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I asked an executive in a midsize British manufacturing firm to describe his vision and received in return a barely comprehensible thirty-minute lecture.
Communication comes in both words and deeds. The latter is generally the most powerful form. Nothing undermines change more than behavior by important individuals that is inconsistent with the verbal communication. And yet this happens all the time, even in some well-regarded companies.
Economically oriented finance people and analytically oriented engineers can find the topic of social norms and values too soft for their tastes. So they ignore culture—at their peril.
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Management is a set of processes that can keep a complicated system of people and technology running smoothly.
Leadership is a set of processes that creates organizations in the first place or adapts them to significantly changing circumstances.
Leadership defines what the future should look like, aligns people with that vision, and inspires them to make it happen despite the obstacles
successful transformation is 70 to 90 percent leadership and only 10 to 30 percent management.
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So why don’t managers use teams more often to help produce change? To some degree, a conflict of interest is involved. Teams aren’t promoted, individuals are, and individuals need unambiguous track records to advance their careers. The argument “I was on a team that. . .” doesn’t sell well in most places today.
great success creates a momentum that demands more and more managers to keep the growing enterprise under control while requiring little if any leadership.
When trust is present, you will usually be able to create teamwork. When it is missing, you won’t.
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When the goal is behavior change, unless the boss is extremely powerful, authoritarian decree often works poorly even in simple situations,
Two weeks after they announced the new vision, they promoted some jerk whose approach is totally inconsistent with that message.”
Leadership by example: Behavior from important people that is inconsistent with the vision overwhelms other forms of communication.
effective information transferral almost always relies on repetition.
Often the most powerful way to communicate a new direction is through behavior.
do your HR systems make it in people’s best interests to implement your new vision?”
To a large degree, like all of us, he’s a product of his history.
Thousands and thousands of managers have been taught that life in organizations is a trade-off between the short run and the long run.
To a large degree, leadership deals with the long term and management with the immediate future.
To some degree, all management is manipulation—and that includes the production of short-term performance improvements.
Charismatic leaders are often poor managers, yet they have a way of convincing us that all we need to do is follow them.
Outstanding leaders are willing to think long term. Decades or even centuries can be meaningful time frames.
Culture refers to norms of behavior and shared values among a group of people. Norms of behavior are common or pervasive ways of acting that are found in a group and that persist because group members tend to behave in ways that teach these practices to new members, rewarding those who fit in and sanctioning those who do not. Shared values are important concerns and goals shared by most of the people in a group that tend to shape group behavior and that often persist over time even when group membership changes.