Uninspiring vision

A key responsibility of leaders is to formulate a future that looks like it will be worth creating. No matter how sensible and realistic the vision, if it does not resonate with your employees it will be hard to make it exciting.

Poor storytelling

Leaders may secretly have a fantastic vision of the future, but they may fail to convey it people in the organization. There is much emphasis on impressing the outside world with storytelling, but if you cannot convince your own people, you have a more fundamental problem.

Employee-vision mismatch

Even if the vision is exciting, realistic and well communicated, it will be difficult to persuade people who don’t have personal values and interests that are compatible with the vision. In such cases, people often leave the organization voluntarily, but if they don’t, they should be encouraged to leave.

Failing to engage people

Research shows that there are three major factors that must be addressed in order to effectively motivate employees:

• Purpose – relating efforts to bigger-picture results

• Autonomy – using your independent judgement

• Learning – growth as part of reaching goals

Even in organizations that provide a clear vision and a clear link between action and contribution, autonomy and learning are often neglected.

Poor leadership credibility

Leaders who appear to lack key knowledge or competency will certainly risk losing credibility. If they pretend to know more than they do and are then unmasked, however, there is a more fundamental problem: character.

Showing a lack of integrity, demonstrating dishonesty, betraying a confidence, hoarding knowledge, or obvious injustice (e.g. giving a promotion to the inferior candidate) are guaranteed to severely undermine credibility.

A Learning Organization pursues goals by systematically engaging everyone in learning and problem-solving. This requires a different leadership style, which we call Lean Leadership:

Honesty, integration and clarity

• Remain fact-based in all dealings

• Discover and validate perspectives and connections

• Make work transparent and visible to all

Vision Formulation

• Involve employees in goal-setting

• Formulate visions that are audacious and inspiring

Pursuing the Vision

• Everyone engaged in non-stop learning to reach goals

• Managers are responsible for engaging people to find the answers, not for having them

• Achieving results involves a never-ending transformation, always striving to improve

Developing People

• Managers’ main focus is helping their people grow

• Respect individuals as independent thinkers

Lean Leadership Coaching

Developing Skills and Behaviors

Our leadership coaching process uses a continuous improvement method analogous to what you would use to improve organizational performance.  The purpose of the process is to build leadership competencies and transition behaviors to adopt a Lean Leadership style.

In each session we reflect on what the participant has observed since the last time, and review goals in order to identify obstacles and problems. We work with the participant to develop potential solutions, which are then enacted and reviewed in the next session.

Lean Leadership Education

Lean Leadership Foundations (2 days)

This course is an interactive mix of case studies, presentation, exercises and role-playing. Participants will be given pre-work and homework focused on real-world challenges they face in their organizations.

Topics covered include:

• Key leadership competencies

• Leadership styles

• What makes Lean Leadership different

• Developing compelling visions and goals

• Evaluating your Leadership Capital

• Strategies for motivation and persuasion

• Investing and building Leadership Capital

• Conflict resolution

• Coaching followers

• Assessing and improving leadership performance