Main RMI Number
408-554-4960
SCU - St. Joseph's Hall
Room # 108
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Retail Management Institute Newsletter -Fall '02
RCME Presents "Being at Our Personal Best as Leaders"
By Debra Black
Barry Posner, Ph.D., Dean, SCU Leavey School of Business, discusses "Key Practices" with RCME participants.
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Charles Darwin concluded that it's neither the strongest nor the most intelligent of a species that survives, but the one most adaptable to change. "I suspect that the same thing might be true in today's business evolution," says Barry Posner, Ph.D., and dean of the SCU Leavey School of Business. "Which organizations are going to survive in these turbulent times? The ones most responsive to change."
Posner, co-author of the best-selling book, The Leadership Challenge, led the Retail Consortium for Management Education on an exploration of "Being at Our Personal Best as Leaders: How to Get Extraordinary Things Done" on June 12. His "Leadership Practices" Inventory has been called the most reliable and up-to-date leadership instrument available today (completed by the participants).
Leadership involves "an attitude, a sense of responsibility. Leadership is all about people who make a difference, and leadership is all about change," Posner says. "To talk about being effective in today's times, we must be talking about leadership. These days, you can't manage your way to the future. To be an effective manager, you've also got to be a leader. We need everyone in the organization to feel like they're leaders and act like they're leaders," he says. He suggests that in spite of a great sense of uncertainty today, try picturing yourself smiling with great excitement as you move forward into the future.
The strength of Posner's work lies in its solid foundation of research. His studies of leadership experiences have involved asking individuals about key actions, strategies, and behaviors they used that made a difference at a time when they were at their personal best. When people are at their personal best, the experiences are similar, Posner says. Patterns of behavior and common threads emerge. "This thing called leadership is not so much about someone personally, it's about a process, it's about the things people do," says Posner.
In his research, five practices stand out: Modeling the way: Be passionate and lead by example. Are you the kind of person that people want to work for? Leaders set the standard for others. What contributes to ethical behavior in the organization? The behavior of the leader.
Enabling others to act: The more choices people have, the more they feel like owners. Trust in the team, and with one another.
RCME participants work towards their own leadership goals
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Encouraging the heart: Provide a culture of celebration. Celebrate, recognize, and reward your people.
Challenging the process: Leaders deal with the art of the possible. Embrace the challenge; leaders need the ability to redefine the situation.
Inspiring a shared vision: Paint the vision continuously. Yet it's not enough to paint the picture, you have to sell the picture! When executives effectively communicate the vision and the values of the organization, it gets people focused in the same direction.
A key seminar objective was moving participants from being unconsciously competent to being consciously competent. By learning more about these similar practices that emerge when we're at our personal best, we can be more conscious about using these practices. Two major ways people learn about leadership are their own experience and the experience of others. "All of us have had the same teacher: this teacher's name is trial and error," says Posner. A third major category in learning about leadership is education, training, and development.
Are leaders born or made? Posner believes we all have leadership abilities, and that this question misses the point. "It's not either/or, it's both. The question for us is, how do we liberate it and develop it for ourselves and for others? It's not something we have to find, it's something we have to bring out."
"Leadership development is fundamentally development of ourselves. It begins with exploring the inner territory. Who am I? What's important to me? What am I trying to accomplish? Why am I trying to accomplish it? Why am I working so hard? Why do I care?" says Posner. "These questions become important to any leader at any level to confront and deal with."
To have any chance of success in leadership, the first person that's got to follow you, pay attention to you, believe in you, is yourself. And because leadership is all about doing something, we only start to do something about a situation when we care about it. "You can't expect greatness until you figure out what it is you care about," says Posner. "What is it that you care enough about to do something?" In fact, Posner challenged the audience to think about whether they were in their jobs to do something or simply for something to do. |
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RMI Newsletter
