Leadership Series

Leadership and Success

In the movie Office Space, the staff labored throughout the movie to produce the TPS report which was illustrative of the modern workplace having waste, mindless work, and uncaring leadership in organizations. The parody song My Cubical is also about the mindless unproductive outcomes of the modern workplace. Even the movie 9 to 5 highlighted an uncaring boss and employees who promote and line the pockets of those above them without reward. In short, Office Space, My Cubical, and 9 to 5 exemplify poor leadership with no sense of direction and the impact on people under them. The trumpet is sounding from many individuals that leadership is faltering, weak, or misguided. These individuals feel lost performing senseless or meaningless tasks in organizations that seemingly go no where. Even the American political situation has fallen victim to poor leadership. Decisions, programs, and reforms cost a lot of money but yield weak or poor results.

As I reviewed the body of works, I noted an apparent gap linking leadership to results and success. Perhaps those authors assumed success or that successful results were just a natural outcome of any leadership endeavor. To claim leadership, without objectives, goals, and an end-state is to maunder aimlessly in never ever land.  In my view, leadership without a focus on results and success is failed and empty leadership. Achieving unfavorable results or non-success is success in itself but only if the leader set out seeking specified results and success. The leader learned from that effort. There is nothing to be gained or learned from lack of focus other than to get focused.

Leadership is not rocket science or something a few people are born with. Leadership has three core competencies involve framing ideas, building social capital, and mobilizing resources that are learned abilities. Anyone can be a leader and with some training a more effective leader.

I am pulling posts together in this series to focus on leadership. I see these postings as applying to all levels of leadership. This is a summary of the Leadership and Success posts as well as some tooling and character postings.

Success:

Success is Not an Entitlement

Success is Getting Up More Than You Fall Down

They Told Me I Was Crazy

Law of Cause and Effect

Leadership:

Leadership and Success

The Leadership Process

Problem Identification

Goal Setting

Change Management

Building Constituencies

Organizational Design

Mobilizing Resources

Assessing Results

Planning for Updates

Bottom Up Leadership

Community Leadership

Character Qualities and Tooling:

Dale Carnegie: All the Principles in One Post 

Proving Yourself on Your New Job

Decision Making Overview Brief

Tattoo on Your Soul

Aliens Cause Global Warming

The Genius of CS Lewis