Which extremely successful ceo advises leaders

According to a new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, effective leadership is reflected by a stream of principles. Subtle alterations in policy, posture, and office culture have major effects on the way authority can be conveyed.

With this new paper in mind, Ladders unpacked 12 key leadership styles employed by the heads of successful corporations.

On balance, the most effective techniques air on the side of one of the two approaches explored in the new study. Transformational leaders try to inspire their team by appealing to each member as an individual as opposed to a dutiful cog. This management style requires a great deal of tact because it steers clear of confrontation. Gates has been said to avoid conflict in professional contexts. Diplomacy is needed to inspire loyalty and dedication, but it can just as easily diminish the perception of authority.

How does the tech magnate account for this potential liability? He reserves his passion for ideals and the central objective of his company. On keeping his team engaged, a year-old Gates once said:. We go into our offices and think up new programs, we get together in meetings,…. If anything, good work is perceived more admirably when the gears are available for all to see. We as a team make up the whole. Your Purpose is Fuel Nobody wants to work anymore for a company that says its No.

Drive the Culture You Believe in Invest in your culture as a differentiator to attract and retain the right talent. Champion transparency and Candor Today, any reaction to what we say can pop up on social media in minutes.

Embrace Vulnerability as a Strength Vulnerability now is a strength that leaders want to be open about. Challenge Your Perspective Surrounding yourself with people who push you for clarity and offer differing points of view is a fundamental condition for success.

Related content 5 steps to leadership success Discover your leadership style The next hot leadership topic. Over his 35 year career as a business leader, Sam has led large and midsize organizatio… Learn More. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Gain deeper insights when you join Vistage Take advantage of peer advisory group advice, 1-to-1 executive coaching, industry networks, exclusive events and more.

Learn more. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. Consider Richard Rosenberg of BankAmerica. He employs, by his own admission and our observation, the box approach to leadership. He says that he must: BankAmerica operates in a highly regulated industry. A small error or, worse, a case of graft can have grave consequences.

BankAmerica thus owes it to its customers to have a strict set of controls, and the CEO must make them his chief responsibility. But is Richard Rosenberg the kind of person you would expect to be using the box approach?

He is relaxed, affable, gregarious. But our situation demanded a box. So here I am. Instead, he quickly discovered that Tenneco was entirely off course. The company had some attractive businesses, but many of its practices prevented those businesses from thriving. There was a highly politicized capital-allocation system, a compensation program that measured and rewarded meaningless goals, and no strategy formulation process.

Without a complete overhaul, Mead determined, the company would not survive into the next century. The battle plan: change. Accordingly, Mead adopted practically every technique of the change approach to leadership.

He launched new policies and procedures, established a new culture, divested operations, fired employees unwilling or unable to embrace new ways of doing business, and went on the road to preach the gospel of change to Tenneco employees all over the world. Again, not at all. He is soft-spoken, even a bit subdued.

Indeed, in his previous position as CEO of International Paper, he was a human-assets leader—a role that may have come more naturally to him. But at Tenneco, the business situation demanded a different approach, and Mead rose to the challenge. That, we argue, is the essence of effective leadership. Not surprisingly, we also encountered CEOs whose personalities seemed to be a natural fit with their leadership approaches.

Assertive and demanding, Stephen Friedman, former managing partner of Goldman Sachs, would likely champion change at any organization. How to explain this confluence of personality and leadership approach? We see two possible scenarios.

The first is fortunate coincidence: A CEO assesses the business situation, determines which leadership approach is required, and finds that it just happens to reflect his or her personal style. A second and more likely scenario: The CEO is appointed by a person or group of people who make the right match. For instance, a board of directors decides that their organization needs strong strategic direction. What sort of CEO will they look for? Not someone who wants to spend a lot of time guiding and empowering individual employees, but someone who loves to get inside the data, someone with a proven talent for analyzing current market conditions, forecasting future ones, and mapping the route between them.

The board will select a candidate who already acts like a chief strategist. Until scientists discover a gene for leadership—and think of the repercussions of that in business, not to mention politics—the debate about personality will persist. Even if scientists find that leadership is more a case of nurture than of nature, there will still be those who think that only classic General Patton types can lead an organization to success.

Our research indicates that leadership is more complicated than that, driven not so much by what someone is like inside but by what the outside demands. CEOs who use this approach believe that their most important job is to create, test, and design the implementation of long-term strategy, extending in some cases into the distant future. It follows, then, that they tend to value employees to whom they can delegate the day-to-day operation of their organizations as well as those who possess finely tuned analytical and planning skills.

In marked contrast to CEOs in the above group, human-assets CEOs strongly believe that strategy formulation belongs close to the markets, in the business units. According to these CEOs, their primary job is to impart to their organizations certain values, behaviors, and attitudes by closely managing the growth and development of individuals. These executives travel constantly, spending the majority of their time in personnel-related activities such as recruiting, performance reviews, and career mapping.

Their goal is to create a universe of satellite CEOs: people at every level of the organization who act and make decisions as the CEO would. They often focus on designing programs, systems, and procedures, such as promotion policies and training plans, that reward people who acquire the expertise and share it across the borders of business units and functions. These CEOs tend to hire people who are trained in the expertise, but they also seek candidates who possess flexible minds, lack biases, and demonstrate a willingness to be immersed— indoctrinated is not too strong a word—in the expertise.

CEOs in this category believe that they can add the most value in their organizations by creating, communicating, and monitoring an explicit set of controls—financial, cultural, or both—that ensure uniform, predictable behaviors and experiences for customers and employees.

In addition, they devote more time than the other types of CEOs to developing detailed, prescriptive policies, procedures, and rewards to reinforce desired behaviors. Finally, these executives tend to value seniority within the organization, often promoting people with many years of service to the corporate team and rarely hiring top-level executives from outside the company.

In contrast to CEOs who employ the strategy approach, these CEOs focus not on a specific point of arrival for their organizations but on the process of getting there. Similarly, their focus contrasts starkly with that of a box leader: Control systems, written reports, planning cycles, policies, and rules do not seem to interest these so-called change agents.

They spend their days in the field, meeting with a wide range of stakeholders, from customers to investors to suppliers to employees at virtually all levels of the organization. Not surprisingly, the people they value are usually those who could be called aggressive and independent—people who view their jobs not as entitlements but as opportunities for advancement that must be seized every day. Seniority matters little to the change agent; passion, energy, and an openness to a new, reinvented tomorrow matter much more.

Executives who lead by using the change approach spend much of their time motivating employees through speeches and meetings.

In this article, we will describe the five leadership approaches in more detail and explore which business situations call for which approaches. There is, naturally, some overlap. CEOs who adopt the strategy approach might use elements of human-assets leadership, for example. Some box CEOs employ the techniques of a strategy leader to address the out-of-the-box issues that can be overlooked in control-oriented organizations. That said, however, our research suggests that in most effectively run organizations, CEOs select a dominant approach, using it as the compass and rudder that direct all corporate decisions and actions.

There will always be a point where the environment changes, the competition changes, something critical changes, and you must realize this and take the leading role in meeting change. In fact, the prevailing opinion of our subjects was that those with the most frequent and meaningful contact with customers and competitors should be responsible for strategic assessment and planning.

Nevertheless, we did encounter a distinct group of CEOs guided by the belief that their position gives them the best vantage point for making decisions about capital allocations, resource management, investments in technology, new products, and locations for doing business.

For this reason, they assert, the CEO alone although often supported by a small corporate team is equipped to determine exactly where the company in all its parts and units should go, and how fast. What you will see is time allotted with a common theme: the collection, cultivation, and analysis of data. These CEOs devote much of their days to the activities that ultimately yield strategic decisions.

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