Leadership Strategy

I’ve been reading the recent research on trust completed by CASS on behalf of the CIPD and am posting a half-way review in the hope that Changeboard will include it in their HR carnival focusing on social responsibility coming out tomorrow.
The research focuses on the need for trust with a variety of different constituents including the mission of the organisations, its customers, leaders, line managers and each other (se my recent post on people like us).

 
Plenty of leaders seek to boost their performance by becoming stronger, more agile, more forceful. Matthew E. May has a whole different strategy.

Most leaders seek to boost their performance by becoming more: more decisive, more communicative, more masterful of complexity. Matthew E. May prefers the opposite approach. A former consultant for Toyota, May sums up much of what he learned there about the art of simplification in the word elegance, which he applied to products, processes, and problem solving in his 2009 book, In Pursuit of Elegance. (A new book, The Laws of Subtraction, will be published this fall.) In a recent conversation with editor-at-large Leigh Buchanan, May discussed how elegance applies to leadership.

This interview with Susan Credle, chief creative officer of Leo Burnett USA, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.

Warren Buffett, one of the world’s leading investors, has chosen a successor. He hasn’t said who that is, though, which has upset some analysts. Working out who takes over when a job becomes vacant is a big worry for everyone, not just billionaires—and it takes more than choosing a name.

If micro-managers are like babysitters, then the bosses we all hope to have are like great coaches.
Coaches inspire and bring out the best in their team. Micro-managers slowly suck the life out of you.
Everybody knows a micro-manager, but nobody claims to be one. Certainly, bosses view themselves differently than their employees see them. 1 in 3 managers say they use a coaching style, but only 1 in 5 employees agree (according to this Adecco study). So, here’s my take on some of the most distinctive attributes of an inspiring coach and a micro-manager.

Read more: http://www.momsrising.org/blog/infographic-whos-the-boss-micro-manager-or-coach/#ixzz1nsGjixm5

 
Does it feel like it takes you less time to do something than if you were to give the job to an employee? Whether they're freelancers or full-time employees, slow-moving, uninspired workers are the bane of many small business's existence. 
How can you get workers fired up and motivated to achieve your company's goals? Here are seven tips:

 
Last Thursday, baseball All-Star Ryan Braun won his appeal of a positive drug test, but the truth remains clouded, trust has been broken, and he’s left with a tarnished image that may never be repaired.
If you’re not familiar with the story, Braun, the reigning National League MVP of the Milwaukee Brewers, tested positive last October for elevated levels of testosterone and was facing a 50-game suspension as a result. Braun had already filed an appeal when news of the failed drug test was leaked in December (results of failed drug tests are supposed to remain confidential until a player exhausts the appeals process, to avoid this very situation of unjustly tarnishing a person’s reputation). Last week an arbitrator ruled that Major League Baseball didn’t follow the strict specimen collection and handling procedures outlined in the collective bargaining agreement with the players union and Braun’s suspension was overturned.

In November 2010, to big fanfare at Unilever's London headquarters, chief executive Paul Polman boldly articulated a new strategy. The company would double the size of its business, he said, by channeling its efforts toward achieving eight ambitious goals by 2020 — among them, doubling the proportion of Unilever's portfolio that meets the highest nutritional standards, and halving the water associated with the consumer use of its products.

“INNOVATION is what America has always been about,” President Obama remarked in his recent State of the Union address. It’s hard to disagree, isn’t it? We live in a world dominated by innovative American companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook. And even in the face of a recession, Silicon Valley’s relentless entrepreneurs have continued to churn out start-up companies with outsize, world-changing ambitions.

The Office of Personnel Management is setting new standards for executive training in the public sector.
According to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), 16 percent of executive new hires in the federal government failed to reach the end of their first year in a new job, either voluntarily resigning or being terminated for performance that fell well below expectations. The culprit? A study by the Corporate Leadership Council found several reasons, among them a poor cultural fit between the new hire and the organization, lack of clarity about what is expected of the new leader, and a failure to inspire trust among staff and peers. The cure? According to OPM, it’s an effective executive onboarding program.

Being the boss means you are often privy to information that your team isn't. You may learn that a major client is unhappy with your service, or that senior leaders are considering outsourcing your team's work. At these moments, it's easy to feel stuck between your bosses and the people you manage. Do you share the information? Or do you protect your employees from it? Whatever the news, it's up to you to decide whether, when, and how to tell your team.

Apple on Tuesday named John Browett, CEO of British consumer electronics chain Dixons, as its senior vice president of retail.
Browett will begin his job in April and report to Apple CEO Tim Cook, according to an Apple press release. Browett, who held various executive positions at Tesco before joining Dixons in 2007, replaces Ron Johnson, who left Apple last June to become CEO of J.C. Penney.