Facts about leadership

What does it mean to be a leader ?

Able to think clearly & wisely Make things happen Communicate well Engage other
people to follow their lead Leaders have the gift to inspire people to perform beyond,
what they had previously considered to be their BEST and achieve outstanding results.
Management Requires Regular Education
Managers need to learn & grow, discover their future & potential as a leader. Leaders
need to have their own inner leadership, a transformational relationship with themselves
in which they consciously dedicate time & resources to the education of themselves &
continue to grow & develop to meet the challenges of the changing world in which they
are operating.
Primary Goal of the Organizations
1.Criticality of the relevance Organization must remain relevant-societies,
stakeholders interested and affected by their action. Relevance is major driving force.
If not, Organization will soon loose its attraction to its markets and customers. End up
with dysfunctional behaviors, decay and disappear.
2. Relevance is Relational Power
Being relevant means engaged power
Relevant--- Power--- Significance Irrelevant ---Powerless---Insignificant With
power one can do and achieve things Power and relevance goes hand in hand Without
power organization dies
Challenge for leaders
What relevance means To whom Which markets to target Geographical positions
eg. Wal-mart unable to become relevant to sufficient German customers. Exit the
market
3.Relevance requires responding to new realities
New realities are always arriving Underlying purpose of the organization must be
made relevant through vision statements That lays out goals and strategies that cohere
with the organizations competencies And above all address changing realities

Being in tune with new realities, what makes organization adaptive and creative Some
realities are obvious and explicit Some are not that readily obvious and are more
implicit Some changes slowly creep up and appear to be a big new reality To remain
alive and relevant organizations should respond to new realities

Shift in Paradigm
From Stability to change & crisis management From Control to empowerment From
Competition to collaboration From Uniformity to diversity From Self centered to
higher ethical purpose. CHANGE THEORIES
Address change from a number of different perspectives: 1. Internal Vs External
(Environmentally determined) Stimulus for change is external to the system changing.
All change is driven by environmental change.
2. Radical Vs Incremental
Focus is whether the change is transformational or evolutionary phenomenon Theory
focus on to the implications of radical turnarounds as opposed to creeping strategic,
structural and behavioral change. Both types of change occur simultaneously in a far
less definable or controlled fashion than we like to imagine.
3. Selection Vs Crises
Focuses on the action of management Either by selection of certain specific change
strategies in a strategic and controlled manner Or responding to crises and driving
change through urgency. In both cases change initiatives are considered to be highly
rational. Top-down-driven activities where leadership is exercised from the top.
Late 1990s and 21st century vision of change is different. Earlier its being a one-off
event but now change is seen as pervasive, continuous and indeterminate. Here
Managers have less control as the organization grapples with change at all levels all the
time. All members of the Organization are caught up in change initiatives
Everyone in the organization needs to see him/herself as an agent of change.
Organizations do not follow classic life-cycle path. Organizations/ Industries break-up
or recreate new paradigms, therefore the life-cycle approach to change is less relevant.
Change is less of a specific initiative in the strategic plan and more a phenomenon of a
daily organizational life.
Why we Dislike Change ?
If change is inherent in all the things and is order of each and every daythen we
dislike it? We tend to favor the status quo.. Why are we so resistant to change ? What
makes the organizational change so complex ?
Nature of Change
NEW REALITIES Change arrives by way of new realities (NR) Realities by definition
do not go away, they are real and must be heeded. We also know that new realities are
always arriving Some NR have direct relevance and immediacy to us and our
organization where as some have less so
So many NR are continuously arriving on so many fronts, we cannot deal them all We
have to develop coping strategies It includes screening out those NR which we consider

as irrelevant or too insignificant Sometimes we incorrectly screen out NR that have

direct relevance to us. May be because of negligence, inattention, distraction, denial or
fear or just because we feel overwhelmed
Cause may be any but the ramifications of overlooking the NR can range from
inconvenient to dire. Organizations screen out NR both formally & informally Formal
Process..Environmental Scanning or Strategic Planning Informal...via the collective
consciousness of employees encouraged to be attentive to the changing environment
The result of these plans to drive the change Changes are usually initiated through the
use of planning documents that lays out Goals Set Benchmarks
Calculate discounted cash flows Any other managerial techniques To ensure the
change will generate a net positive contribution to the bottom line
Organizations too can fail to respond to poignant NR Can respond to the wrong ones
or can respond to the right ones but in wrong way NR are a tricky business NR can be
obscure, deceptive, can arrive in a fragmented fashion, can readily mislead and difficult
to absorb We have ask ourselves continuously, as which NR is critical one, how I am
going to use it and why should I use it ???
VALUE TENSIONS
NR create value tensions Most recent change you have experienced like a new job, or
a new house or a new baby NR requires us to give up, change or mediate our values In
turn change our priorities and behaviors Values have developed over time, shaped by
our life stories and experiences
They are part of who we are Our values give us identity and community Changing,
mediating or reprioritizing our values is no trivial project Change that challenges our
values results in a sense of LOSS All change, even good change signifies loss of some
kind Value tensions cut to the chase