LivingLeadership Handbook
THE LIVING LEADERSHIP HANDBOOK -
37 INDISPENSABLE LESSONS FOR
MASTERING LEADERSHIP
NOW AVAILABLE FOR FREE DOWNLOAD!
You will discover practical insights into 37 major topics which impact on leadership success. You will discover why you and others behave as you do in organisations and personally. You will learn many practical steps you can take to enhance your leadership skills and ‘grow’ both you and your organisation in the process.
Read these summaries of the first 4 chapters to discover the invaluable information you will learn from reading this handbook:
Chapter 1 – Introduction
Leadership looks and sounds easy.
We all readily recognise a good leader or boss. They are visionary, intelligent, decisive and fair. They delegate, lead balanced lives, communicate well, are team players, cope well under pressure and embrace technology and change.
We also instinctively recognise a bad leader. As Joanne Painter succinctly put it in an insightful article in The Age newspaper: “Bad bosses are autocratic, hierarchical, inconsistent and non-intuitive. The sort who kick heads and ask questions later.” She adds that they surround themselves with clones who are scared to offer diverging opinions and enjoy playing power games, such as intimidating staff or withholding information.
Chapter 2 – The COMET Model of “Self”
An essential prerequisite for the successful leader is the ability to communicate, something we all tend to presume we personally excel at. Regrettably, my experience suggests that little effective communication goes on in most, if not all, organisations and, indeed, in most relationships. In some respects you will probably agree with this statement – most people believe they are never told enough in their organisation and so the communication must be “poor”.
I have a deeper meaning of communication in mind, however, when pointing to its almost total absence and consider the consequences for both the organisation and the individual people in it. Most people, and therefore most organisations, communicate at fairly basic levels. Let me illustrate what we are saying by introducing you to the COMET model. This acronym represents five stages in the communication and human interaction chain, or more correctly five levels of communicating, either with another person or even with oneself.
Chapter 3 – Managing Upwards
We have all been exhorted as part of our management training to “manage upwards”. This concept usually has a restricted meaning of telling our boss what to do and leaving it at that. Sometimes there are negative connotations – that it means telling our boss where to “get off”; however, this is not what it really means! The true concept of managing upwards has a far wider meaning. But firstly, let us just recognise that even the limited meaning given to the concept does not result in much productive result. The reasons for this should be fairly obvious and they have to do with fear, poor self-esteem, vulnerability – fear of the person losing their job, for example, and a general reluctance to tell the truth, as we have examined in the COMET model earlier.
Chapter 4 – Our Childhood Experiences
It may seem strange that a section on childhood experiences would be included in a book such as this on leadership. Many of you will recall, however, the words of Saint Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit religious order – “give me a child till he or she is seven and I have them for life”. This quotation sums up a truism in psychological theory – i.e. that many of the things that happen to us as adults, or many behaviours which we exhibit as adults, can be traced back to our childhood experiences, conditioning or upbringing. The reason for this is that the first seven to eight years or so (everyone is different) of a person’s development tends to fashion their life forever. That doesn’t mean that everything is “set in concrete” and people can’t change. It means that many of our experiences which are significant to us in the first seven years go on to play a part in our behaviour as adults. Unfortunately, many people can’t or won’t change and so their childhood experiences are even more determinative of their future behaviours, certainly in a personal sense, but also in an organisational sense.
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