8 Tips for Cutting Edge Leaders by George Kohlrieser

Being appointed a leader does not necessarily make you one. The good news is that high performance leadership and leading at the edge are talents everyone can learn. George Kohlrieser, an organizational and clinical psychologist and Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at IMD reveals the eight paths to achieving cutting edge leadership:

1. Develop your leadership talent

Companies that have a leadership development culture excel because they become talent magnets by consistently providing people with opportunities to learn, grow and build leadership competencies. As with all talents, leadership must be developed through years of focused learning, training and practice.

2. Lead from the mind’s eye

Learning how to master the mind’s eye enables one to make choices about how one thinks, feels and acts in any given moment. The brain can be trained to look for opportunities and to go beyond obstacles, just as great athletes, musicians and actors do. Leaders who learn how to program their bodies and emotions to follow their mind will always outperform others, and personal leadership competence is a result of being aware of and regulating one’s mental states and emotions.

3. Build success through your secure base relationships

A secure base is someone who provides a sense of protection, is a source of positive inspiration and provides comfort in times of stress, frustration or failure. Very talented people often fail because they either lack secure bases or choose the wrong ones. Having the support of secure bases makes the attainment of seemingly unreachable goals possible simply because they believe in you more than you believe in yourself.

4. Lead through effective communications

A hallmark of high performance leaders is the ability to influence others through all levels and types of communication, from simple interactions to difficult conversations and more complex conflicts, in order to achieve greater team and organizational alignment.

5. Leading through conflict management

Changing negative conflicts into positive engagement is crucial for organizations to perform well. High performing leaders are able to deal with disputes, disagreements and diverse points of view. Organizations that encourage people to raise difficult issues find that doing so leads to innovation, new goals and the changes needed to achieve them.

6. Leading in a fragmented world

Among the many challenges that leaders confront in the 21st century, fragmentation in executive teams and their organizations is often cited as a major barrier to execution and implementation. Leaders can learn to develop and build integrated groups and teams across global organizations, creating an organization with “enough” shared purpose and direction to make change happen.

7. Leading through strategy

Leaders face many conflicting goal, and need to explore what it means to have a strategy in the current business environment. This includes understanding both the strategic role of the leadership team within the organization and the challenges of the overall strategy process on individual leaders. By visualizing alternative futures, leaders are able to clarify potential directions and options as a basis for enabling leadership choice.

8. Leading at the edge is a journey

High performing leaders know that learning to lead at the edge is a lifetime process of discovery. By playing to win, rather than playing not to lose, leaders make work a more exciting, enjoyable and engaging place for themselves and all those around them. With this foundation, running the business, and

Joseph Grenny on influencing yourself and others to achieve results

Over the past 20 years Joseph Grenny has taught and advised more than 100,000 leaders from all over the world on how to get the best out of themselves and others. His experience – combined with the latest research in behavioral economics and the social sciences – has led Grenny to develop what he calls “six sources of influence.” He contends that these sources of influence – if carefully and consistently nurtured – will provide you with a systematic strategy for executing on influence and give you the power to change anything. Read on to learn more.

Interview by Chris Stanley

Why is influence so important to business leaders?

If you think of problems like an iceberg, business leaders face problems both above and below the water line. Those above the water line are the visible problems of setting strategy and policy, developing new products, creating processes. These are the visible, tangible, tactile challenges that they need to generate solutions to. The problems below the water line tend to deal with behavior in the organization - things that are not always visible and apparent, but that profoundly affect the ability to execute on the elements that are above the water line. Of the two, the below the water line problems tend to be the more profound, persistent, and the most resistant to change. And leaders tend to have the fewest tools for solving them.

So what would you say are the typical characteristics of a great influencer?

There are two big things that people need to do to be effective at influencing change.

Firstly they need to have a robust and proper way of understanding today’s behavior. For example, if they need to improve service quality, the first thing that leaders do is they start rolling out a change strategy without deeply understanding the behavior that they are confronting. If employees are lethargic, disinterested or resistant, leaders tend not to have a very robust way of thinking about the root causes of that resistance.

Secondly they need to have a robust way of creating an influence strategy. We’ve spent 25 years studying the best that social science has to offer and also looking at the best practitioners on the planet to see how they create effective, rapid, profound and sustainable behavior change across an organization. We found that the measure of the potential effectiveness of an influence strategy is the degree to which it reflects six sources of influence.

What are these six sources of influence?

There are two big reasons people do what they do - because they want to do something and because they can do something. What leaders tend to do is develop motivation strategies that do very little on the ability side. They also tend not to understand that there are three types of motivation and ability: personal, social and structural.

Personal motivation and ability looks at ‘Do I want to" and "Can I?" When leaders are creating change strategies, they tend to focus on just personal motivation. They are trying to convince people that they ought to something. What they don’t understand is there are social and structural factors that profoundly affect whether people want to do something and whether they are capable of doing it.

Social motivation looks at whether my leaders, peers, direct reports and others are encouraging me and praising me or discouraging me and getting in my way. On the social ability side, the same is true - are people throwing up barriers or providing me with the help and resources that I need?

Finally there"s structural motivation - rewards and incentives; and structural ability - the design of the organization and the resources that are systematically made available.

All six of these affect any behavior. They enter into your choices about what you are going to eat today or whether you stick with the diet or not. They enter into whether you show up to work on time or not and whether you stay engaged all day long. If leaders don’t know how to think about all six of these systematically and most importantly draw upon all six of them, they fail more often than not in affecting the problems below the water line. We have found that leaders who use all six of these sources of influence were ten times more likely to see change succeed.

So let’s talk about some of these sources in a little bit more detail. The first one you mentioned is personal motivation. So how would you go about motivating someone to do something they don’t want to do?

Generally positive behaviors are less common than negative behaviors. So how do you get people to engage in positive behavior? The answer is that leaders have to help people make an experiential linkage between the behavior that is being asked of them and their own core values. When we say experiential we mean that it does not require a lecture or some sort of verbal persuasion. Leaders need to use engaging stories or recreate powerful personal experiences to help people to anchor the new behavior, and they tend not to be very comfortable with that.

Can you give me an example of this working in practice?

Yes, absolutely. We looked at supervisors in a fast food chain who were just trying to get employees to pick up a broom and brush up the dining area during slow periods. You would think that this is a particularly insignificant behavior and that it would be difficult to create a sense of vigor and passion about it. We found that those who were successful in counseling employees and changing behavior did so by describing customer experiences that were particularly dissatisfying in a way that was quite animated to the employee. So for example a manager spoke to an employee who was not very engaged in brushing up the dining area and described how twenty minutes earlier he had seen a mother come in with her two year old daughter. The mother had gone to order food while the two year old daughter sat at the table sweeping her arm across all of the debris and smears of ketchup that the previous guest had left, putting her hand to her mouth and licking it off. This created such a sense of disgust in the 17 year old employee that he didn’t need to be told to go out and clean the dining area; he felt a moral compulsion to go out and do it. So even with mundane behaviors like that, using stories can create a sense of moral motivation that profoundly affects people’s choices.

What are some of the challenges that leaders face in harnessing social pressure in a positive way, that doesn’t create resentment within teams?

The first mistake leaders make is that they don’t target their influence towards the opinion leaders. They tend to try to just diffuse their attention across the entire employee population. But the leader’s job is to persuade ten per cent of the organization, and the opinion leaders will bring everybody else along. Leaders ought to focus their attention on this unique population.

The second mistake is that when leaders do try to engage opinion leaders, they usually work with suck ups rather than real opinion leaders. For example if you are rolling out a big new quality program or a customer service program, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is go out and ask for volunteers. The people who volunteer tend to be the ones who are least socially credible in the organization, and that is the death of your effort.

Have you any evidence of the effectiveness of employing these six sources of influence?

Yes, we have studied over a thousand organizations and their attempts to bring about change. This very broad systematic strategy showed differences of an order of magnitude of 1000% when organizations started to employ all six sources of influence. These aren"t marginal differences that made some incremental change. The six sources of influence describe the physics of change. If you are not using all of these elements you shouldn’t expect to see real significant behavior change occur.

We’ve talked a lot about influence within businesses and organizations and change management in organizations. How does influence work on a more personal level? If I want to convince my boss that I want a pay rise for example, how might that work, how might I go about doing that successfully?

The first is that you need to realize that your boss will decide to give you a raise not just when he or she is motivated to do it but also when he or she is able. So you will have to be able to deal with both the motivational and the ability side. Often when we try to influence our boss we are just thinking about making him realize they should give us the pay rise but not realizing that they can’t. The people who are the most persuasive are the ones that make arguments that deal with the ability side as well. So if my boss says he’s only got budget for a 2 percent pay increase across the entire team, I have to deal with the ability side of that as well. I either have to add additional value or demonstrate where additional money is. Thinking in this way opens up other avenues that help me to be more persuasive and effective with others as well.

How do you view the internet and technology in general as a tool for influencing people’s behavior?

In general technology over the past 20 years has done more to feed impulses than values. In spite of the fact that it has been a wonderful enabler of information access, the kind of personal behavior that it has promoted has largely been negative. It has caused people to be more isolated at times. We are using social networking rather than social get-togethers. In many cases we respond to the impulses of text messages or cell phones and email as opposed to organized thought. Yet I think that the potential is there for technology to be profoundly helpful in helping people to create self-directed change. This is one of the next big projects that we are involved with the support of Dr. Albert Bandura at Stanford who stands as quite a pioneer in this field. Our next big project is to try to harness all six sources of influence through the use of technology to help people to create more self-directed change.

Tal Ben-Shahar’s keys to happiness

Tal Ben-Shahar is a professor at Harvard Business School whose course on happiness and positive psychology is the most popular ever run at the university. Here are his 6 tips on achieving the state of mind that will let you perform to your potential.


1. Give yourself permission to be human. When we accept emotions — such as fear, sadness, or anxiety — as natural, we are more likely to overcome them. Rejecting our emotions, positive or negative, leads to frustration and unhappiness.

2. Happiness lies at the intersection between pleasure and meaning. Whether at work or at home, the goal is to engage in activities that are both personally significant and enjoyable. When this is not feasible, make sure you have happiness boosters, moments throughout the week that provide you with both pleasure and meaning.

3. Keep in mind that happiness is mostly dependent on our state of mind, not on our status or the size of our bank account. Barring extreme circumstances, our level of well being is determined by what we choose to focus on, and by our interpretation of external events. For example, do we see the glass as half full or half empty? Do we view failure as catastrophic, or do we see it as a learning opportunity?

4. Simplify! Generally, we are much too busy, trying to squeeze in more and more activities into less and less time. Quantity influences quality, and we compromise on our happiness by trying to do too much.

5. Remember the mind-body connection. What we do — or don"t do — with our bodies influences our mind. Regular exercise, adequate sleep, and healthy eating habits lead to both physical and mental health.

6. Express gratitude, whenever possible. All too often we take our lives for granted. Learn to appreciate and savor the wonderful things in life, from people to food, from nature to a smile.

The End of Management

By ALAN MURRAY

Business guru Peter Drucker called management "the most important innovation of the 20th century." It was well-justified praise. Techniques for running large corporations, pioneered by men like Alfred Sloan of General Motors and refined at a bevy of elite business schools, helped fuel a century of unprecedented global prosperity.

But can this great 20th century innovation survive and thrive in the 21st? Evidence suggests: Probably not. "Modern" management is nearing its existential moment.

Corporations, whose leaders portray themselves as champions of the free market, were in fact created to circumvent that market. They were an answer to the challenge of organizing thousands of people in different places and with different skills to perform large and complex tasks, like building automobiles or providing nationwide telephone service.

In the relatively simple world of 1776, when Adam Smith wrote his classic "Wealth of Nations," the enlightened self-interest of individuals contracting separately with each other was sufficient to ensure economic progress. But 100 years later, the industrial revolution made Mr. Smith's vision seem quaint. A new means of organizing people and allocating resources for more complicated tasks was needed. Hence, the managed corporation—an answer to the central problem of the industrial age.

WSJ Deputy Managing Editor Alan Murray discusses some of the lessons new managers can learn from his new book, "The Wall Street Journal Essential Guide to Management."

For the next 100 years, the corporation served its purpose well. From Henry Ford to Harold Geneen, the great corporate managers of the 20th century fed the rise of a vast global middle class, providing both the financial means and the goods and services to bring luxury to the masses.

In recent years, however, most of the greatest management stories have been not triumphs of the corporation, but triumphs over the corporation. General Electric's Jack Welch may have been the last of the great corporate builders. But even Mr. Welch was famous for waging war on bureaucracy. Other management icons of recent decades earned their reputations by attacking entrenched corporate cultures, bypassing corporate hierarchies, undermining corporate structures, and otherwise using the tactics of revolution in a desperate effort to make the elephants dance. The best corporate managers have become, in a sense, enemies of the corporation.

The reasons for this are clear enough. Corporations are bureaucracies and managers are bureaucrats. Their fundamental tendency is toward self-perpetuation. They are, almost by definition, resistant to change. They were designed and tasked, not with reinforcing market forces, but with supplanting and even resisting the market.

Yet in today's world, gale-like market forces—rapid globalization, accelerating innovation, relentless competition—have intensified what economist Joseph Schumpeter called the forces of "creative destruction." Decades-old institutions like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns now can disappear overnight, while new ones like Google and Twitter can spring up from nowhere. A popular video circulating the Internet captures the geometric nature of these trends, noting that it took radio 38 years and television 13 years to reach audiences of 50 million people, while it took the Internet only four years, the iPod three years and Facebook two years to do the same. It's no surprise that fewer than 100 of the companies in the S&P 500 stock index were around when that index started in 1957.

Even the best-managed companies aren't protected from this destructive clash between whirlwind change and corporate inertia. When I asked members of The Wall Street Journal's CEO Council, a group of chief executives who meet each year to deliberate on issues of public interest, to name the most influential business book they had read, many cited Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma." That book documents how market-leading companies have missed game-changing transformations in industry after industry—computers (mainframes to PCs), telephony (landline to mobile), photography (film to digital), stock markets (floor to online)—not because of "bad" management, but because they followed the dictates of "good" management. They listened closely to their customers. They carefully studied market trends. They allocated capital to the innovations that promised the largest returns. And in the process, they missed disruptive innovations that opened up new customers and markets for lower-margin, blockbuster products.

The weakness of managed corporations in dealing with accelerating change is only half the double-flanked attack on traditional notions of corporate management. The other half comes from the erosion of the fundamental justification for corporations in the first place.

British economist Ronald Coase laid out the basic logic of the managed corporation in his 1937 work, "The Nature of the Firm." He argued corporations were necessary because of what he called "transaction costs." It was simply too complicated and too costly to search for and find the right worker at the right moment for any given task, or to search for supplies, or to renegotiate prices, police performance and protect trade secrets in an open marketplace. The corporation might not be as good at allocating labor and capital as the marketplace; it made up for those weaknesses by reducing transaction costs.

Mr. Coase received his Nobel Prize in 1991—the very dawn of the Internet age. Since then, the ability of human beings on different continents and with vastly different skills and interests to work together and coordinate complex tasks has taken quantum leaps. Complicated enterprises, like maintaining Wikipedia or building a Linux operating system, now can be accomplished with little or no corporate management structure at all.

That's led some utopians, like Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, authors of the book "Wikinomics," to predict the rise of "mass collaboration" as the new form of economic organization. They believe corporate hierarchies will disappear, as individuals are empowered to work together in creating "a new era, perhaps even a golden one, on par with the Italian renaissance or the rise of Athenian democracy."

That's heady stuff, and almost certainly exaggerated. Even the most starry-eyed techno-enthusiasts have a hard time imagining, say, a Boeing 787 built by "mass collaboration." Still, the trends here are big and undeniable. Change is rapidly accelerating. Transaction costs are rapidly diminishing. And as a result, everything we learned in the last century about managing large corporations is in need of a serious rethink. We have both a need and an opportunity to devise a new form of economic organization, and a new science of management, that can deal with the breakneck realities of 21st century change.

The strategy consultant Gary Hamel is a leading advocate for rethinking management. He's building a new, online management "laboratory" where leading management practitioners and thinkers can work together—a form of mass collaboration—on innovative ideas for handling modern management challenges.

What will the replacement for the corporation look like? Even Mr. Hamel doesn't have an answer for that one. "The thing that limits us," he admits, "is that we are extraordinarily familiar with the old model, but the new model, we haven't even seen yet."

This much, though, is clear: The new model will have to be more like the marketplace, and less like corporations of the past. It will need to be flexible, agile, able to quickly adjust to market developments, and ruthless in reallocating resources to new opportunities.

Resource allocation will be one of the biggest challenges. The beauty of markets is that, over time, they tend to ensure that both people and money end up employed in the highest-value enterprises. In corporations, decisions about allocating resources are made by people with a vested interest in the status quo. "The single biggest reason companies fail," says Mr. Hamel, "is that they overinvest in what is, as opposed to what might be."

This is the core of the innovator's dilemma. The big companies Mr. Christensen studied failed, not necessarily because they didn't see the coming innovations, but because they failed to adequately invest in those innovations. To avoid this problem, the people who control large pools of capital need to act more like venture capitalists, and less like corporate finance departments. They need to make lots of bets, not just a few big ones, and they need to be willing to cut their losses.

The resource allocation problem is one Google has tried to address with its "20%" policy. All engineers are allowed to spend 20% of their time working on Google-related projects other than those assigned to them. The company says this system has helped it develop innovative products, such as Google News. Because engineers don't have to compete for funds, the Google approach doesn't have the discipline of a true marketplace, and it hasn't yet proven itself as a way to generate incremental profits. But it does allow new ideas to get some attention.

In addition to resource allocation, there's the even bigger challenge of creating structures that motivate and inspire workers. There's plenty of evidence that most workers in today's complex organizations are simply not engaged in their work. Many are like Jim Halpert from "The Office," who in season one of the popular TV show declared: "This is just a job.…If this were my career, I'd have to throw myself in front of a train."

The new model will have to instill in workers the kind of drive and creativity and innovative spirit more commonly found among entrepreneurs. It will have to push power and decision-making down the organization as much as possible, rather than leave it concentrated at the top. Traditional bureaucratic structures will have to be replaced with something more like ad-hoc teams of peers, who come together to tackle individual projects, and then disband. SAS Institute Inc., the privately held software company in North Carolina that invests heavily in both research and development and in generous employee benefits, ranging from free on-site health care and elder care support to massages, is often cited as one company that could be paving the way. The company has nurtured a reputation as both a source of innovative products and a great place to work.

Information gathering also needs to be broader and more inclusive. Former Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley's demand that the company cull product ideas from outside the company, rather than developing them all from within, was a step in this direction. (It even has a website for submitting ideas.) The new model will have to go further. New mechanisms will have to be created for harnessing the "wisdom of crowds." Feedback loops will need to be built that allow products and services to constantly evolve in response to new information. Change, innovation, adaptability, all have to become orders of the day.

Can the 20th-century corporation evolve into this new, 21st-century organization? It won't be easy. The "innovator's dilemma" applies to management, as well as technology. But the time has come to find out. The old methods won't last much longer.

How to Get People to Change

By Bobbie Gossage
Feb 1, 2010

Forget PowerPoint. If you want to influence employee or customer behavior, charts and data typically won't cut it, say Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the 2007 bestseller Made to Stick and the new Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. In Switch, the Heath brothers explore ways to manage big changes in life and in business. "Change is hard, because we're schizophrenic," says Chip, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. (Dan is a senior fellow at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business.) "Part of us may want to change, but part of us has this emotional connection to the way that we've always done things." In researching their new book, the Heaths consulted experts on subjects as diverse as how to diet and how to change society. "Time and again, we found the same principles coming up, whether it was individual change or organizational change or societal change," says Chip. Those principles, he says, involve appealing to both our rational and emotional sides. Inc. senior editor Bobbie Gossage recently spoke with Chip Heath about the book's findings.

What mistakes do leaders make when they are trying to change their organizations?

One of the main mistakes is when leaders come up with a new vision but never translate that broad analytical vision into something people on the frontlines can actually execute. I was talking to an entrepreneur who wanted his employees to have a "mindset of customer service." But if you're an employee, when you hear that, all you hear is buzzword, buzzword, buzzword, jargon, jargon, jargon.

What if you are dealing with some really stubborn people who don't like change?

You can try to find the feeling that's going to make them empathize with customers. For instance, Microsoft had some very stubborn programmers who thought they were writing brilliant software. But six out of 10 customers Microsoft surveyed couldn't figure out how to use the new feature. When they told the programmers this, their response was, "Where did you find six dumb people?" Microsoft brought the programmers into a usability-testing lab and put them behind a two-way mirror. When the programmers watched a real customer struggle with the software they designed, the programmers immediately started thinking about ways of changing it.

Don't try to argue with a stubborn employee. That appeals to the dark side of the analytical parts of ourselves.

What do you mean by the dark side?

Our analytical capacity is wonderful, but we face too many choices. If you give customers in a grocery store an assortment of 24 jams to sample, they're actually less likely to buy any of the jams than if there are only six jams. Very often we paralyze our analytical side by offering it too much to analyze. The same thing happens if you give your employees too many things to think about -- like having a "mindset of customer service." As an employee, there are 45 things I could do that might improve customer service, and I don't have time to do all of those things, so I end up doing none of them.

What about using carrots and sticks?

If you're offering bonuses or hiring and firing a lot of people so that you can find the few special people who can execute your vision -- those are expensive, time-consuming strategies. Very often, by making small changes in the environment, we lead people in the right direction without that expense.

So you should change the environment, not the employee?

One of the most basic mistakes that psychologists have documented is that we tend to blame people and their personalities for problems and ignore situations. One of my students, a director at Nike, thought of herself as a very open manager. She had an open-door policy, but when she asked for feedback, she learned that her staff thought she was a bad communicator.

After talking with her team, she realized the problem was the way her desk was set up. When an employee came in and sat across from her, her computer was right in the middle. She got distracted when e-mails showed up. After she rearranged her office so she would have to turn her chair away from the computer when an employee came in, she immediately got positive feedback. By fixing that environment, she fixed the problem.

You mention in the book that peer pressure is also a powerful motivator.

Social influence is strong. If a third of your employees aren't filling out their expense reports on time, what they may not know is that two-thirds of your employees are. Sometimes just understanding that a crowd of people is moving in a direction makes people uncomfortable enough to change. One of my favorite studies in the book is about a group of researchers who went into hotels that have those "Please reuse your towels" signs. They changed one of the signs to say, "Most people in this hotel reuse their towels at least once during their stay." Immediately, towel reuse rates went up 25 percent, and laundry bills went down.

Does a bad economic climate affect people's ability to change?

We commonly think that fear is a good motivator, but fear works for only a short time. And this recession has gone on for a couple of years in some parts of the country. So when we try to motivate people, we need to find feelings of hope and optimism.

How do you do that?

There's a technique we talk about in the book: looking for the bright spots. When you face a change situation, you're often demoralized and depressed. Instead of focusing on what isn't working, you need to shift people over to thinking, What have we done in the past that has been successful for us?

I was talking to a small-business owner whose firm is a general contractor. He had been killing himself by doing proposals for big government contracts, which the company would often lose. I asked him, "What are the last three times that you got a contract you were excited about?" Turns out they were all projects from referrals, and they tended to be not the bigger projects but projects for small and medium-size cities where relationships mattered more.

At this firm, they were masters of taking people who might not necessarily agree on what the fire station should look like and helping them resolve those conflicts. The firm shifted to focusing on smaller projects where it was in charge of a more complete project and people's skills were better utilized.

It's easy to get demoralized when you lose and you lose and you lose. But when you think about the last time you won and how you can do those kinds of things more often, that gives people a sense of hope and optimism that will motivate their behavior