Stephen Covey has a new "Habit"

Fifteen years after his celebrated "The 7 habits of Highly Effective People" is released, covey has taken a leaf out of his own life and released his 8th Habit.

"Find your voice, and inspire others to find theirs."

That proves difficult to accomplish, and The 8th Habit is 50 pages longer than the original seven combined.

No. 8 is a half-ton habit that invites the merging of talent, passion and conscience that few mortals accomplish — otherwise we would be populated with Gandhis. Simply, Habit 8 asserts that everyone has an inner longing to seize the day and live a life of contribution. It requires heavy lifting, and Covey challenges readers to get there.

Read he full press coverage here.

Can Leaders be Modelled ?

After my long date with leadership issues I related them back to what we practice in the field. Everywhere I see some kind of modelling practice in place to determine the behaviors that make up a successful leader. All is well if these behaviors are universal and unaffected by time factor. But we are faced with a tough answer to the question : Would copying behaviours of "current" leaders would produce successful "future" leaders?

It seems to me perfectly natural to model a technical job or a purely managerial job but leadership is something special , something different isn't it. They are the ones who break conventions who strikes gold and who scales unknown peaks that others haven't even dreamt of. Are we not arresting the whole idea of leadership and by modelling it? I set out to find what is going among people who think on similar lines.

I found a perfect companion in Margot Cairnes author of best selling book "Approaching the Corporate Heart". Here are some of quotes from one of her articles titled "Competency theory Leadership". The full article is available here http://adtimes.nstp.com.my/jobstory/feb26b.htm

Dr. Mcelland (proponent of Competency theory and associated practices) believed he could take pieces of different men, sew them together, charge them with current and create a superior being. So he took features he admired in different people, joined them up, applied electricity and created a monster.

Competency theory is based on studying successful people, breaking down their behaviors, attitudes and skills into measurable bits, and then looking for ways of sewing those bits together to create beings who (most likely) demonstrate superior performance. Based on competency theory leadership development involves training the FUTURE leaders to mimic the observable competencies OF CURRENT LEADERS.The competency theory has even stretched to the realm of emotion where, through work on emotional intelligence, we have managed to turn how we feel emotionally into measurable competencies

Tomorrow's leaders cannot be created by having them mimic the competencies of yesterday's leaders. At best a competency approach can create managers - controllable cogs to grease the organizational wheel, without too much imagination, innovation or change. At worst competency theory can kill the innate brilliance of those with the spark of originality, creativity and inner power that lies at the heart of real leaders.

Leadership comes not from without but from within. Real leadership development involves nurturing the unique potential of each individual, having them be as much themselves as they are capable of being. Real leadership development encourages people to follow their own interests, develop their own unique insights, motivations and capacities. It helps them
bring their innate gifts into relationship with the people and the world around them, encouraging them to make their distinctive contributions to the greater good."

The madness of trying to mimic future leaders with yesterday's competencies comes to light fully when remember the incredible rate of discontinuous change currently occurring globally.Could Bill Gates have been created by training him to behave like the people who headed IBM when Gates worked there? It was those managers who rejected the notion of the operating system that formed the basic product upon which Microsoft was built. Would the competencies of the people who made sliderules have been of any use at all to Tom Watson when he developed IBM? The idea is ludicrous - yet it is the basis of competency theory.

Well that figures the answer isn't it?

More on Leadership

It has been a long holiday back here at Kualalumpur. I used those holidays to do more indepth reading on leadership issues. How can one miss John.C.Maxwell and his famous "21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership" . I would term it is a "The Leadership Bible", while most of you would have read this gem, i found an online resource: a set of assessments that accompany the laws laid by Maxwell. You can try them for free at this site:

http://www.injoy.com/a21/

Assess yourself and pass me on the comments! Have Fun

Servant Leadership

I have come across this article "Practicing Servant Leadership by Larry Spears" quite amusing more holistic approach towards leadership.

>>Quoted from "Practicing Servant Leadership by Larry Spears"
The servant-leader is one who is a servant first. In "The Servant as Leader" Greenleaf wrote, "It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant--first to make sure that other people's highest-priority needs are being served. The best test is: Do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?"

At its core, servant-leadership is a long-term, transformational approach to life and work--in essence, a way of being--that has the potential for creating positive change throughout our society."

Read this intresting article here http://www.l2li.org/leaderbooks/l2l/fall2004/spears.html

Components of Competency

Found this picture from my old archives. It explains components of competency fairly well, could be used in your slides on competency awareness.

Unfortunately I donot have author information for credits!!

Skills Vs Competency

Too many practitioners and organizations mix up between Skills and Competencies. I have witnessed profound confusion on this topic all over . I found this book excerpt offering a comprehensive explanation on how they both differ and why we should focus on competencies than skills.

Excerpted from Creating A Culture of Competence, by Dr. Michael Zwell. Published by John Wiley & Sons, 2000. Pages 22-24

"In the business world today, there is some confusion over the definition of a competency. The biggest confusion is between competencies and skills. Skills generally refer to the mastery of technique and knowledge that applies to a specific area or profession. Sales skills include prospecting, handling objections, and closing. Drafting skills include measuring and drawing. Managerial skills include writing and forecasting. Some companies use the word competency to mean skills. This causes them big headaches for two reasons. First, there are so many skills in every position in an organization that management of a skills database is a time-consuming and difficult activity. The bigger problem is that the focus on skills distracts people from the use and assessment of competencies, which play a much bigger role in determining performance.

More importantly, focusing only on knowledge and skills misses the point. Having the greatest knowledge and skill on the planet won't make any difference if people have no desire and no drive to use that skill and knowledge.

It is not that skills are unimportant. A threshold level of skill is necessary to a job.If you are hiring an electrical engineer to work at a nuclear power plant, you need someone who knows electrical engineering. Assuming that technical ability determines successful performance, however, is a costly mistake. People with basic skills who are strong in the important competencies for a position will, because they're strong in those competencies, acquire whatever knowledge and skills they need to become a superior performer in that job. If people strong in Initiative do not know the answer to a problem, they'll use their Initiative to find it. If people strong in Service Orientation do not know the answer to a customer's problem, they'll find someone who does. Keeping the focus on competencies is keeping your eye on the ball.

It is paying attention to what matters, paying attention to the things that actually determine the difference between strong and weak performance."

You are Killers!!

I greatly admire the passion Tom Peters brings to work. Called affectionately as "Tom's Rants" are thoughts that puts TOM on war path. Here is his Rant on "Health Care"

"A recent report suggests that "acute care" facilities ("hospitals," to US civilians) kill 195,000 patients a year due to quality lapses. That is, one victim of crappy management every ... 2 minutes, 38 seconds"...whoops i couldn't digest it still, it is pretty scary!!!

Tom's Fury to Health professionals especially those on acute care facilities:

"You are Killers : Quality remains a bad joke. Stop using the term "healthcare",You haven’t earned the right to utter the word “care”!!

For more of TOM's Rants on health care download his presentation from his website http://www.tompeters.com

Got a point to ponder here: if US is 2 min 38 Sec, i am pretty scared to think about developing / under-developed countries....Reasons to believe the miracle of God .