Leadership Strategies For Business Development

What are we really recommending when we talk to executives about “courageous leadership”?

Commit to a vision. Believe in your vision  — and the fact that it will require some disruption to achieve –in order to get others to commit to it.  Courageous executives have the courage of their own convictions.

Try new approaches and new ideas. Have the courage to actually allocate resources to learning and becoming good at the new idea. There’s often huge pressure to continue to do the old thing. Willingness to push toward an often undefined outcome is essential to my definition of “courage.”

Wholeheartedly pursue the goal. It’s human nature to fear change. Someone in your organization is likely to resist, and we’ve seen many executives abandon their initiatives as soon as anyone pushes back. This isn’t conviction! Persistence in the face of resistance is essential.

Combine these attributes and you have a courageous, forward-looking executive leading an organization that’s likely to vastly outperform the competition.

We  did a session on courageous leadership at ISPI (International Society for Performance Improvement)’s recent conference that got really good reviews. Here is the gist of the session:

• We told executives that we will guarantee that their vision gets implemented.
• We asked the attendees at the session if they thought such a guarantee was a good thing or a bad thing. After some serious thought, they said that it was a good thing, but that it might not be credible.
• We shared that in our experience working with executives, that such a guarantee was actually a bad thing.
• Attend carefully to the wording of the guarantee: “We will guarantee that their vision gets implemented.”
• Whose vision are we guaranteeing? Who is now accountable for the quality and impact of the vision? They are, and many don’t like the idea.
• Many executives are used to having an unresponsive organization which gives them a reason — some would say an excuse – for the ineffectiveness of their vision.
• Guaranteeing that their vision gets implemented scares many executives.

William Seidman, Ph.D. is the Chief Executive Officer and President of Cerebyte, Inc. He is a recognized thought leader and expert on management decision-making and Executive Leadership. In particular, Dr. Seidman is renowned for understanding the processes required to harvest discover and use expert knowledgewisdom.

Michael McCauley is the Vice-President of Product Development for Cerebyte. He has led significant product development and consulting efforts in diverse companies such as HP and Dell.

The above article is from “Strategy to Action in 6 Days” one if the collections of Executive Operations articles co-written with Cerebyte, Inc Vice Presidents and Head of Product Development Michael McCauley. For more executive leadership articles and tools, go to http://www.cerebyte.com/index.html