The One Asset Every Effective Leader Must Have

By: Nick Tasler

It’s not charisma. It’s not intelligence, either. It’s not even integrity. It’s a skill that all of us have, but surprisingly few of us know how to maximize.

What is the one thing all effective leaders have in common? That’s the multi-billion dollar question posed virtually every day from Minneapolis to Mumbai by store managers and sales associates to the top brass in the C-suites.

To find out, let’s do a quick experiment. Take a few seconds to imagine the most effective leader you’ve ever worked with. Get a clear image of that person in your mind. Was that leader bold or sensitive? Were they known for being charismatic or soft-spoken? Were they visionary or pragmatic? Were they book-smart or streetwise?

An effective leader can be any one of those things, can’t they? The only thing every effective leader does is make good decisions—good people decisions and good strategy decisions. Here’s why: Other people—whether they are hourly sales associates, corporate team members or company shareholders—won’t follow somebody whose choices lead to dead ends. Without good decisions, no amount of charisma or honest intentions can save a leader from failure.

How to Start Making Better Decisions
The good news is that anyone can become a better decision-maker by better understanding the two key elements that produce a decision: the person and the situation. Think of it like this: Person x Situation = Decision.

Most decision-making experts focus on identifying how people make decisions in different situations. For example, if people are given a choice between one bird in the hand or two birds in the bush, we know from common sense and decades of research that most people will—you guessed it—take a bird in the hand. Sounds right, doesn’t it?

The problem is that “people” don’t make your decisions, you do. So, it doesn’t matter that three out of four people will choose a bird in the hand, if you’re the fourth person who dove headfirst into the bush. It doesn’t matter if three out of four people are reluctant to open that new store in Shanghai or invest in that new social media channel if you’re the fourth one who already signed the lease and uploaded your avatar on TheNewNewThing.com.

What matters is that you understand how you tend to make decisions, as well as how you leverage that tendency for the best results. You not only need to know whether you’ll make the decision or not, but also how you’ll tend to execute it, how you’ll tend to adjust during the process, and how you’ll learn from it in order to make an even better decision the next time.

Gary Hamel: Three Challenges Facing Organizations

By: Karen Rulifson

I just read this blog and couldn't say it better myself:

Published by Michael Lee Stallard on October 11, 2009

Last week I was invited to attend the World Business Forum in NYC with 50 other leading bloggers. The presentation that resonated the most with me was Gary Hamel’s. In it, he outlined three challenges facing today’s organizations:

1. How do we build an organization that can change as fast as change itself? Change is accelerating at this time in history and organizations need to act faster to deal with opportunities and threats. Consider the changes in the last century including in healthcare, microprocesssors, transportation, computing power, the internet, telephony, gene sequencing, biotech, etc.

2. How do we build an organization where innovation is everyone’s job? The accelerated pace of change makes this a necessity. Do employees understand their organizations innovation insights? Is every employee’s contribution to innovation measured?

3. How do we build an organization that actually inspires extraordinary accomplishment? This is the most important of the three challenges facing today’s organizations. On average, seventy-five percent of employees are not engaged in their jobs. We need employees who regard their jobs as the way to bring their passion in the world. Our job as managers is to build a work climate, a sense of purpose that inspires initiative because obedience, diligence and intellect are mere table stakes in today’s hypercompetitive marketplace.

These ideas are from Hamel’s book, The Future of Management.