Bootstrap Leadership Blog

This just in – leadership matters. It’s true in all walks of life, but especially true in the business world. You can’t browse the internet or pick up a paper or business magazine without reading about the power of positive leadership. And everyone wants more if it. Executive search firms have never been busier trying to fill the demand for leadership talent. Every year, the top consulting firms and Fortune 500 companies line up to grab MBA talent from the best business schools. Great leaders demand a premium on the open market, as they seek to find the right environment to apply their skills. 

If you are a business executive, you face a number of critical challenges to building a successful organization. However, of all the variables that impact your company, one stands out as the single best indicator of your success – the quality of your leaders.   By now, it’s accepted that a company’s human capital is its best single asset. If this is true, then leadership is certainly the key ingredient that powers this asset; you simply can’t become a great company without great leaders. And in today’s competitive environment, you need leaders at all levels of your organization to spark innovation, drive productivity, and motivate and empower employees. Having the right leaders also makes a substantial impact on key customers and business partners. In fact, great leaders have been proven to be significantly more effective than average leaders in every way – from producing revenue and profits to driving customer satisfaction and employee commitment (Zenger & Folkman, 2002).

As a business executive, leadership needs to be one of your top priorities. You need to insist upon and support the right processes. You need to make sure you’re being rigorous, fair, and well-grounded in your assessment of leadership talent. Finally, you need to demonstrate a passion for growing leaders, and make it known that you consider it every manager’s job to help develop the next generation of leaders.  

In the weeks and months to come, we'll explore the characteristics that great leaders share, examine specific examples where leaders are making a difference, and offer suggestions for how you can take your leadership game to a new level.  Leadership most definitely matters, and you owe it to yourself (and your team) to continuously improve as a leader.  Make a commitment to your own development by book-marking and visiting this post on a regular basis.  Its up to you to create your own leadership style and improve your impact as a leader.    

Do you have a favorite leadership quote?  As a leader, you’ve probably been exposed to a variety of inspirational sayings and quotes down through the years.  Perhaps one or more of these have caught your attention and become a personal favorite.  While you’re not required to have a leadership quote framed and hanging in your office, it is kind of cool to find one that sums up your leadership philosophy or fits your leadership style.  Here are a few of my favorites:

“To command is to serve.  Nothing more, nothing less.”    - Andre Malraux

“Management is doing things right.  Leadership is doing the right things.”   - Peter Drucker

“Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do what you want done because he wants to do it.”    - Dwight Eisenhower

“The first responsibility of the leader is to define reality.  The last is to say thank you.  In between, the leader is a servant.”    - Max DePree

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worst when they despise him.  But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say, ‘We did this ourselves.’”    - Lao-Tzu

“A leader leads by example, whether he wants to or not.”    - Anonymous

“Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success.  Leadership determines whether the ladder is leading against the right wall.”   - Stephen Covey

“Before you become a leader, success is all about developing yourself.  When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.”                         - Jack Welch

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, then you are a leader.”    - John Quincy Adams

“Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.”    - John Kennedy

What I love about these quotes is they all have something to do with the concept of servant leadership or lifelong learning.  Quotes like these inspire us, and remind us that leadership is about those we lead, not about us.  If you have a favorite leadership quote, I’d love to read it.  Post it in the comments section, and I’ll print another list like this in a few weeks.  In the meantime – keep leading with courage and passion. 

The events this spring and summer across several Middle East nations have been pretty remarkable – a true groundswell of citizens coming together to bring about real change – talk about creating a sense of urgency and forming a guiding coalition (however unorganized).   All of which got me thinking… has this ever happened (or could it even happen) inside a corporation? 

OK, it’s a crazy leap to make – but think about it.   What would it take, and could it even be done?  Organizations are not democracies (far from it).   And yet, there are similarities between companies and governments (citizens are called employees; laws = rules/values; the police/army might be the various compliance programs or even the “boss-direct report relationship”, etc.).   What would an “uprising” by the employees look like?  Would it be completely viral and leaderless?   Would a small group of brave VP’s carry a list of demands to the C-suite?  Would the Board have to be co-opted to “oust” the CEO?   How would that even work? 

I’m sure some form of this has been done – at the senior levels.  Think of a COO who gets the ear of an influential Board member, and starts to plant the seeds of transition (with herself as the logical next choice to be CEO).  Or maybe it would be targeted at getting some rules changed, or some new procedures put in place – I suppose that happens all the time (it’s called leading change – and it is supposed to able to work from any level in the organization).  But a bottoms-up approach to get the CEO fired?  A complete overthrow of the power base in the organization?  Wow, that would be incredible, and would probably change corporate life as we know it forever…

Nah, on second thought, it could never happen… the rebels would just get fired.  Unless…

 
Unless the reach and influence of social media has grown so powerful that the right PR campaign could reach outside the walls of the organization… where analysts and business writers started to really take notice.  Hmm…something to think about!