Employees at any level can provide Leadership

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

2. Agenda
• Introduction
• Overview of Leadership from Below
• Enabling Leadership in IS&T —
Supporting Growth through:
– Calculated Risk-Taking
– Inclusiveness
– Delegation
– Collaboration
• Challenges
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3. 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?
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4. 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
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5. 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
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6. 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.
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7. 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‖
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8. 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?‖
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9. 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.
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10. 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
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11. 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
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12. 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.
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13. 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?
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