Quiet Leadership: Six Steps to Transforming Performance at Work

 

By David Rock
Published on: 2007-10-01

Quiet Leadership will help you improve other people’s thinking, which is the best place to begin improving performance.

—Marshall Goldsmith, founder of Marshall Goldsmith Partners

In the book, Rock encourages leadership based on a six step program, namely,

1. Think about Thinking
2. Listen for Potential
3. Speak with Intent
4. Dance Toward Insight
5. Create New Thinking
6. Follow Up

 You start a conversation with someone you manage, a conversation about a project that could be going better. You want to improve their performance and think you know what they should do. You estimate the conversation should only take a few minutes, yet somehow 45 minutes later you’re still going around in circles. Sound familiar?

Unfortunately, improving human performance involves one of the hardest challenges in the known universe: changing the way people think. In constant demand as a coach, speaker, and consultant to companies around the world, David Rock has proven the secret to leading people (and living and working with them) is found in the space between our ears. “If people are being paid to think,” he writes, “isn’t it time the business world found out what the thing doing the work, the brain, is all about?”

Supported by the latest groundbreaking research, Quiet Leadership provides, for the first time, a brain-based approach that will help busy leaders, executives, and managers improve their own and their colleagues’ performance.

Quiet Leadership is for the CEO who wants to be more effective at inspiring his or her leadership team, but has just a few minutes each week to speak to them. It’s for the executive who’d like to get a manager to plan more effectively, but can’t seem to work out how. It’s for the manager who wants to inspire the sales team, but isn’t sure how to do it. It’s for the human resources professional who is ready to take on changing the culture of a whole organization. It’s for the parent or caregiver who wants to reach new levels of communication and understanding with their family members.

Quiet leaders are masters at bringing out the best performance in others. They improve the thinking of people around them—literally improving the way their brains process information—without telling anyone what to do. Given how many people in today’s companies are being paid to think and analyze, improving our thinking is one of the fastest ways to improve performance.

Quiet Leadership offers a practical, six-step guide to making permanent workplace performance change by unleashing higher productivity, new levels of morale, and greater job satisfaction. Above all, Quiet Leadership will give you the clarity and strength that comes from mastering and using powerful insights that teach you to perform and succeed, at the highest level.

Leadership from the Inside Out

 

By Kevin Cashman
Published on: 1998-09

Leadership from the Inside Out is an interactive,reflective journey into the heart of authentic,personal leadership. It gives you the practical tools to grow as a whole person to become a leader for life. Leadership from the Inside Out was named the #1 best selling business book by CEO-READ in 2000

Leadership from the Inside Out is a major paradigm shift in leadership development. It gives you the tools to go directly to the heart of all significant leadership transformation: growing as a person to grow as a leader.

—Paul Walsh, chairman & CEO, The Pillsbury Company

Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win

 

By William C. Taylor, Polly G. Labarre
Published on: 2006-09-01

In Mavericks at Work, Fast Company cofounder William C. Taylor and Polly LaBarre, a longtime editor at the magazine, give you an inside look at the “most original minds in business” wherever they find them: from Procter & Gamble to Pixar, from gold mines to funky sandwich shops. Want to stop doing business as usual? Then take some lessons from the 32 maverick companies Taylor and LaBarre profile.

Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win by William C. Taylor and Polly LaBarre is a great book. It’s one of those business books that stand out from the crowd and not only in it’s cover design! The cover reflects nature of this book, bold, challenging and provocative. The authors describe the book as “more than a how-to book. It is also a What-If book” with the underlying premise that:

“.. in business, as in basket ball, the smart take from the strong – that the best way to outperform the competition is to outthink the competition.. ” and it’s the “..mavericks do the work that matters most – the work of originality, creativity, and experimentation..”

Two aspects of this book really stand out, firstly the curiosity of the authors, who throughout the book challenge your thinking with a number of provocative questions, secondly the book is littered with quotes from the numerous organisational leaders as they tell their story.

“We went deep inside these organisations, looking to understand the ideas they stand for and the ways they work.”

The book has 12 chapters and is grouped into four parts. The books is jam packed with insightful discussion, delving into what makes maverick companies successful. This made the book very difficult to review, however I have selected those thoughts and ideas that really impacted me in each part of the book to give you and idea of the books message.

Part One: Rethinking Competition

• Talking about the link between who Southwest airlines hires and promotes and their business strategy, Libby Sartain explains that ”We examined at the most detailed level and asked, ‘From the minute you think of working here to the minute you leave, what makes this experience unique? What is it about our workforce that separates us from the competition?’”
• “Anybody who’s running a business has to figure out the higher calling of that business, its purpose. Purpose is about the difference you’re trying to make – in the marketplace, in the world. If everybody is selling the same thing, what’s the tie-breaker? It’s purpose” – Roy Spence
• “How you talk about your company speaks volumes about how you think about your business. And ultimately, how you think about your business determines how well it performs.”
• “Re-creating your industry is about creating a story around customers, around employees, around products…” – Arkadi Kuhlmann
• “At Netscape, the competition with Microsoft was so severe, we’d wake up in the morning thinking about how we were going to deal with them instead of how we would build something great for our customers” – Mike McCue, previously vice president of technology in Netscape
• “We believe that a new wave of strategic innovation is being built around disruptive points of view. Maverick leaders don’t just strive to build high-performance companies….They present a fresh take on the world that clicks with customers, energizes employees, and shapes their business, from the markets they target to the customers they serve and the messages they send. They understand that the only sustainable form of market leadership is thought leadership”
• “Companies that compete on a disruptive point of view are defined as much by the opportunities they choose not to pursue as by the businesses they do enter.”
• “Companies that think differently about their business invariably talk about it differently as well. What language does your company speak?”
• “The customers who are right for you, they love you. They become evangelists. The customers who you close out, they hate you. But you know what they do when they hate you? They tell everybody about you–and that’s good. It creates dialogue. There’s nothing like differentiation.”
• “Perhaps the most powerful indicator of a company’s future share of the product market in its industry is its current position in the talent market for that industry: is it attracting more than its fair share of the best people?”
• If your company went out of business tomorrow, who would really miss you and why? “Why might a company be missed? Because it’s providing a produce or a service so unique that it can’t be provided nearly as well by any other company. Because it’s created a workplace so dynamic that most employees would be hard-pressed to find a similar environment somewhere else. Because it has forged a uniquely emotional connection with customers that other companies can’t replicate.”
• “Can you identify one piece of how your company operates that if it were to disappear, would be sorely missed in the marketplace? If not, can you identify one good reason why your company is not a risk of disappearing?” 

Provocative Questions:

• What ideas is your company fighting for?
• What purpose does your company serve?
• If you do things the way everybody else does, why do you think you’re going to do any better?
• Did today really matter?
• Are we who we say we are?
• Do you have a distinctive and disruptive set of purpose that sets you apart from the competition?
• Do you have a vocabulary of competition that is unique to your industry and compelling to your employees and customers?
• Are you prepared to reject opportunities that offer short-term benefits but distract your organisation from its long-term mission?
• If your company went out of business tomorrow, who would really miss you and why?

Part Two: Reinventing Innovation

• “The best leaders have a crisp answer to the question: why would great people want to work for us?”
• “Great performers tend to be naturally competitive. They want to know where they stand, they want to know how good they are. They also want to be challenged, to improve their skills.”
• “You cannot motivate the best people with money. Money is just a way to keep score. The best people in any field are motivated by passion. That becomes more true the higher the skill level goes. People do their best work when they are passionately engaged in what they’re doing.” – Eric Raymond
• “Wieden argues that his job is to ‘walk in stupid every day’ – to keep challenging the organization and himself, to seek out unexpected ideas, outside influences, and new perspectives on old problems. ‘It’s the hardest thing to do as a leader,’ he concedes, ‘but it’s the most important thing. Whatever day it is, something in the world changed overnight, and you better figure out what it is and what it means. You have to forget what you just did and what you just learned. You have to walk in stupid every day.”
• “It’s hard to find an executive who doesn’t appreciate the power of the experience curve – the idea that the more you do something (make computer chips, build airplanes, write TV spots), the more productive you becomes. Dan Wieden and his colleagues also appreciate the power of the inexperience curve – the idea that the more you do something, the more important it is to challenge the assumptions and habits that built your success so as to generate a wave of innovations to build the future.”
• “The most effective leaders are the ones who are the most insatiable learners, and experienced leaders learn the most by interacting with people whose interests, backgrounds, and experiences are the least like theirs.”

Provocative Questions:

• Why should people want to work for us?

Part Three: Reconnecting with Customers

• Levitant says. “For us the foundation of a brand is the psychological contract – the contract between a company and its employees and between those employees and their customers. Great consumer companies are built on genuine passion, plus a day-to-day commitment to great execution”
• “The challenge isn’t to perform as much as it is to connect, to offer something so distinctive that people can’t help but notice, even in a marketplace with low prices and big claims. In an era of overcapacity and oversupply, overloaded customers are eager to identify with companies that have an appealing identity.”
• “We’re customer experts. Our focus is on always doing what’s right for a specific customer we know very well. Every product we buy, every real estate decision we make, every action we take, is through the eyes of that customer. Our customer is our category” - Glen Senk
• “There are so many ways to defy expectations in the marketplace, to do enough little things that you wind up making a big impression on your customers.”
• “To make their offerings more memorable, companies are working desperately to make them more emotional.”
• “The first and most important piece of every job, is to tell a unique and relevant story about the space, the product, or the experience. story is the fundamental platform for organizing ideas. That’s how you connect emotionally with people.” - David Rockwell
• “The next frontier for making products more emotional is to turn them into something social – to create a sense of shared ownership and participation among customers themselves. The more people you invite to shape your company’s personality, the more you enable them to share their ideas with one another, the greater their stake in what your company does – and the more invested they become in its success. In the new world of competition, generating a whole lotta love means unleashing a whole lotta participation.”
• “There’s always a demand for something distinctive”
• If you want customer to invest in and talk about your brand, then invest time and money in developing products worth talking about in the first place”

Provocative Questions:

• How do you make a compelling offer to customer who already have more than enough of what you’re selling?

Part Four: Redesigning Work

• “I’m a capitalist, not a social worker. Too many companies spend too much time trying to ’fix’ their mediocre performers. They should spend more time recruiting and retaining great performers.” -John Sullivan
• “The difference between success and failure, Andreessen and McCue now understand, is not just a function of the markets a company enters or the products it launches. Just as important are the people it lets in the door – who it hires, who it turns away, and the criteria for making those decisions.”
• “Any company with a disruptive business model has to be clear about the distinctive work experience it creates to support that model - and how that work experience shapes the customer experience.”
• “Great people almost always have great jobs. So if you want to fill your organization with knockout contributors, you can’t wait for them to knock on your door. You’ve got to knock on their door and persuade them to walk into your office.”
• “Remember, stars don’t work for idiots. So as you raise the quality of your talent, you’ve got to raise the quality of your management.” – Dr John Sullivan
• “Great people want to work on exciting projects. Great people want to feel like impact players inside their organization. Great people want to be surrounded with and challenged by other great people. Put simply, great people want to feel like they’re part of something greater than themselves.”
• “Companies that compete differently tend to work differently from the competition.”

Provocative Questions:

• Be honest: how many companies do you know that are as creative, as disciplined, as businesslike about the people factor in business as they are about finance, engineering, and marketing?
• What is it about the ideas your company stands for, its point of view in the marketplace, the ways in which employees interact with customers or collaborate with one another, that becomes irresistible to the best people in your industry?
• Have I established a great fit between the customer experience and the work experience?
• Are you articulate and persuasive about why talented people are more likely to thrive at your company than at rivals?
• Why should great people join your organisation?
• Do you know a great person when you see one?
• Can you find great people who aren’t looking for you?
• Are you teaching great people how your organization works and wins?
• Does your organisation work as distinctly as it competes

(Some of the information here are from http://www.thepracticeofleadership.net)

Leadership Without Easy Answers

 

By Ronald Heifetz
Published on: 1998-07-22

Here are the good points from the book:

p.20 We should focus on leadership as an activity- the activity of a citizen mobalizing people to do something. Leading is more likely to produce socially useful outcomes by setting goals that meet needs of both leader and follower.

p.21 Defining leadership as formal authority excludes those like Ghandi, and M.L. King, who faced moral doubt and deep regret by defying authority.

p.23 The hardest and most valuable task of leadership may be advancing goals and designing strategy that promotes adaptive work.

p.24 To produce adaptive work, a vision must track the contours of reality; it has to have accuracy, and not simply imagination and appeal.

p.26 Tackling tough problems- problems that often require an evolution of values- is the end of leadership; getting that work done is it’s essence .

We need a governor on our tendencies to be arrogant- To think that we can transform people or an organization can fuel arrogance.

p.49 Having authority not only brings resources to bear, but also serious constraints on the exercise of leadership.

p.57 Authority is conferred power to perform a service.

p.65 When stress is severe, we seem especially willing to grant extraordinary power and give away our freedom.

p.73 Habitually seeking solutions from people of authority is maladaptive. Dangerous for 2 reasons: 1. Because work avoidance often occurs in response to our biggest problems, and 2. It disables some of our most important personal and collective resources to accomplish adaptive work.

p.87 When using authorative provocation as part of strategy, one must be prepared for an eruption of distress in response.

p.91 If we think people are not enlightened to exercise control, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.

p.102 Formal authorization brings with it the powers of office, but informal authorization brings subtle yet substantial power to extend far beyond the limits of job description.

p.126 Exercising leadership from a position of authority in adaptive situations means “going against the grain”. Rather than providing answers, one provides questions; rather than protect from threat, one lets people feel threat to stimulate adaptation; instead of orienting people to their current roles, one disorients so that new relationships develop; rather than quelling conflict, one generates it; instead of maintaining norms, one challenges them.

p.127 Leadership is a razor’s edge because one has to oversee a sustained period of social disequilibrium so that people confront the contradictions in their lives and communities.

p.128 Five strategic principles of leadership:

1.Identify the adaptive challenge.

2.Keep the level of distress within a tolerable range for doing adaptive work.

3. Focus attention on “ripening” issues and not on stress reducing distractions.

4. Give the work back to the people, but at a rate they can stand.

5. Protect voices of leadership without authority.

p. 180 Authority constrains leadership because in times of distress people expect to much. They form inappropriate dependencies that isolates their authorities behind a mask of knowing.

p.183 The scarcity of leadership from people of authority makes it all more critical to have people exercise leadership without authority.

p.186 Leadership without authority = person operating from the margins of society; to persons with senior authority who lead from beyond their authority, challenging either their own constituents ‘ expectations or engaging people across the boundary of their organization.

p.188 Absence of authority enables one to deviate from the norms of authoritative decision making – one can raise questions that disturb, there is a latitude for creative deviance. Can focus on a single issue. It places one on the frontline of experience and information.

p.193 Advantage of formal authority is breadth – disadvantage is distance from raw and relevant detail.

p.225 Leaders without authority who raise disturbing questions, stand naked and can be the messenger that is killed by an authority figure who is “used” by those that do not like the question being raised.

p.228 Leaders that push authority figures in an attempt to solve important problems should expect that authority figures will strike back because of “others” pressure on them to maintain equilibrium.

p.238 Changing the status quo requires more than changing the authoritative figure .Adaptive work requires adjustments, learning, and compromise of many of the dominant, complacent and beleagured.

p.241 Pains of change deserve respect. Knowing how hard to push and when to let up are central to leadership.

p.242 When pacing the change ask:

1.How stressful is the question or problem.

2.How resilient are the people.

3.Are they accustomed to learning or will they reach for avoidance mechanisms

p.247 The long term challenge of leadership is to develop people’s adaptive capacity for tackling ongoing streams of hard problems. In early stages charismatic authority is a strong resource.

p.251 Strategic challenge is to give the work back to the people without abandoning them. Overloaded, they avoid learning, underload , they grow dependant.

p.261 Ways that communities sacrifice problem solving to restore equilibrium:

perpetually reorganize in hope of a structured fix.

Blame the authority, scapegoat, etc.

p.265 When conflicting criticism seems to damn whatever one does, the distinction between role and self can be life saving. Making the distinction enables one to externalize the conflict, thus focusing attention on the issue and giving the conflict back to the rightful owners.

p.273 When serving as a repository of many conflicting aspirations, a person can lose himself by failing to distinguish his inner voice from the voices that clamor for attention. One needs a sanctuary – a run, quiet walk, a prayer to break the spell of frenzy.

p.274 The practice of leadership requires a sense of purpose – the capacity to find the values that make risk-taking meaningful.

p.275 Adaptive change if prolonged to long becomes a high-risk enterprise that can require a revolution.

(Source: http://www.fspe.org/linc/resources/Leadership.asp)

The Daily Drucker: 366 Days of Insight and Motivation for Getting the Right Things Done

By Peter F. Drucker
Published on: 2004-10-26

Revered management thinker Peter F. Drucker is our trusted guide in this thoughtful, day-by-day companion that offers his penetrating and practical wisdom. Amid the multiple pressures of our daily work lives, The Daily Drucker provides the inspiration and advice to meet the many challenges we face. With his trademark clarity, vision, and humanity, Drucker sets out his ideas on a broad swath of key topics, from time management, to innovation, to outsourcing, providing useful insights for each day of the year.

These 366 daily readings have been harvested from Drucker’s lifetime of work. At the bottom of each page, the reader will find an action point that spells out exactly how to put Drucker’s ideas into practice. It is as if the wisest and most action-oriented management consultant in the world is in the room, offering his timeless gems of advice. The Daily Drucker is for anyone who seeks to understand and put to use Drucker’s powerful words and ideas.

Know-How: The 8 Skills That Separate People Who Perform from Those Who Don’t

 

By Ram Charan
Published on: 2007-01-02

Charan’s insights take you into the heart of effective leadership. He provides the reader with eight essential skills that are needed for success in the new century.

These 8 essential skills include the following:

1. Positioning and Repositioning the business
2. Pinpointing External Change
3. Leading The Social System
4. Judging People
5. Molding A Team
6. Setting Goals
7. Setting Laser-Sharp Priorities
8. Dealing With Forces Beyond The Market

Know-How is the missing link of leadership. By showing how the eight know-hows link to, interact with, and reinforce personal and psychological traits, Ram Charan provides a holistic and innovative portrait of successful leaders of the twenty-first century.

Leadership: Theory and Practice

 

By Peter G. Northouse
Published on: 2006-10-26

Leadership Skills are the tools and traits acquired to facilitate guiding or a directing a group, most commonly toward a shared goal.

This book offers a full coverage of contemporary notions of leadership, including traditional theories, salient models, and new domains. The chapters on women in leadership, culture, and team leadership are welcomed additions. The sophisticated but readable style and the inclusion of superb case material make this book a valuable resource for both entry-level and advance leadership courses.

Think and Grow Rich!: The Original Version, Restored and Revised

 

By Napoleon Hill
Published on: 2004-10-01

70 years after the book” Think and Grow Rich” was written, it is still a highly respected and read book. It has sold millions of copies and is a “Bible” for people who are searching financial freedom. The essence of the book is Napoleon Hill’s famous statement: “Everything your mind can conceive, you can achieve” The title says the same, in different words: “Think and Grow Rich”

The book goes through “The thirteen steps to riches” according to Napoleon Hill.

The whole book has a underlying tone of “You can do it!” mentality to motivate you.

The book offers a lot of questionnaires and practical exercises in addition to all the text. It gives you clear guide lines in how to set goals and reach them and how to make clear plans that you can follow thru. You are shown the way to realise your highest potential, and succeed in anything you set your mind to.

It also teaches you not to give up, and see all mistakes as learning opportunities. Napoleon Hill teaches that successful people never considers temporary failure as a permanent defeat.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition

 

By Edward R. Tufte
Published on: 2001-05

“The century’s best book on statistical graphics.” COMPUTING REVIEWS

“One of the best books you will ever see.” DATAMATION

“Best 100 books of the 20th century.”

“The most important contribution
so far to the study of the graph.”
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN
STATISTICAL ASSOCIATION
AMAZON.COM

The classic book on statistical graphics, charts, tables. Theory and practice in the design of data graphics, 250 illustrations of the best (and a few of the worst) statistical graphics, with detailed analysis of how to display data for precise, effective, quick analysis. Design of the high-resolution displays, small multiples. Editing and improving graphics. The data-ink ratio. Time-series, relational graphics, data maps, multivariate designs. Detection of graphical deception: design variation vs. data variation. Sources of deception. Aesthetics and data graphical displays. This is the second edition of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Recently published, this new edition provides excellent color reproductions of the many graphics of William Playfair, adds color to other images, and includes all the changes and corrections accumulated during 17 printings of the first edition.

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It

 

By Michael E. Gerber
Published on: 1995-04-12

In this first new and totally revised edition of the 150,000-copy underground bestseller, The E-Myth, Michael Gerber dispels the myths surrounding starting your own business and shows how commonplace assumptions can get in the way of running a business. He walks you through the steps in the life of a business from entrepreneurial infancy, through adolescent growing pains, to the mature entrepreneurial perspective, the guiding light of all businesses that succeed. He then shows how to apply the lessons of franchising to any business—whether or not it is a franchise. Finally, Gerber draws the vital, often overlooked distinction between working on your business and working in. your business. After you have read The E-Myth Revisited, you will truly be able to grow your business in a predictable and productive way.