Leading From Below

IS&T Leadership Meeting Leading from Below Dean Briggs Joanne Hallisey September 20, 2007

Agenda • Introduction • Overview of Leadership from Below • Enabling Leadership in IS&T — Supporting Growth through: – Calculated Risk-Taking – Inclusiveness – Delegation – Collaboration • Challenges Leading from Below 2

Concepts • Leadership vs. Management • Who leads in an organization? • How does IS&T benefit from leadership at every level? • How do individuals benefit when they decide to lead? Leading from Below 3

Leading from Below • VP/CIO/CEO are overbooked and cannot do it alone • Managers and Team Leaders are overbooked • Managers and Team Leaders can – Make the conscious decision to become a leader – Reorganize to become less essential to the day to day work – Listen to signals from outside the organization – Encourage staff to take advantage of opportunities to lead Leading from Below 4

Shift in Thinking • Focus on influence, not control • Expose others to your information • Influence existing processes rather than rebuilding • Keep a sharp focus • Earn trust • Don’t wait for the perfect time Leading from Below 5

What does it look like? • Welcome input from staff and then put their best ideas to use with staff as leads. • Give interested staff responsibility for areas that need improvement. • If you have an idea for improving something, scope it out and present it to your team leader, manager, director with a plan for implementing your idea. Leading from Below 6

Closer to Home: Fostering Leadership • Foster expanded view of business environment. – Encourage staff: go talk directly with business customers*, to understand:  business challenges;  needs from IS&T;  their communications style, language; and  How IS&T’s helping them solve business problems * Everyone has a ―business customer‖ Leading from Below 7

Closer to Home: Encouraging Growth • Push Problems Down. – Encourage staff to take on larger problems Out of Comfort Zone → Growth • Pull Problems Back. – Open door policy for staff problem-solving. – In-hand solution not required (otherwise, you’ll never hear about the toughest problems);  neither should you provide answers to every problem  teach problem-solving → collaboratively work through problems – Ask questions without answers – Regularly ask, ―What if?‖ Leading from Below 8

Closer to Home: Encouraging Calculated Risk-Taking • Use Calculated Risk-Taking: – weigh options, make choices reflecting best returns for effort, – Candidly discuss increased risk for failure • Do not punish failure; – Surgical training maxim: ―Forgive and Remember‖ – Do ―Lessons Learned” always, even with successes. – More learning from failure than success. Leading from Below 9

Closer to Home: Encouraging Inclusiveness • Lift the Veil: More Input = Better Results Sooner – Gain a different perspective on problem- solving in your team meetings: invite a good thinker from another Directorate – Encourage staff to share documents and plans ―in the rough‖ with colleagues from other groups — including business customers  Communicate fewer bits, sooner;  Don’t wait until it’s polished/ reviewed/ approved: harder to change, greater reluctance  Encourage early, frank, concrete, specific feedback Basis is Trust Leading from Below 10

Closer to Home: Learn to Delegate   • Don’t make or ratify all the decisions; teach decision-making • Delegate problem-solving: – Do you and your manager encourage – or discourage – skip-level meetings? • Manage to results, not problem-solving process – Let them learn how to get results – Their methods may be better than yours – Caveat: don’t break the china without good reason Leading from Below 11

Closer to Home: Nobody’s In This Alone • Strike a balance between individual entrepreneurship  collaborative planning: make better use of meetings – Encourage group brainstorming – Conduct tighter, focused, more group-involved, well-led meetings and people won’t mind them as much – Have facilitator other than the presenter: keeps things on the agenda; tracks time; traps digressions. – Make liberal use of whiteboards and newsprint to track the discussion points, the open issues, decisions made or required, who’s responsible. Leading from Below 12

Questions for Our Group • What we’ve proposed — will it work in IS&T? • Using ourselves as an example: having Executive Management delegate the agenda for this meeting to IS&T Managers; a leadership opportunity? — or a homework assignment? • What are Leadership Opportunities in IS&T? (for ourselves, for others). • Some challenges to leading from below, in IS&T? Leading from Below 13

Leading From Below

by deanpbriggs on Dec 19, 2009

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Leading From Below — Presentation Transcript