Uplifting Leadership

How Organizations, Teams, and Communities Raise Performance

Andy Hargreaves, Alan Boyle, Alma Harris

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781118921326
• eBook ISBN: 9781118921340
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

What does it take to do more with less? How can you do better than before, or better than others? How do you turn losses into wins, or near-bankruptcy into strong profitability, or abject failure into stellar success?

The power of uplift enables any organization to do more with less, beat the competition, and perform better than ever. Leaders who uplift their employees' passions, intellects, and commitments produce remarkable results.

Based on original research from a seven-year global study, Uplifting Leadership reveals how leaders from diverse organizations inspired and uplifted their teams' performance. Distilling the six common characteristics of leaders at high-performing organizations across business, sports, and education, authors Andy Hargreaves, Alan Boyle, and Alma Harris explore the nature of uplift, its impact on performance, and the ways to achieve it within and beyond an organization's walls, revealing how leaders:

• Identify and articulate an inspiring dream that is coherently connected to the best of what the organization has been before
• Pursue that dream at a sustainable pace without squandering resources, incurring excessive debt, or burning people out
• Forge paths of innovation and improvement that others have overlooked or rejected
• Monitor progress by using metrics and indicators in a mindful and meaningful way
• Build teams that naturally pull people into change rather than pushing them through it

Featuring case studies of organizations as diverse as Shoebuy.com, Fiat, Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, Marks & Spencer, Cricket Australia, Burnley Football Club, and the Vancouver Giants, as well as world-leading educational systems, Uplifting Leadership provides tools for leaders to incorporate these performance-driving strategies into their own.

For leaders who want their people to try harder, transform what they do, reach for a higher purpose, and stay resolute and resilient when opposing forces threaten to defeat them, Uplifting Leadership provides a path to better performance across any organization.

Chapter One
Dreaming with Determination

With Dennis Shirley

All people dream, but not equally.

Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their mind,

Wake in the morning to find that it was vanity.

But the dreamers of the day are dangerous people,

For they dream their dreams with open eyes,

And make them come true.

—T. E. Lawrence

Dreaming and Believing

When Martin Luther King Jr. stood before the Reflecting Pool in Washington DC on a late August day in 1963, he did not declare that he had a strategic plan. He didn’t list a set of key performance indicators or specify any targets for meeting them. Dr. King, as we know from his passionately delivered speech, had a dream—an improbable dream that his “four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”¹ Within just two generations, that dream and all the actions it inspired helped give rise to the first African American president of the United States.

Without dreams, profound human and social change would scarcely be possible. Uplifting organizations and their leaders aspire to and articulate an improbable dream that is bolder than a plan or even a vision, and they inspire others to be part of it. Dreams like Martin Luther King’s articulate the possibility of change and insist on its necessity.

Inspiring dreams is one of the very first factors that come into play when creating something from nothing or turning failure into success. Dreams describe an imaginable future to hope and strive toward, a vision that offers something far more desirable than the present state. Dreamers don’t pressure people to change against their will; instead, they inspire people to change by eliciting, appealing to, and expressing their ideals, aspirations, and beliefs, so that they might believe in the possibility of unprecedented change.

Dreams are most powerful when they are held collectively by a community, rather than pursued for individual self-interest. The most inspiring dreams are therefore fundamentally connected to improving an entire organization, whole communities—even entire countries. These kinds of stimulating visions add meaning to people’s lives and offer hope in the midst of despair. The following three elements of inspiration are especially integral to uplifting leadership and we will see them at work throughout this chapter and those that follow:

• A broad and inspiring dream extends far beyond numerical targets. It doesn’t home in on being in the top five, or emphasize vague and lofty goals like being “world class.” Instead, this kind of dream doesn’t only promise to raise performance and increase output; it also strives to change people’s lives for the better. It promises to bring them to a better place. This often occurs by inciting social uplift in terms of opportunity, equity, or advancement for those who have been marginalized or discriminated against. In two poor London boroughs that had been dogged by educational failure, the dream in Hackney was that parents would fight to get their children into its schools; in Tower Hamlets, it was that poverty would not be an acceptable excuse for failure.
• The dream’s inclusive nature expresses a sense of collective identity. This means that the vision doesn’t just belong to a few top leaders. It’s also the property and prerogative of entire communities to which people form deep attachments, from the highest ranking executives to the lowest status assistants, from frontline workers to office staff in the back. The commonwealth at Scott Bader chemicals and resins creates an unbreakable bond of investment and involvement throughout the workforce that joins everyone together with a sense of social responsibility.
• The dream is made up of a clearly articulated relationship between what has been and what will be. It’s not merely a description that harkens back to the past or looks toward the future, but that shows the connections and continuity between valued heritage and needed progress. This helps people to know where they are going by encouraging them to recall where they once started out. They are reminded what they are made of and where they came from. People in the small and economically depressed town of Burnley, in England, dared to dream that its soccer club could once again play in the top echelon of the English Premier League.

The power of inspiring dreams to raise collective performance and turn failure into success occurs in all kinds of places. One of the least likely junctures is where the rubber really does hit the road: in the auto-manufacturing industry. Yet this is just where we’ve found some of the most daring dreams of all. When Henry Ford established the Ford Motor Company, he declared that its purpose would be no less than “opening the highways to all mankind.”²

On a crisp winter evening, the night before the 2009 US Presidential Inauguration, breaking news first reached the Italian City of Turin that would transform the city’s and the world’s understanding of its auto-manufacturing industry forever. The Financial Times was the first to report a possible partnership between Fiat Auto and American auto giant Chrysler.³ Just months later, when Chrysler collapsed like a house of cards along with General Motors, the partnership became a reality. By the end of 2013, it was poised to turn into a full merger. On New Year’s Day, 2014, Chrysler Motors and the United Autoworkers Union became “completely absorbed” by Fiat in a full merger when Fiat bought out the 41 percent share in Chrysler of the United Autoworkers Union Trust.⁴

Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino (FIAT) had come a long way from the brink of bankruptcy in 2004. Founded in 1899, Fiat had built a classic and honorable reputation throughout most of the twentieth century as one of the pioneers of the European car industry.⁵ For a very long time, it was believed that what was good for Fiat Motors was also good for Italy as a nation. Fiat’s Golden Age had taken place during the 1960s, when the tiny Fiat 500 was a market success and an iconic element in romantic European movies. Under Gianni Agnelli, grandson of the company’s founder, Giovanni Agnelli, Fiat courted success through a chic sense of 1960s Italian style and quality.⁶

But signs of a slow decline at Fiat were already evident by the early 1980s. A robust yet overprotected domestic market in which Fiat sales peaked at 59 percent of market share in 1988, and a European market that still held up respectably at 15 percent, masked a host of underlying problems.⁷ Whereas outsourcing represented only 50 percent of production in 1982, the figure had escalated to 65 percent a decade later—and similar patterns held for design work. The US market didn’t just find Fiat’s boxy vehicles unattractive; they were also unreliable. Warranty repair costs on the 1974 Fiat Strada wiped out all profits on its sales. By 1984, the company abandoned the US market altogether.⁸

A patrician style of management in this family-run company could no longer adapt to accelerated systems of production and to the increasingly globalized marketing of the modern auto-manufacturing industry. When Gianni Agnelli passed away in 2003, Fiat was in crisis. By 2004, the company had suffered seventeen straight quarters in the red.⁹ A dizzying succession of four CEOs failed to produce a turnaround. Even the Mayor of Turin felt that Fiat was a “badly run company” that seemed headed for the wrecker’s yard.¹⁰

In 2004, Sergio Marchionne was appointed as the first CEO ever to run Fiat Auto without the direct oversight of the Agnelli family. Even though he had no background in the industry, the company’s problems were glaringly obvious to Marchionne when he took over. He described it as a “laughing stock,” even a “cadaver.”¹¹ Fiat had an overextended portfolio; its engineering focus had made it unappealing to stylish twenty-first-century consumers; and dealers had a take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward their customers.

Yet somehow, the company had returned to profitability as soon as 2006—and by 2008, before the global economic collapse, Fiat’s bottom lin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Introduction: Uplift
• Chapter 1: Dreaming with Determination
• Chapter 2: Creativity and Counter-Flow
• Chapter 3: Collaboration with Competition
• Chapter 4: Pushing and Pulling
• Chapter 5: Measuring with Meaning
• Chapter 6: Sustainable Success
• Chapter 7: Uplifting Action
• Appendix: Research Methodology
• Acknowledgments
• The Authors
• Index
• End User License Agreement