Kindle Notes & Highlights
Guts is an umbrella term for the quality we’d been missing: a willingness to do the right thing, no matter how difficult that is.
To be a leader in today’s business environment, you need to use your head, demonstrate heart, and act with guts.
execution often requires a mixture of power and influence, of risk and analysis, of explanation (or winning people’s minds), and of inspiration (or winning their hearts).
Growth is also about risk.
context leaders were three times more effective than content leaders. Content leaders are classic head types, feeling compelled to draw on their knowledge to add value when they meet with others. Context leaders, on the other hand, add value by recognizing other resources when they enter a room and use them effectively.
In The Courage to Act, authors Merom Klein and Rod Napier emphasize that courage can be learned, especially if it is approached as behavior that exhibits the following five traits: purpose, will, rigor, risk, and candor.
Managers must be both coach and mentor to others, and this means exhibiting greater transparency and emotional intelligence.
The leader thinks, “How do I get my people to do what needs to be done if my positional power diminishes?” or “How can I trust my supplier with proprietary information?” or “How can I partner with a company in one area and compete with them in another?” These are all legitimate questions, but reframing the boundaries doesn’t mean ignoring the answers. It means respecting the boundaries but also being willing to transcend them when the situation warrants.
The first thing leaders must do, therefore, is to follow our earlier recommendation to find a balance between strategic and operations mind-sets.
involves developing influence through lateral relationships to get things done.
create a climate of accountability.
value and display perseverance.
Leaders can become easily distracted and reactive in business today, when they are bombarded with stimuli, communication, requests, information, and choices. You
leverage people’s strengths rather than help them fix their weaknesses.
• The mistaken notion that leaders should represent the organizational party line.
Organizational environments that encourage strict adherence to the party line.
We often ask leaders to identify the unwritten rules of an organization. Frequently, the number-one written rule is this: “Do not express disagreement with your boss.” This rule is sometimes more operative the higher you go in a company in which a strong culture discourages dissent among those at the top. Sometimes “alignment” becomes more important than good decision making, and leaders with a strong point of view are seen as contentious and distracting.
A failure to read, investigate, and think about what’s happening in the “outside” world.
Self-doubt about one’s ability to form a point of view.
sustainability, innovation, and networking.
the difference between “nice” and “kind.” If you are unaware that you have a noticeable spot on your tie and someone is nice, she doesn’t mention it, thus saving you from minor embarrassment. If someone is kind, however, he pulls you aside, tells you that you have a spot and that you might want to change your tie. He is acting in your best interests and, most likely, telling you something that you wanted to know.
The most difficult challenge for most leaders is to confront their direct reports about performance issues or to move them out of their jobs.
Being nice means avoiding conflict and disingenuously pretending that all is well. Being kind means giving people a message they needed to hear and acting in their best interest.
CEO has one member of his executive committee who is not performing and is one of the few females in a company that has had issues with diversity. In fact, her lack of performance in a critical staff function is having an impact on the entire organization. He knows that it is in the best interest of the organization to make a change, and his board is pressuring him to do so. At the same time, he has built a powerful bond with this individual, having worked with her throughout both of their careers. When she was appointed to her role by his predecessor, her skill set fit the requirements of the
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Acknowledge the reality of competing needs that must be balanced, and don’t consistently favor one over the other.
Get in touch with their own heart.
Be capable of pivoting from driving to listening modes.
driving for results and listening to others are both important. And they are not mutually exclusive.
White spaces exist between functions, hierarchical levels, divisions, departments, and geographies. These are no-man’s-lands in which responsibility is unclear. More customer and market opportunities than ever before fall into these gaps, and it is easy to miss them or fail to solve problems because leaders treat an organizational structure as a map of proprietary territories.
They insist that they trust others but that they must “verify” by instituting controls.
Having empathy doesn’t mean relaxing standards or being a pushover.
