leaders

How do leaders drive (lasting) change?

Last week, I enjoyed spending a few days in Vegas, speaking and networking at Fiserv's annual client Forum. The keynote on the second day of the event was Troy Aikman, who was interviewed by Fiserv's CEO Jeff Yabuki about sports, of course, as well as about leadership and business.

One of the stories that Troy shared resonated with me because it's exactly the kind of thing that I talk about when it comes to driving lasting change: leaders can't just talk the talk; they must walk the walk.

“When I grow up, I want to be a follower,” said no one.  No kid aspires to follow others.  No employee says his best quality is being a follower.  No MBA student signs up for followership classes (and not just because business schools don’t offer them.)  Being a leader is what counts these days.  Leadership is rewarded.  Leaders are glorified.  A leadership role is the ultimate goal.  A Google search for leadership produces 353,000,000 results.   Followership?  9,100,000 — less than 3%.  And yet, a leader needs followers; a good le

In today’s cluttered, uber-competitive, over-retailed, choice-overload world, your brand must have an clear, meaningful reason for being.  You need to play an invaluable, irreplaceable role in people’s lives.  Hope you enjoy is a collection of my resources on brand purpose and purposeful leadership.

I have been mentoring leaders for decades, from the very young high potentials to far more seasoned individuals. Regardless of age or experience, there are always certain questions that are top of mind in my approach, like whether they are trainable or have the courage to be a leader and not only a manager. Being a manager is relatively easy; being a leader is hard. It means that you cannot please everybody. It means you have to balance between different interests. It means you have to stand up against the forces that could make your organization mediocre.

In a classic Harvard Business Review article, Abraham Zaleznick contrasted two very different styles of authority. Managers, he argued, take a rational approach and seek order and control. Leaders, on the other hand, are more emotionally driven and seek to drive change.

Great brands don’t follow – they lead. That’s why they tend to ignore existing trends and advance their own cultural movements instead.

Why have I been making such a big fuss of leadership, management and employee engagement?  Some of you – especially those of you that focus on strategy, process or technology – might have noticed that I have increasingly made a big thing of leadership, management, employee engagement and organisational effectiveness.  Why?

Ever since I read Max DePree’s Leadership Jazz (great book, btw), I’ve always considered leadership to be both an art and a science. But I find there‘s a lot more content about the science of leadership (organizational design, management principles, etc.) than there is about the art.

by: Jon Miller