THE LEADERSHIP CRASH COURSE

BY: PAUL TAFFINDER

Paul Taffinder is a partner at Marakon Associates, the leading strategy consulting firm and the
world’s foremost authority on value creation. Paul has advised dozens of global 500 companies on
leadership and has written extensively about leadership and change, beginning with his first book THE
NEW LEADER and then BIG CHANGE, which won the prestigious business Management Book of the Year
Award 1999 fir what the judges called “his inspirational approach to corporate transformation”.

According to the book, world is full of managers and desperately short of leaders – real leaders.
Organizations start to fail when they start to produce too many managers and not enough leaders . In
The Leadership Crash Course, Author seeks to address the shortage by helping executives develop the
skills necessary to drive large-scale change within their organizations. Leadership is about getting people
to achieve new things, and therefore largely about change-about inspiring, helping and yes, sometimes
enforcing, change in people. There are five critical areas that have been identified by him.

IMPOSING CONTEXT
By imposing context means you must make it absolutely clear what is important in the
enterprise, what its direction and goals are, where it has come from and where it is going, what your
values as the leader are and, by extension, how they fit with the values of the enterprise, and therefore
what is expected of your people. It is because people need a framework within which to live, work and
achieve and to give direction to take, show individuals what the key goals are and make sure people
always have a sense of proportion and can distinguish day- to-day between what actions are important
and those that are not . Without this, human beings either stick slavishly to the monotonous and
everyday achieving little, or their individuality draws them into haphazard, directionless competition
with each other.

MAKE RISK AND TAKE RISKS

Leaders are distinguished by their ability to make and take risks-that is to both seek out and
create opportunities and then turn these opportunities for success in the present and future. It is related
to questions about what need to change, taking risks on new business ventures or new strategic
directions, freeing people to try new things, giving energetic individuals the chance to prove themselves
and develop, seeking out your people’s creative ideas and innovations and letting them have a go. But,
risk making and risk taking is not a prescription or excuse for sloppy, lazy management. Risk can and
should go hand-in-hand with management rigour and discipline.

CHALLENGE AND CHANGE

It is true in many organizations and enterprise that people are fearful, apathetic, cynical,
skeptical, stuck in a rut, or simply trapped in the workaday grind of the status quo. So, as a leader you
must challenge and change by experimenting and being adventurous in order to: grab people’s
attention, energize your followers, take competitors by surprise and jolt your people, from time to time,
out of accepting things as they are, to prevent the ordinary becoming all that they believe is possible.
Leader should to something different, be unpredictable, do what no one expects, surprise people and
ask people to challenge you and change the way things are done. Blow them out of their ruts. Challenge
and change

HAVE DEEP CONVICTION

Perhaps the most distinctive mark of leaders is their conviction. They believe wholeheartedly in
what they’re doing, but that alone is not enough. If you have deep conviction but never show it, you
cannot lead others. Leaders demonstrate their conviction. They talk about what they want to achieve
and they reveal their emotional involvement in it by showing their excitement, their impatience, and
their determination. But aspiring leaders frequently confuse conviction with never changing their minds.
They think that they have to have an answer for everything and make an instant decision. Leaders do
change their minds, but once they commit to a decision, they put their conviction on the line. Leaders
are single-minded, excited by the future, fervent, determined, totally resolved.

GENERATE CRITICAL MASS

No matter how much conviction you have, no matter how rapidly and effectively you mobilize
your people and get them to commit to achieving aspiration goals, no matter what risks you take – if you
fail to channel the available energy of a group of people into tasks that make a difference, that make
things happen, then you will have failed the toughest test of leadership. It is leadership skills of
generating critical mass that enable you to push your people beyond simply starting new initiatives, or
working on multiple tasks, or putting enormous effort into activities. This also requires you to influence
people – to get them to do things they may not want to do, to join you in achieving something that is
not self-evidently in their own interests, to adjust their viewpoint or their ideals and fall in behind you.
Too many managers these days still believe they can operate within a command and control framework
where their people will meekly do as they’re told. Younger generations of employees are creative and
their positive emotion responses to customers are better released through influence, persuasion and
involvement.

Lastly Leadership Crash Course is a hard-hitting day-to-day guide to help executives and
managers gain insight into their own leadership, then develop and hone the right skill to become
powerful leaders. Genuine leadership makes a huge, often crucial, difference to the value that strategy,
structure and organization offer. It moves things forward, it inspires action, it changes the world, and it
maximizes the likelihood of growth, attainment and success. Author pushes you to analyse you own
strengths and weaknesses and then systematically build your personal capacity to create leadership
value. This book offers unprecedented access to insight personal cases and real examples of both
success and failure.