ONLINE EXCLUSIVE: Only Good Leaders Will Ensure a Better Tomorrow
Ken McGuire
Creative leaders are vital to any organization especially in this reset economy, but too many organizations are citing the shortage of likely candidates coming from within the thinned out ranks of their existing managerial workforces. The manufacturing community, which has endured declines in its overall ranks for several decades, is facing an even greater challenge. Complexity in making things has been escalating even more quickly than providing services. The convergent pressures of globalization, the imperative of immediacy in delivering customer solutions, (both process and product), volatility in supply chains, and community demands for sustainability, not to mention the expectation to deal with all this complexity at lower cost, has been gathering into a perfect storm. The managers coping with these stresses haven’t been exposed to business models outside of their own company. The next generation of senior leader needs to be capable of navigating unforeseen changes with strong leadership skills. And, leading is not the same as managing. And leadership skills are not the same as managerial skills honed under stress. Leadership connects the dots on the escalating complexities of the current scene and makes sense of it by initiating a clear and compelling vision that stimulates accountability in others tasked with achieving it. Leadership skills are aimed at growing the business, even in an ill-defined future state, while managerial skills resolve known deficiencies to keep the business intact. Managerial skills mainly react to the known problems, resolve them and then streamline processes to prevent further failures. Leadership shapes the successful vision for the future, navigating through murky waters and making it crystal clear.
Leaders must make sense of the escalating complexity in which their managers operate. They must set the vision in a way that makes sense throughout the organization without spelling out an “answer.” The leader’s vision should catalyze commitment in the organization and initiate the vigorous pursuit, by others, to a clear and compelling future state. While the manager’s role has traditionally been delivering answers, the leader’s role is engaging people with penetrating questions to encourage learning by discovery. The leader must see beyond the known problem and envision the potential in a long-term solution. Leaders must establish high performance standards with short horizons and stretch goals, and then lead by example. Leaders stretch the imagination of what’s possible. Good leaders don’t do what everybody else is doing; they make profound sense of the complex with simple analogies and then demonstrate it themselves by walking the talk. And leaders can say it in one page or one phrase, when managers might require a rulebook and a procedure manual.
Great leaders set a tone for freedom of choice for their constituents inside a strong sense of personal accountability that those people have to a joint shared vision. Great leaders embrace accountability without enveloping it into a set of stringent conditions. They let the good example of their own behavior cascade down the ranks into the good behavior examples of others until it embeds itself into the behaviors of the entire population. This accountability is not enforced with rigorous metrics, mindlessly applied. But make no mistake; the measurement of goal attainment is not abandoned. It’s just not held up as the single threshold to attain.
Leaders refresh the current situation with a different view, and where every party to the situation can define and accept accountability for improvement. Leaders do not impose rules-based compliance and then measure conformance to it.
The AME Institute took on the challenge of developing a unique, hands-on and practical, leadership development program. We partnered with Arizona State University to assist AME Member companies’ bridge this leadership development gap. The result was a year-long learning experience, emphasizing peer-to-peer interaction, provocative lectures from industry and academic thought leaders, visits to sites renowned for standout level leadership, a 10-week Student Intern assignment, plus an assigned senior management mentor, all calibrated with an upfront On-Site Capabilities and Behavioral assessment conducted by AME and ASU educators. It is a comprehensive and informative, but not prescriptive, attempt to have accomplished managers get insight and exposure to successful leader styles for emulation, and test their choices inside their own organization with a dedicated student intern for a summer.
Many large companies have a namesake company university or program to groom their leaders. But too few other companies can afford or are willing to take on the challenge of this huge educational effort. The first year of the program was completed with a small group of participants who credited it as a great success.
The year-long program for 2012 will build on the success by repeating the same features, but has expanded to five workshops in 2012 to improve peer networking.
See www.ame.org/institute for more information.
Ken McGuire is vice chairman of the AME Institute.
