The most important task of an organization’s leader is to anticipate crisis, not to avert it, but to anticipate it. To wait until the crisis hits is already abdication. Being ahead of it: innovation, constant renewal, The lesson for the leaders of non-profits is that one has to grow with success. The starting point is to recognize that change is not a threat, it’s an opportunity.
The steps to make innovative decisions and implement them:
1. Organize yourself to see the opportunity;
2. Implement the innovation effectively, the most common mistake is the attempt to build too much reinsurance into the change, to cover your flank, not to alienate yesterday. The leader of the organization has to set the example.
3. You have the problem of organizing the new, It must be organized separately.
4. A mistake for innovative planning is if being isolated from operations, the planners overlooked a few ‘housekeeping’ details – if you first plan, confirm your plan with domain expert.
Everything new requires hard work on the part of true believers and true believers are not available part time.
This is not what I was hired to do or what I expected to do, but this is what the job requires – and then I need to roll up my sleeves and go to work.
How to pick a leader?
1. what is his or her strength?
2. what is the one immediate key challenge? Matching the strengths with the needs
3. Character / Integrity: A leader sets an example. Tips: I always ask myself, would I want one of my sons to work under that person?
In the non-profit agency, mediocrity in leadership shows up almost immediately, you deal with balance, synthesis, a combination of bottom lines for performance. You can’t be satisfied in non-profit organizations with doing adequately as a leader, you have to do exceptionally well, because your agency is committed to a cause. Anybody in that leadership position who thinks he’s a great man or woman will kill himself -- and the agency.
The role the leader takes has to fit in terms of the mission of the institution and its values. To work, the role has to fit in three dimension: fit you, fit the task, fit expectations, you have two things to build on: the quality of the people in the organization, and the new demands you make on them.
The leaders who work must effectively, never say ‘I’, and that’s not because they have trained themselves not to say ‘I’’, they don’t think ‘I’, they think ‘We’, they think team.
They accept the responsibility and don’t sidestep it, but ‘we’ gets the credit. As a leader, you are visible, incredibly visible and you have expectations to fulfill.
I don’t want to see a pimp in the mirror when I shave in the morning, If you do see one, they your people will see one, too.
To every leader, there is a season
Basic leadership competences:
1. willingness, ability and self-discipline to listen, all you have to do is keep your mouth shut, we either do things to perfection, or we don’t do them, we don’t do things to get by.
2. Willingness to realize how unimportant you are, compared to the task, ‘leader has sucked the place dry’ – when he left, the organization collapsed.
3. Do not feel threatened by strength.
Most leaders were neither born nor made, they were self-made. We need far too many leaders to depend only on the naturals.
Sister Justina taught a lot to peter drucker,
It wasn’t his nature, but it was the key task, and so it had to be done == Douglas Mac Arthur
It’s that willing ness to make yourself competent in the task that’s needed that creates leaders.
Whot does it need so that it can be successful another 25 years – SEARS, he concluded that it needed managers.
The balance decision:
1. Balance between seeing only the big picture and forgetting the individual person who sits there – one lonely young man in need of help
2. Becoming the prisoner of operations, A CEO is forced to see the same issues she faces in her own organization through the other end of the telescope, the effective people do it very largely through their work in associations and other organizations. I’m too close to the details, I need to see what the overall issues really are too.
3. Balance between concentrating resources on one goal and enough diversification.
4. Balance being too cautious and being rash Drucker: I’ve taught myself that if I expect something to happen in 3 months, I say, make it five. “know thyself” know what’s your degenerative tendency. Make sure you know your degenerative tendency and try to counteract it.
5. Balance between opportunity and risk.
The don’t of leadership
1. Far too many leaders believe that when they announce things, everyone understands, It never happens. Effective leaders have to spend a little time on making themselves understood: they say ‘This is what we were faced with, these are the alternatives we saw, the alternatives we considered, what is your opinion’? They may say we wouldn’t have decided that way, but at least upstairs, they just didn’t shoot from hip.
2. Don’t be afraid of strengths in your organization, you run far less risk of having able people around who want to push you out than you risk by being served by mediocrity.
3. Don’t pick your successor alone, we tend to pick people who remind us of ourselves when we were twenty years younger, This is pure delusion, you end up with carbon copies. Leaders don’t pick their own successors, they are consulted, but they don’t make the decision
4. Don’t hog the credit, don’t knock your subordinates, A leader has responsibility to his subordinates, to his associates. ‘He never sang their praises’ – WRONG
The most important do is: keep your eye on the task, not on yourself, the task matters, and you are a servant – don’t ask why again and again, just do it! Focus on the task and commited to it is the most important thing.
