One of the great pitfalls leaders can fall into during the Credit Crunch is the belief that previous success guarantees future happiness - or, that what has worked in the past will work in the future. Clearly, the context many leaders are operating in is different. Not least are the changes in confidence, commitment, knowledge and awareness of their teams.

Indeed, Marshall Goldsmith - in his challenging book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There - argues that:

 “successful people become great leaders when they learn to shift the focus from themselves to the performance of others”.

He demonstrates how a high proportion of senior people overestimate their own contribution and skills and ignore many of their failures and errors.

The pressure is on leaders to step up to the mark, issue dictats, make heroic decisions. But greatness lies in recognising our own gaps and by skillfully utilising the expertise around us. George W Bush gives us a good example of how not to do it - as reported in The Guardian, 26/11/08:

“Bush could not tolerate any dissent, once telling a luckless economics adviser that any decision the President made was, by definition, good policy.”

Barack Obama seems to prefer strong characters, robust discussion, good listening, and then he will make decsisions.

We need new answers and new solutions. Of course, the past provides guidelines and principles, but they need to be tested out against the new risks, and barriers to success need addressing. Just looking to past successes contrains our thinking.

The challenge is to enable others - to motivate them to take diffcult decisions and think through the short and long term consequences. You need buy-in from key stakeholders. A key issue is that whilst the decisions you make are important, the implementation of those decisions is where “the rubber hits the road”.

Great leaders enable their organisation to implement and they consider the current capacity to make implementation work - not what happened in the past.

Tags: Barack, bush, credit+crunch, marshall+goldsmith, Obama

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 11th, 2008 at 5:58 pm and is filed under Change, Engaging People, Ideas to Action, Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.