A friend of mine has been high on the book Good to Great for some time.  The multinational that he worked for purchased thousands of copies and it became mandatory reading for all managers.  Being ADD I was reluctant to buy it as I knew that  it would gather dust on my bookshelf with all the other great books that I intend to read one day.  Well, when a friend gave me a book voucher for my last birthday, I decided to buy the book, written by Jim Collins. 

The book is excellent.  It describes organizations that produced stock returns 6.9 times the general market for the 15 years following their transition from good to great.  So now I’m excited, wanting to find the secrets to their success.  So I skipped to the first chapter dealing with the research and went to chapter 2 dealing with my favourite topic, Leadership.  And, what a pleasant surprise!   What the researchers found that distinguished the great leaders from the good ones surprised them too.  They discovered that the best leaders built enduring greatness “through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will.”  Wow, humility.  Isn’t that neat?   The great leaders didn’t spend their time on the lecture circuit beating their chests and bragging about how great they and their companies were.  In fact, few people would even recognize the names or faces of some of the CEOs from Walgreens, Gillette, Kroger, Pitney Bowes and Philip Morris to name a few.

So, is the idea of Humility and Focused Determination new?   Actually no.  I have recently been intrigued by MUSAR, which are ancient teachings from the scriptures dating back some 1000 years.  They describe the attributes of spiritually based fine human beings.   And, guess what.  Yes, the # 1 quality listed in Alan Morinis’ book Everyday Holiness is Humility.  And, enthusiasm is there too.

My conclusion: nothings new.  But the best ideas are sometimes lost for a while until some fine research resurrects them for us.

Never make assumptions about your learners.  Always give them the benefit of the doubt.  These were humbling lessons I got when preparing for a training session in a Municipal environment.  I assumed that the participants would be middle aged, mostly men and deeply cynical about anything I could offer them.  I couldn’t have been more wrong.  The 30 people I worked with were mostly middle aged for sure, but there was a good mix of men and women and each one was more enthusiastic than the next.  They had read pride in what they did, were eager to participate and saw real value in the ideas and skills I shared.

The experience was all the more positive as I got a number of follow up letters thanking me for my contribution and describing some successes that resulted for applying some of the workshop principles.

Moral of the story: Have the highest expectations of all participants, and never assume anything based on age, sex, level of the organization and type of industry. You just never know! 

Just back from a training assignment for The Greater City of Sudbury.  Wonderful people; so proud of their city, its services and the sense of community.  The City administrators have a major challenge: half of all their managers are going to be retiring in the next 5 years.  They are now making a concerted effort to develop a new generation of leaders by providing their middle managers an extensive 15 day series of workshops spread over a number of months.  The value of staggered training is that it will give participants an opportunity to practice skills in between sessions and report back to their peers on their progress.

The training incorporates the use of a number of diagnostic instruments to enable each person to identify their own strengths and weaknesses so that they can focus on those aspects of the learning that would benefit them mostly.

Peter Bock defines leadership as the ability to develop leaders, not followers.  Powerful stuff.  I think he’s be proud to be associated with The Leadership Institute as we are at the forefront of leadership development.  Our aim is to deploy materials and information to enable self-directed learners to improve their leadership skills.  We have a number of strategies to enable this goal - materials for self-study groups, the contents of some of my most popular books and monthly web-based learning session.  Participation in a combination of these opportiunities should raise your ability to take on a greater role of influence in your organization.  Good luck!