass around the praise.
When you become a leader, sometimes you really feel the pull
to say, “Look at what I’ve done.” When your team excels, it’s only
normal to want some credit yourself.
After all, you run the show. You hand out the paychecks, so
people listen to your every word (or pretend to) and they laugh at
all your jokes (or pretend to). In some companies, being boss
means getting a special parking place or traveling first class. It
could go to your head. You could really start to feel pretty big.
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Don’t let it happen.
Remember, when you were made a leader you weren’t given a
crown, you were given a responsibility to bring out the best in
others. For that, your people need to trust you. And they will, as
long as you demonstrate candor, give credit, and stay real.
RULE 5. Leaders have the courage to make unpopular decisions and gut calls.
By nature, some people are consensus builders. Some people long
to be loved by everyone.
Those behaviors can really get you in the soup if you are a
leader, because no matter where you work or what you do, there
are times you have to make hard decisions—let people go, cut
funding to a project, or close a plant.
Obviously, tough calls spawn complaints and resistance. Your
job is to listen and explain yourself clearly but move forward. Do
not dwell or cajole.
You are not a leader to win a popularity contest—you are a
leader to lead. Don’t run for office. You’re already elected.
Sometimes making a decision is hard not because it’s unpopular, but because it comes from your gut and defies a “technical” rationale.
Much has been written about
the mystery of gut, but it’s really just
You are not a leader
pattern recognition, isn’t it? You’ve
to win a popularity
seen something so many times
contest—you are a
you just know what’s going on
leader to lead.
this time. The facts may be incomplete or the data limited, but the
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situation feels very, very familiar
to you.
If you’re left with that
Leaders are faced with gut calls uh-oh feeling in your
all the time. You’re asked to invest in
stomach, don’t hire
a new office building, for instance,
but visiting the city,you see cranes in the guy.
every direction. The deal’s numbers
are absolutely perfect, you’re told,
but you’ve been here before.You know that overcapacity is around
the corner and the “perfect” investment is about to be worth sixty
cents on the dollar. You’ve got no proof, but you’ve got a real uhoh feeling in your stomach.
You have to kill the deal, even if that pisses people off.
Sometimes the hardest gut calls involve picking people. You
meet a candidate who has all the right stuff. His résumé is perfect:
prestigious schools and great experience. His interview is impressive: firm handshake, good eye contact, smart questions, and so on.
But something nags at you. Maybe he’s moved around an awful
lot—he’s just had too many jobs in too few years without a plausible enough explanation. Or his energy seems too frantic. Or one
previous boss said nice things about him but didn’t sound as
though he really meant them.
And you’re left with that uh-oh feeling in your stomach again.
Don’t hire the guy.
You’ve been made a leader because you’ve seen more and been
right more times. Listen to your gut. It’s telling you something.
RULE 6. Leaders probe and push with a curiosity that
borders on skepticism, making sure their questions are
answered with action.
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When you are an individual contributor, you try to have all the
answers. That’s your job—to be an expert, the best at what you do,
maybe even the smartest person in the room.
When you are a leader, your job is to have all the questions.You
have to be incredibly comfortable looking like the dumbest
person in the room. Every conversation you have about a decision, a proposal, or a piece of market information has to be filled
with you saying, “What if?” and “Why not?” and “How come?”
When I was �…
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