Blog Masonry Boxed

Key points for spotting emerging leaders:

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“Leaders get the best out of followers and followers get the best out of leaders,” says Manfred Kets De Vries, Clinical Professor of Leadership Development at INSEAD.

The connection between leaders and their staff is only one of many circular connections he sees.

The challenge for leaders multiplies as organisations get bigger and as globalisation makes companies more diverse and more virtual.  “It’s very hard to manage large organisations, things become so enormous,” he said in an interview with INSEAD Knowledge.

Another circular challenge for leaders is to keep an organisation growing over generations. “To me, the real test of a leader is how well his or her successor does, and very few leaders pass that test,” he says.

Leaders have to help people re-invent their organisations. Kets De Vries imagines this as an ancient mythical serpent that swallows its tail but is constantly reborn in a circular connection.

To complete that circle, leaders are required to leverage their vision and their skills to create sustainable, results-oriented organisations. He believes group or team coaching is one of the most effective ways of achieving that long-term success.

Kets De Vries, the Director of INSEAD’s Global Leadership Centre, recently won a lifetime achievement award from the International Leadership Association for his contributions to the study of leadership. It was the first time the prestigious organisation had given the awards.

His extensive work in coaching business leaders has led him to believe that leaders need greater self-awareness: “Many executives don’t know themselves very well.” Some know the issues but they don’t know how to shift direction. Kets De Vries says for those executives it’s very difficult to set the right goals and get people to buy into your values and goals.

“Leaders need to help people think outside of the box,” he says, adding:  “When you are riding on a dead horse the best thing is to dismount. Many people try to keep on riding the dead horse, but you have to do something different.”

That requires teams of good leaders not just a single strong executive in any successful organisation. “Leadership is a team sport,” he says. That team needs to have clear goals and values. The leadership teams that are most successful know how to get people to buy into those values and practice those values.

Leaders, he believes, should strive to create better places to work. Kets De Vries argues that isn’t just an altruistic notion. Work today is complicated by rapidly changing technology, virtual working teams separated by cultural and geographical differences and the challenges for individuals of managing their own careers.

Workers want jobs that make them want to come to work everyday and that should be an important goal for any executive.

Leaders who make a deep connection with their employees will succeed, he says.  They lead in ways that are symbolic – as well as literal – to create organisations where people feel like they can and should do their best.

“You have to get people’s hearts and minds and get them to buy into the DNA of an organisation,” he says.

• Assemble a critical mass of key stakeholders.

1. Many more than just the top 8 to 10 leaders.
2. Should include key technologists and leading process engineers.
3. Group should be sufficiently diverse to ensure conflict, which will get issues on the table so they can be resolved.
4. Have to decide how it’s going to happen.

• Do an organizational audit to generate a complete picture of how the organization really works.

1. Understand the competitive situation.
2. Reveal barriers to moving from “as is” to the future.
3. Core values.
4. Key systems.
5. Strategic assumptions.
6. Core competencies, etc.

• Create urgency.

1. A threat that everyone perceives, but no one is willing to talk about, is most debilitating to an organization
2. Book of Five Rings  Japanese guide for samurai warriors. Written four centuries ago, directs the samurai to visualize his own death in the most graphic detail before going into battle. Idea being, once you have experienced death, there is not a lot left to fear: one can then fight with abandon.
3. This helps explain the value of discussion about not changing and the dire consequences to a company in a difficult business situation.

• Harnessing contention.

1. Conflict jump-starts the creative process.
2. Most companies suppress contention.
3. Control kills invention, learning and commitment.
4. Emotions often accompany creative tension, and they are often unpleasant.
5. Intel plays rugby; your ability at Intel to take direct, hard-hitting disagreement is a sign of fitness.
6. Many excellent companies build conflict into their designs.

• Induce organizational breakdowns that foster out-of-the-box thinking and solutions.

1. Breakdowns should happen by design, not accident.
2. In trying to manage back from the future, concrete tasks will have to be undertaken; continuing on the current path will not get you there. Often you don’t know how to make these tasks occur. This will generate breakdowns, which can generate out-of-the-box thinking and solutions, if the situation is managed/lead correctly. ip info . Continuous open dialogue is key to working through breakdowns.
3. Setting impossible deadlines is another way to encourage breakdowns and out-of-the-box thinking