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Boundaries for Leaders
Henry Cloud
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eBook - ePub
Boundaries for Leaders
Henry Cloud
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About This Book
In Boundaries for Leaders, clinical psychologist and bestselling author Dr. Henry Cloud leverages his expertise of human behavior, neuroscience, and business leadership to explain how the best leaders set boundaries within their organizations--with their teams and with themselves--to improve performance and increase employee and customer satisfaction.
In a voice that is motivating and inspiring, Dr. Cloud offers practical advice on how to manage teams, coach direct reports, and instill an organization with strong values and culture.
Boundaries for Leaders: Take Charge of Your Business, Your Team, and Your Life is essential reading for executives and aspiring leaders who want to create successful companies with satisfied employees and customers, while becoming more resilient leaders themselves.
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CHAPTER 1
THE PEOPLE ARE THE PLAN
My client, CEO of a $20 billion company, looked at me with one of those expressions that smart people get sometimes when something extra smart goes off in their heads, the kind of thought that captures even their own attention. Head tilted and eyes squinted, he said something profound: âYou know what is weird?â
âWhat?â I asked.
âEverybody out there is always trying to figure out the right plan. They meet, they argue, they worry and they put all of their energy into trying to come up with the ârightâ plan. But the truth is that there are five right plans. There are a lot of ways to get there. The real problem is getting the people to do what it takes to make the plan work. That is where you win or lose. Itâs always about the people.â
He was right. Ultimately, leadership is about turning a vision into reality; itâs about producing real results in the real world. And that is only done through people doing what it takes to make it happen. So, as a leader, how do you get that to happen? What are the things that you have to do to ensure they will do what will make it workâwith a team, a direct report, or an entire organization? That is the focus of this book.
This book is about what leaders need to do in order for people to accomplish a vision.
WHEN THE âPEOPLEâ SIDE OF THINGS DOESNâT WORK
This particular CEO had come to me for help with his team. They had become disconnected from one another, and their divide had begun to manifest itself in the rest of the organization. At the root of the problem was a breach between the leader of operations in the home office and the leader of the sales force out in the field. Communication had broken down, and results were slowing down tooâall for no good reason, other than that the âpeopleâ side of things wasnât working. Even though the âplanâ was good, the team was not functioning like a good team, with shared objectives and healthy relationships that would help make the plan work. Similarly, the culture was at risk, with negativity creeping in where positive energy should have been. The dilemma for the CEO was that even though he had a good âplan,â as he said, and he had âreally great people,â they were just not working together.
As I meet with leaders and their companies, I find that more often than not, they have smart plans. They know their business, or they would not be where they are. They are strategic, talented, gifted, and experienced. Their âbusinessâ expertise got them to where they are, but as they rise to more significant positions of leadership, they need other skills in addition to what their business smarts can provide. They need to be able to lead people to get results.
What usually got them there was being good at the business, devising and executing âthe plan.â But now, as leaders, they also have to be good at something else: getting people to do what it takes to make the plan work. It is about leading the âright people,â empowering them to find and do the âright thingsâ in the âright waysâ at the âright times.â That is what will bring a plan to real results.
As one leader told me, âI wanted this position because I love the hunt, the strategy, the winning. I love focusing on how to make it work and getting there. But the longer I am at it, the more and more of my time is spent on the people leadership issues, and less on the work. I have great people, but getting them all on the same page and working together takes more time and energy than it seems like it should. Some days I feel more like a psychologist than a business leader.â
How much time and energy it âshouldâ take is debatable, but the key takeaway is this: the time and energy that you do invest in people issues should produce better results and create teams and a culture where momentum and energy thrive. And the work of building a great team should feel personally rewarding instead of draining. Put simply: the people side of it should not be what he was experiencing. It should be an investment with a high rate of return for you and for the business, not a constant drain on your personal and organizational resources. It should produce positive, not negative, energy.
As a leader, you probably spend a lot of time on the âpeopleâ side of business alreadyâeven more time when results are poor. You are always building teams and culture, leading direct reports, driving initiatives and change through your organization, and pushing for innovation, adaptation, and agility. And what you want is for all of that effort to produce results, and for people to be positively energized as they help drive the vision forward.
GREAT PLAN, GOOD PEOPLE, BUT POOR RESULTS
Sometimes even with all of that energy spent, results are negatively affected by the ways that different people function both in teams and as individuals. Too often such âsoftâ issues become ingrained patterns that determine how the business itself looks and functions. When added up, individual weaknesses and poor interpersonal dynamics can overshadow the strengths. All the smarts and skills of individual team members just donât produce the results you are looking for. Opportunities are lost, even as you spend more time and more energy trying to get people moving forward together in the right direction. Such a great plan, such good people, and still not getting the results you want.
See if you can identify with any of these issues:
Do any of these sound familiar? Donât worry: you are not alone. The frustrations described here happen frequently, even to very talented people and even in high-performance organizations. âPeopleâ issues tend to sneak up on even the best leaders, sometimes derailing even the best talent and the best-laid plans.
CHRIS: A GREAT PLAN HITS THE WALL
Consider the experience of one such leader: Chris founded his company by building on his success as a rainmaker. He had worked for a technology company and had consistently closed more sales than everyone around him. Like many successful people, Chris decided to do on his own what he had done for others. So, with some investors, he launched a new venture. âWhy sell this stuff for someone else when I can do it for myself?â he reasoned. He was soon to find out the answer.
Things went well early on. Chris landed a few big accounts and built a company around those early successes. The new company grew quickly, landing more big accounts with global companies who wanted to use its equipment. Adding more and more employees, Chrisâs company soon became a substantial entity, with revenue growing every year until it became a true market leader in its competitive space. The future looked good. Chris could see a public offering in the near future.
But within a few years things began to be not so good inside the walls of the company. Key employees who had joined Chris because of his high energy and can-do spirit began feeling overworked and increasingly stressed out because of what they called the âchaos.â The company seemed to lack its original direction and momentum. For a time, success seemed to go hand in hand with the chaos, but slowly at first and then more rapidly, the chaos began to overshadow all that was good. That is when Chrisâs board, comprised of key investors, called me.
The boardâs concern came from what they were hearing directly from some members of Chrisâs executive team. The team told the board that they had reached the breaking point, that they couldnât take the chaos and dysfunction anymore, and that if the board did not do something soon, they were going to leave. That amount of talent threatening a mass exodus certainly got the boardâs attention.
In trying to get to the bottom of the problem, my first step was to set up interviews with all of the members of the executive team. I wanted to get a feel for what was happening. What struck me first was their love for Chris. They really admired him, the energy that he created, his passion for what they were doing, and his creativity about the technology they had developed. They wanted to be on his team and make what they had created succeed and grow. Even more important, they wanted to give their talents to the company, and they all wanted to be part of the endeavor for the long term.
But they had gotten to a bad place. When I interviewed them they were as dismayed and as frustrated as they had been motivated and inspired at the beginning of the companyâs journey. They reported feeling like they were running around in a thousand different directions. They would be headed down one path, only to suddenly get an e-mail from Chris about another new deal that required team members to marshal all of their resources around this latest, exciting opportunityânever mind last weekâs latest, exciting opportunity. Obviously this near-constant rejiggering of priorities created confusion and disruptions, leaving the rank and file unsure about whether what they were working on yesterday was still what they were supposed to be worrying about tomorrow morning. Or was the new emphasis the âmain thing nowâ?
Even worse, Chris would send e-mails to his executive teamâs employees, putting those people into a state of confusion as to whom they were supposed to be answering toâth...