What factors make a powerfully effective leader ? As we enter the 21st century, the challenge for leaders in all spheres to deliver consistently extra ordinary results is getting harder. The geographical dimensions of competition are expanding. Technology is advancing, Time horizons for results are shrinking. Customers are demanding more, faster and better. Through a number of interviews with the heads of 160 of the world’s top Corporations, Farkas, De Backer and Sheppard in their well researched book “Maximum Leadership 2000” offers revealing and absorbing insights into the leadership styles and methods of today’s top performing executives and what they do to add value to their organisations.
MAXIMUM LEADERSHIP is, simply put, the ability to consistently deliver extra ordinary results. The five main approaches to this new concept are :
1. The Strategist Approach . The CEO manages for success by acting as the company’s top strategist, systematically envisioning the future, and specifically mapping out how to reach there.
2. The Human Assets Approach. The CEO manages for success through people, policies, programmes and principles.
3. The Expertise Approach. The CEO manages for success by becoming the champion of a specific, proprietary expertise, and using it to focus the organisation.
4. The Box Approach. The CEO manages by building a set of rules, systems, procedures and values that essentially control behaviour and outcomes well-defined boundaries.
5. The Change Agent Approach. The CEO manages for success by acting as an agent of radical change, transforming bureaucracies into organisations that embrace the new and different
Does the right approach lead to organisational effectiveness – to success ? Here it is also important to recognise that these reflections are the view from the top of the organisation. More work needs to be done to relate these opinions to each organisation’s understanding of the CEO’s approach, and beyond that, to financial results. Every day, senior managers in every kind of business and every country face this leadership challenge. Some are already using one or more of the approaches. Others are at the opposite pole : They are starting anew, deciding which kind of path they will forge in the hard going to results. It is a challenge to focus both on what needs to be accomplished, and how to get it done.
Tailpiece
Reward Excellent failures, but punish mediocre successes,
– Brig K Harikumar (Retd)
Re-posting from my old note published in 1997 .