Productivity Blog
What Kind of Leader Are You?
By Carol Morrison from i4cp | July 9, 2009
Novelists, playwrights and screenwriters have known for eons that the way to test a character's mettle is to present her/him with a crisis. In fact, that's the crux of creative fiction: the focal character's meeting some sort of catastrophe - be it physical, emotional or both - and the subsequent story that recounts the growth the character demonstrates as a result of various trials and tribulations.
Truth, ever and always stranger than fiction, presents us with a business world that is rife with crises on a daily basis. And one big, rip-snorter of a crisis in the form of the recession we're currently battling. If ever a mettle-testing situation existed, this one certainly fits the bill. So what's the story? Corporate yarns are being spun every working day, and leaders are the focal characters. What will they do to guide their companies through these rough economic waters? Can they weave dwindling sales and skittish customers into a recipe for success? Or will they simply be the last ones left to turn out the lights and lock the doors when the organization fails?
What will you do? The i4cp Knowledge Center on Effective Leadership offers a plethora of suggestions and strategies for effective leadership through the current financial crisis. "Identify trends and adapt organizational resources;" "act with ‘urgency, speed and flexibility;'" "emphasize alignment;" and "prepare for recovery" are just a few of the instructional insights you'll find there. The point is action. Specifically, pro-action and not re-action. I don't know about you, but even if the turn-out-the-lights-and-lock-the-door scenario I described above did occur, I'd feel a lot better about it if I knew that my organization's leaders led us out with a bang and not a whimper (apologies to T.S. Eliot).
Crises will bring to light any cracks in the organizational foundation. Put a company under stress and fault lines will show up soon enough. Maybe employees aren't engaged or don't understand what's expected of them. Perhaps pricing is off, or production is too slow. Whatever problems have been percolating will come to light. The antidote? A proactive approach. Seize the opportunity to reaffirm your company's mission and its values. Or if that's where a fault line opened, get proactive about re-thinking what the mission should be and get busy re-framing values that work. Take a hard look at core competencies. What do you do best? Be proactive about identifying your competitive advantages - and about leveraging them more creatively. Seek out your best employees and ask for their ideas; ask them what your customers are saying. Figure out how to turn that information into the kind of action that can help your firm survive and thrive.
The crisis is here. You're the lead character. You know the genre - action. What kind of story will you write?
Truth, ever and always stranger than fiction, presents us with a business world that is rife with crises on a daily basis. And one big, rip-snorter of a crisis in the form of the recession we're currently battling. If ever a mettle-testing situation existed, this one certainly fits the bill. So what's the story? Corporate yarns are being spun every working day, and leaders are the focal characters. What will they do to guide their companies through these rough economic waters? Can they weave dwindling sales and skittish customers into a recipe for success? Or will they simply be the last ones left to turn out the lights and lock the doors when the organization fails?
What will you do? The i4cp Knowledge Center on Effective Leadership offers a plethora of suggestions and strategies for effective leadership through the current financial crisis. "Identify trends and adapt organizational resources;" "act with ‘urgency, speed and flexibility;'" "emphasize alignment;" and "prepare for recovery" are just a few of the instructional insights you'll find there. The point is action. Specifically, pro-action and not re-action. I don't know about you, but even if the turn-out-the-lights-and-lock-the-door scenario I described above did occur, I'd feel a lot better about it if I knew that my organization's leaders led us out with a bang and not a whimper (apologies to T.S. Eliot).
Crises will bring to light any cracks in the organizational foundation. Put a company under stress and fault lines will show up soon enough. Maybe employees aren't engaged or don't understand what's expected of them. Perhaps pricing is off, or production is too slow. Whatever problems have been percolating will come to light. The antidote? A proactive approach. Seize the opportunity to reaffirm your company's mission and its values. Or if that's where a fault line opened, get proactive about re-thinking what the mission should be and get busy re-framing values that work. Take a hard look at core competencies. What do you do best? Be proactive about identifying your competitive advantages - and about leveraging them more creatively. Seek out your best employees and ask for their ideas; ask them what your customers are saying. Figure out how to turn that information into the kind of action that can help your firm survive and thrive.
The crisis is here. You're the lead character. You know the genre - action. What kind of story will you write?
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