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Leading for Success
Unleash your leadership potential to
achieve extraordinary results
SARAH COOK
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FOREWORD
IT is often seen as a ‘hard-skill’ profession where there is no place for soft skills. Yet the importance of soft skills for the IT professional should not be underrated; they underlie all behaviours and interactions. Both IT and non-IT professionals need to work together and learn from each other for effective business performance. All professionals, be they in IT or elsewhere, need to understand how their actions and reactions impact on their behaviour and working relationships.
This series of books aims to provide practical guidance on a range of soft-skills areas for those in IT and also for others, including those who deal with IT professionals, in order to facilitate more effective and co-operative working practices.
Each book is written by an experienced consultant and trainer. Their approach throughout is essentially practical and direct, offering a wealth of tried and tested professional guidance. Each chapter contains a diagnostic and focused questions to help the manager plan and steer their course. The language used is jargon-free, and a bibliography and a helpful glossary of terms are included at the end of the book.
Angela Wilde, February 2009
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PREFACE
This book is intended to provide IT managers with practical advice and tips on how to become an effective leader. Whatever the environment in which you work, providing effective leadership leads to a climate where team members want to give of their best and where organisational goals are more likely to be reached. Furthermore, there is a strong link between leadership and the creation of the stakeholder value of an organisation.
Gone are the days when leadership was merely a quality that people at the top of the organisation needed to demonstrate. In order to succeed today organisations need distributed leadership. This is leadership that is demonstrated at every level throughout the business.
Whether you are new to leadership or have been a leader for some time, this book will help you to develop your leadership skills. It is designed to assist you in understanding what the characteristics are of an effective leader, to help you assess where your strengths and development areas are and to aid you in creating a plan of action for realising your leadership potential.
I hope that you will find this book informative and practical and that it provides you with details on how you can become an even more effective leader.
Sarah Cook
The Stairway Consultancy Ltd
www.thestairway.co.uk
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sarah Cook is the Managing Director of the Stairway Consultancy Ltd. She has 15 years’ consulting experience specialising in leadership and management development, team building and change. Prior to this, Sarah worked for Unilever and as Head of Customer Care for a retail marketing consultancy.
As well as having practical experience of helping individuals to improve their leadership skills, Sarah is a business author and has written widely on leadership and management development, team development and coaching. She also speaks regularly at conferences and seminars on these topics.
Sarah is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and a Chartered Marketeer. She has an MA from Cambridge University and an MBA. Sarah is an accredited user of a wide range of psychometric and team diagnostic tools. She may be contacted via
[email protected].
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to acknowledge:
R.R. Blake and J.S. Mouton, The Managerial Grid, Gulf Publishing, 1964.
R.R. Blake and J.S. Mouton, The New Managerial Grid, Gulf Publishing, 1978.
S. Cook, S. Macaulay and H. Coldicott, Change Management Excellence, Kogan Page, 2004.
J. Gardner, On Leadership, Free Press, 1993.
P. Hersey, The Situational Leader, Pfeiffer and Co, 1984.
P. Hersey and K.H. Blanchard, The Management of Organizational Behaviour, 8th edition, Prentice Hall, 2000.
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CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter 1: What Is Leadershi...
