Making and Fulfilling Your Dreams as a Leader: A Practical Guide for Formulating and Executing Strategy - Softcover

Welte, Carl

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1452590591 ISBN 13: 9781452590592

Verlag: BalboaPress, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Making and Fulfilling Your Dreams as a Leader enables you as a leader-regardless of organizational level-to truly make a difference. It equips you to mobilize people to achieve shared aspirations in creating a desired future. You will be able to apply the strategic framework model presented in Making and Fulfilling Your Dreams as a Leader on an ongoing basis to establish your organizational identity and direction to anticipate and constructively address business opportunities and challenges. "Carl is the most creative, pragmatic, and thoughtful organizational consultant I know. He has helped me address numerous organizational problems and situations" -Tom Bjornson, president, Claremont Behavioral Services "Carl and Clay were able to take strategic planning in our branch business units from nowhere to somewhere during a time when we needed a clear vision of growth. As a NTSE company of $3 Billion in revenue this was no small task. We were on a tight schedule and needed their expertise. Their process was a terrific help in allowing us to achieve our long term objectives" -Mark E. Boitano, executive vice president and COO, Granite Construction Inc. "Carl always adds breadth, depth, and clarity to any strategy discussion. I am particularly impressed with his realistic, fad-free perspective" -Nort Croft, project manager, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Carl established Welte Associates in 1993. Welte Associates enables leaders and teams to achieve their desired results by helping them develop the organizational capability to do so. His involvement with organizations of all sizes and at levels both as an employee and external consultant coupled with his avid passion and study has enabled him to develop practical know-how regarding organization effectiveness and leadership. Carl lives with his wife, Dee, in Novato, California.

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Making and Fulfilling Your Dreams as a Leader

A Practical Guide for Formulating and Executing Strategy

By CARL WELTE

Balboa Press

Copyright © 2014 Carl Welte
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4525-9059-2

Contents

Acknowledgments, ix, 
Introduction, xi, 
1. Shared Aspirations: A Leadership Imperative, 1, 
I. Formulating Strategy: Identity, 9, 
2. Defining Purpose (or Mission): Who Are We?, 11, 
3. Clarifying Core Values: What Do We Stand For?, 21, 
4. Identifying Distinct (Core) Capabilities: Is There Anything We Are Really Good At?, 35, 
II. Formulating Strategy: Direction, 41, 
5. Conducting a Situation Analysis: What is Going On in Our Relevant Environment?, 43, 
6. Crafting a Translatable Vision: Where Are We Going, and What Does It Look Like When We Get There?, 55, 
7. Charting a Strategic Path: How Are We Going to Get There?, 63, 
8. Planning Action: How Are We Going to Make It Happen?, 75, 
III. Executing Strategy, 105, 
9. Enabling the Organization: Integrating and Aligning Efforts, 105, 
10. Monitoring and Modifying Progress: Working the Plan, 115, 
Conclusion, 135, 
Notes, 137, 
About the Author, 141, 

CHAPTER 1

Shared Aspirations: A Leadership Imperative

Leaders get people moving. They energize and mobilize. They take people and organizations to places they have never been before.

—Kouzes and Posner, The Leadership Challenge

The work of the organization can be divided into three broad categories: technical work, management work, and leadership. Technical work is the direct application of physical and mental effort to provide the organization's or organizational unit's products or services. Management work is the coordination of diverse activities to achieve desired results. Leadership, as defined Kouzes and Posner, is the art of mobilizing others to want to struggle for shared aspirations.

All three categories of organizational work are critical. The importance of technical work, doing the work of the organization, is obvious. But without the coordination provided by proper management, confusion and inefficiencies abound. And without effective leadership, the organization will be mired in the status quo, if lucky. The status quo is not an option, especially in today's fast-paced world.

My focus in this book is leadership, specifically crafting shared aspirations to take the organization where it needs and wants to go.

Based on their extensive global research spanning more than twenty-five years, The Leadership Challenge, by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, identifies "the five practices of exemplary leaders." These practices are:

1. Model the way

2. Inspire a shared vision

3. Challenge the process

4. Enable others to act

5. Encourage the heart

These five practices and the six behaviors ascribed to each practice have withstood the test of time and have proven to be valid in all cultures around the world, and at all levels of the organization.

Making and fulfilling your dreams as a leader gives you practical and proven methods to successfully use all of these practices, especially the first three: model the way, inspire a shared vision, and challenge the process. Effectively applying these first three practices is essential if you as a leader are going to energize and mobilize people, the essence of the last two practices. Without shared aspirations, you cannot be successful in taking your organization and people to new and better places.

To further make the case for the criticality of shared aspirations, we turn to the seminal work of Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, captured in their book Built to Last.

In this groundbreaking book, the authors looked at what makes the truly exceptional companies outperform other companies in their respective industries. Based on their research, the authors destroy the commonly held belief that only charismatic, visionary leaders can build visionary companies. What they discovered in their research is that the exceptional companies are passionate about both defining and preserving their core ideologies (what I refer to as the "identity" dimension in this book) and stimulating progress in the marketplace (what I refer to as the "direction" dimension in this book).

These important findings greatly shaped my critical thinking about strategy and the resultant application with my consulting clients. The genesis of my Strategic Framework Model that forms the foundation of this book, and is shown below to a large part, sprang from this research.

Strategy formulation consists of the identity and direction dimensions in the Strategic Framework Model. Both dimensions are critical, and they complement one another.

The identity dimension defines the organization's core ideologies. This includes why it exists (purpose or mission) and what it stands for (core values). The identity is the foundation upon which the organization is built. Once appropriately defined, the identity is relatively timeless. The organization may, however, need to rethink its identity when faced with major changes in its relevant external and internal environments.

The direction dimension, on the other hand, changes as the organization defines and redefines its ideal future state (vision) and resultant strategies (strategic path) to move toward achieving the desired state. The purpose of the direction dimension is to help the organization define how it can best stimulate progress in its relevant external environment. To do so, the organization needs to continually plan "from the outside in" so it can best influence, adapt, and align with its unique external context. This continual need for the organization to pace with its external world is why I prefer the term strategic thinking and its dynamic connotation to the traditional term strategic planning and only the periodic attention to the future that this term means to most people.

Situation analysis is an important prerequisite for crafting a powerful direction. It refers to the need for the organization, both on a continuing basis and formal basis, to periodically assess what is going on in its relevant external environment and its resultant capability to effectively take advantage of or respond to identified opportunities and challenges.

Even if they do a good job of formulating strategy, a large majority of, if not most, organizations fall when it comes to the need to work the strategy. Living and working the strategy on an ongoing basis needs to be priority number one for the organization's leadership. Leadership needs to give due diligence to establishing and using helpful mechanisms and defining and requiring important organizational patterns of behavior to catalyze the achievement of the strategy.

Leader Behavior in Developing Shared Aspirations

Developing shared aspirations begins with you, the leader, and your leadership team. You will want to interact with your team in a genuine and qualitative manner throughout the entire process of formulating and executing strategy. This does not mean, however, that your actions will always be highly participative, for true leadership starts from within you as the leader. And the strategic process is not necessarily meant to be a democratic process. This is especially true when it comes to clarifying values.

To be an effective leader, you need to vary your behavior to fit the situation. At times, you should be highly directive. At other times,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: BalboaPress
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1452590591
• ISBN 13: 9781452590592
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 158
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchpark GmbH; gpsr@buchpark.de; ; Krügerweg 1; Trebbin; Brandenburg; 14959; Deutschland