Leading for Success

Unleash your leadership potential to achieve extraordinary results

Sarah Cook

• Publisher: IT Governance Publishing
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781849281522
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Leadership

Every business, has to adapt to change. And the IT department of a business will always find itself at the cutting edge of such changes.

Change requires leadership. Impressive technical and administrative skills are not enough, and people in IT departments are now increasingly expected to use their soft skills as well.

IT is no longer merely a back-office function. People in IT are now being called on to drive through improvements in the wider operations of their business. Both as agents and enablers of change, IT professionals need to develop communication skills so that they can cooperate with the other departments of their organisation. This book is intended to help IT professionals develop their leadership skills.

Benefits to business include:

• Develop effective communication skills and inspire and enthuse your team!
• Create a team vision, shaping future goals by focusing on the team's earlier successes.
• Give the members of your team the sense of responsibility that will motivate them to achieve excellent results.
• Ensure your people perform to their full potential.

Enhance your leadership skillstoday.

Leading for Success

Unleash your leadership potential to
achieve extraordinary results

SARAH COOK

Soft Skills for
IT Professionals

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

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

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].

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.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1: What Is Leadershi...

Table of contents

• Leading for Success