Thank you for joining this course on Effective Leadership, Resonant Leadership and how to inspire it in ourself and others. We'll be going through a number of modules, but in this first one. I am going to introduce the concept of what is effective leadership. What is the kind of leadership that excites us and make us wanting to bring our game. What I can say is that outstanding leaders know that the music of leadership is emotions. And that people who are really good at leadership are able to help inspire, and help us manage our emotions in the process. But I can't convince you of this because 60 years of research and social psychology has made it clear that you don't convince people of things by rational arguments. You convince them by emotional argument, and then you use rational arguments afterwards to make yourself feel better. But I can help you think about it through an exercise. So I'd like you to get a pen or a pencil and a piece of paper. Have 2 columns. On the top of the left hand column. Write the name of a leader that you've worked with or for in the past, that brought out the best in you. Somebody who was exciting to work with. Somebody who, if they took over a different division of your organization, you'd seek a transfer to work with them. If they started a project in the community, even though you're very busy, you would volunteer to work on it. Somebody who you really enjoyed working with. On the top of the right hand column, I'd like you to put the name of a leader you've worked with or for who did not bring out the best in you. Somebody who you thought was a lump. Whatever they got paid, it was too much, even if it was a volunteer organization. And then as you think of those 2 specific people, and to make the exercise work, you have to think of specific people. Start to remember what it was like to be around them. What did they typically say or do. And under each person's name, write a few observations about what they typically said or did and how they made you and others around them feel. I'm going to ask you to hit the pause right now while you do that and then click the run and we'll come back and talk about what you wrote. Welcome back. Let's first look at the leader on the left, the one who brought out the best in you. In having this discussion with a lot of other people over the past few years. In many different organizations. One of the things I'm struck with is how people say, and you might have written this down yourself, well, that person excited me. They empowered me. They inspired me. It was fun being around them. They valued me. They helped me to understand where I was in the, the bigger picture here and the purpose. They helped me to find a meaning in what we're doing. They trusted me. They engaged me personally.They asked me questions. They protected me in certain things. They encouraged me to take risks. They engaged me in ways that, a lot of times, people wouldn't. They made me feel a real part of things. They challenged me. Again, they excited me. Sometimes, they were very competent in what they were doing. But a lot of the time, it was something that they were doing with me, and they seemed to have the same kind of impact on most of the other people around that they interacted with. If we contrast that with what most people say about the person on the right, what did they typically do? Well, they were micro managers, they blamed, us for things but they took the credit, they were demeaning, they were hostile, they were negative, they said things that made us feel like we didn't want to be there, they treated us like a, a resource, a human resource not really a person. and in a lot of ways, they were very narrow, or very self-centered. These kinds of answers are things that people often talk about when they contrast these effective these leaders who brought out the best in you, compared to others who were less effective in bringing the best in you. What could we learn from this? First observation of this module is that you know what great leadership is. It didn't take a whole lot of time for you to think of a person to put on the top of the left hand column, the one who brought out the best in you. You know in your heart what great leadership is. Now you're probably sitting there saying, well, why is he getting so excited. Since 1970, I and my colleagues have been doing these studies where we try to differentiate outstanding and effective managers from average and poor. And we can. And we've done this in managers and leaders in public sector, private sector, non-profit, large, small in over 94 countries of the world, but if we look at the data sideways we come to a very alarming observation. That about 50% of the people in management leadership position aren't adding value in anyone's point of view. Another 20 to 30% maybe adding value in one person's point of view. That means That you could take 70 to 80% of the people in management jobs in your organization, out of their management role, and the organzation would function more smoothly. That's a very sobering statistic. And one of the things it means that the people that we're exposed to most of the time, day to day, Aren't very good at it, and yet, who do we try to emulate to fit in or do a good job? So, that's why I got so excited that you have a model inside, in your experiences, you have had the ec, the experience of. Being with somebody who brought out the best in you, who light you up, who helped to inspire you, to, to bring it all. And that's what we are looking for here. That's the kind of interaction that is really dramatic. If we start to look at what you said, we start to characterize this as a difference between a relationship, which is the second major point I'd like to make, is that leadership isn't just a person. It's not a leader, it's a relationship. You can't be a leader without followers. So we're very concerned about helping you shift your focus in thinking about leadership, away from the individual, to the interactions, to the relationship Because what's really important is to look at what happens between the leader and the people around him or her. For our 2002 book, Primer Leadership, we adopted a concept from physics to capture what we were observing in all of the research studies in our reading of other of colleagues research. And that is that outstanding leaders are resonant. They're in tune with you in sync. It's a very different thing that the traditional image of a top down leader where the leader's the person that sets the goals, the visions, the strategies. And tries to get everybody beneath him in the organization aligned underneath their view. If you mean alignment together in sync, then I agree with you. But this top down alignment doesn't work. And by the way for those haveing a moment of nostaglia, it didn't work in the 50s, and it certainly doesn't work in the military. 35 years of research. In the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, Army, Air Force, British Navy and a number of other militaries around the world make it very clear that outstanding military leaders don't use command and control. They use in their words, ask and inspire. So, this notion of being in sync with the people around you ends up being a really vital ingredient. in thisi magical moment were people come together and they start to do more than they coudl have or even thought of individually [MUSIC]
