Creative Leadership Mining the Gold in Your Work Force

A. S. Migs Damiani, A. S. Damiani

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781574442267
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000154498
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Mentoring & Coaching
• Index: Business

"Migs Damiani has come up with a winner. Here is a book you can open to almost any page and get useful information. You can spend a few minutes reading a chapter and get some profound thinking and solid advice. Creative Leadership gives specific, clear-cut directions not just for those who are in leadership positions, but those who want to be more, do more, and have more. He ties it all together in an interesting and informative way, and hits major points with bullet-like precision, effectively using "nuggets" of information that you can use in your personal, family, and business life."

1

Meeting Leadership Challenges in the 21st Century

“Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he or she wants to do it.”

Dwight Eisenhower

The following corporate stories are indicative of the dramatic changes that have taken place regarding how companies are being managed.

Toro Company was forced to undergo a horrific downsizing for the first time in its history. More than half of its employees lost their jobs. CEO Ken Melrose’s first message to the survivors was, “We (senior management) are to blame; we’ve let you down; we’ve mismanaged the company.” But Melrose believed that Toro could turn around. He transformed Toro into an open corporation by insisting that the first job of the managers was to enable their employees to be stars. He backed his words with action. Soon empowerment, cross-functional employees, the freedom to fail, team-building, structural flattening, and process-oriented work teams became the very fabric of Toro.

Ken Melrose, Chairman and CEO, Toro Company

They brought Dee Parkinson in when the business was on the brink of extinction. After senior execs at the parent company had all but given up on Suncor’s Oil Sands Group, Parkinson raised it back from the dead. She did this amazing turnaround using three simple principles: (1) go to the employees — all the employees. Ask them for help. Ask them how things can be fixed. Let them tell you how to make things right. (2) Tell them that they’ve told you how to fix it. Tell them in face-to-face meetings, in the employee publication, in private one-on-one meetings, everywhere. (3) Do what they’ve told you to do. That’s it. As simple as this sounds, it saved a billion dollar oil mine from shutting down for good. This is one of the most dramatic corporate stories of the 1990s. Parkinson’s courage and toughness under extreme pressure helped save a company, a town, and an industry.

Dee Parkinson, Executive Vice President, Suncor Oil Sands Group

CEO Jack Stack believes that corporate problems are caused by two things: (1) no one tells employees how to make money and generate cash, and (2) management doesn’t have the understanding or the fearlessness to commit to total communications. Fear of losing control and mistrust of communication cripple the company’s most sincere attempts to change. He’s learned that:

◾ A business should be run like an aquarium, so everybody can see what’s going on, what’s going in, what’s moving around, what’s coming out.

◾ Everything you do should be based on the understanding that job security is paramount. You should be creating a place for people to work not just this year, but for the next fifty years.

◾ Downsizing means that management has failed.

◾ You will always be more successful in business by sharing information with the people you work with than by keeping them in the dark.

◾ Your company will make more money if it openly shares information, ideas, and numbers.

◾ You can practice open-book communication and management even if you’re a front-line supervisor in a company mummified in secrecy. Can these methods work? Is total communication the answer to all your company’s problems?

Jack Stack, CEO, Springfield Remanufacturing Co.

Trends in the 1990s

In clam waters, every ship has a good captin.

- Swedish proverb

We live in an age of unforgiving management responsibility. In the 1990s, downsizing became a troubling symbol of continuous change and relentless competition. In a recent report, “Corporate Downsizing, Job Elimination, and Job Creation,” the American Management Association looked at trends in the U.S. over the last five years. Among the findings:

◾ Even as downsizing continues, more jobs are being created. In 1995, the net change in jobs was −1.1%, a sharp improvement over the −8.4% of two years earlier. As a result, job elimination is no longer synonymous with downsizing.

◾ Of the new jobs created in 1995, 50.3% were hourly, 9% were middle management, and 31.1% were professional/technical.

◾ Middle managers, who comprise between 5% and 8% of the workforce, made up more than 15% of the laid-off workers.

◾ Fewer companies attribute layoffs to a short-term business downturn; more are citing long-term reasons such as improved staff utilization, re-engineering, and outsourcing.

◾ Fewer than half of the firms that have downsized in the past five years have subsequently increased their profits, and then only a third reported higher productivity.

◾ Companies that increased training budgets after downsizing were twice as likely to show profit and productivity over the long term.

REDEFINING RELATIONSHIPS WITH EMPLOYEES

According to a CEO brief on “The People/Performance Paradox,” published as a supplement to Chief Executive Magazine in July 1996, the 21st century will bring unprecedented challenges to face senior management, who will find themselves in a troubling paradox: at the very moment in which we need to redefine our relationship with our employees and offer them less security — we also will need more employee involvement and creativity — attributes that tend to flourish best in an atmosphere of mutual commitment and trust.

I skate where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.

- Wayne Gretzky

Study any corporation or based on your own experience, name those responsible for missed opportunities and bungled projects you have witnessed. Do management names top the list? Just ask the employees. They’ll tell you that the problem definitely is management and they are the biggest barrier to change, innovation, and new ideas.

MANAGEMENT ISN’T EASY

While management looks easy, the fact is that mediocre management is the norm. What looks easy is extraordinarily difficult. Impossible demands and high expectations are required of managers. They are expected to possess skills in finance, cost control, resource allocation, product development, marketing, manufacturing, and technology. They must be masters of strategy, persuasion, influence, negotiation, writing, speaking and listening, and have common sense and a positive attitude. To demonstrate leadership, managers must possess vision, involve their employees, and motivate and bring out the best in others. They are expected to be friend, mentor, and guardian of their subordinates. Not many people can live up to these expectations.

Teaching kids to count is fine, but teaching them what counts is best.

- Bob Talbert

Many, however, become successful. Even though they may lack many of the skills that are part of their job descriptions, they make up for it by having “people skills.” Understanding that managing involves human interactions, successful managers influence subordinates to work hard, even when they may know little about the technical aspects of the work. Subordinates will thwart and dislike the manager who is mean-spirited, regardless of his or her technical prowess.

There are an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job.

- Peter Drucker

Great managers have the following attributes:

◾ They understand the importance of character.

◾ They are able to communicate clearly and consistently, keep promises, avoid hidden agendas, and take personal responsibility for the company’s acts as well as their own.

◾ They empower subordinates and restrain the instinct to control.

◾ They create value where none exists, save and create jobs and careers.

◾ They exhibit more character than technical proficiency, have integrity, passion, and courage.

◾ They are enthusiastic and energetic.

INVESTING IN PEOPLE SKILLS

It is easy to teach statistics, data analysis and other similar technical and business subjects but not much is being invested by corporations in “people skills” and values training. Organizations that are going to survive and prosper in the future will be those that find a way to tap into the individual’s human potential and explore new methods of managing, motivating and redefining the fundamental relationship between the employee and the company. To get there, managers have to create a positive, caring climate of trust in which others can be motivated to develop their intelligence and skills and be the best they can be. Trust makes cooperation possible and cooperation is especially important in an era of change and competition.

You know how leadership works… just look at how your company leader behaves.

- Steven Berglas

A workforce that can cooperate well with each other and with management will set a company apart from the competition. Corporations that promote people skills will be the ones who succeed. Corporations must develop the skills and behaviors needed to manage in this work...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• About the Author
• Advance Praise
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Meeting Leadership Challenges in the 21st Century
• 2 The Winner’s Triangle
• 3 Begin at the Beginning, with a Positive Attitude
• 4 Making Others Feel Important
• 5 Managing Confrontation
• 6 Leading Change
• 7 Motivating Employees for Higher Productivity
• 8 Mentoring
• 9 Communicating
• 10 Developing Your Leadership Potential
• 11 Recommended Education and Training
• Epilogue
• Resources for Your Personal/Professional Growth
• Words of Inspiration