Leaders venture out. Those who lead others to greatness seek and accept challenge. For example, pioneer leaders confronted their traditional organizational cultures with some radical new ideas, ideas that enabled them to reinvent their organizations. Every single personal-best leadership case we collected involved some kind of challenge. Not one person said he or she achieved a personal best by keeping things the same. Leaders create positive change by searching for opportunities and by experimenting, taking risks, and learning from mistakes.
Leaders are pioneers—they are willing to step out into the unknown. The work of leaders is change, and the status quo is unacceptable to them. They search for opportunities to innovate, grow, and improve. But leaders need not always be the creators or originators. In fact, it’s just as likely that they’re not. Sometimes a dramatic external event thrusts an organization into a radically new condition. Therefore, leaders must remain open to receiving ideas from anyone and anywhere. The leader’s primary contribution is in recognizing and supporting good ideas and being willing to challenge the system to get new products, processes, services, and systems adopted.
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Week 1
Learn about your ability to inspire change. Ten years ago if someone were to tell you that you would have all this information about yourself public for the world to read, see and hear, you would have said they were crazy. Now look at where we are, we are so much more comfortable living more public lives, we build communities, share, communicate, collaborate, access information, and shape our personal experiences. All these new behaviors are cascading over organizations which is forcing us to make changes.
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Week 2
According to Gallup’s employee engagement survey engaged employees produce better business outcomes (based on a composite of financial, customer, retention, safety, quality, shrinkage and absenteeism metrics) than other employees do, across industries, company sizes and nationalities, and in good economic times and bad. How do we improve Employee engagement?
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Week 3
Once the leader has personally changed and discerned the difference between novel change and needed change, then that leader must become a change agent. In this world of discontinuities and rapid change, the leader must be out in front to encourage change and growth and to show the way to bring it about. He must first understand the two important requisites to bringing about change: knowing the technical requirements of the change, and understanding the attitude and motivational demands for bringing it about
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Week 4
Regardless of his state in the present, the negative thinker finds disappointment in the future. The epitaph on a negative person’s headstone should read, “I expected this.
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Week 5
It is helpful to remember that change can be seen as either revolutionary (something totally different from what has been) or evolutionary (a refinement of what has been). It is usually easier to present change as a simple refinement of “the way we’ve been doing it” rather than something big, new, and completely different.
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Week 6
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Week 7
Human behavior studies show that people do not basically resist change; they resist “being changed.” This section will emphasize how to create an atmosphere that will encourage others to be changed. Unless people are changed, change will not happen. The first statement of this chapter read, “Change the leader, change the organization.” Now we will start with the leader and develop a strategy for the organization.
