The Leadership Challenge by James Kouzes and Barry Posner is outdated, having originated in the early 1980′s.when everyone was trashing management. Hence why Tom Peters said in the preface to their first edition of 1987 that ”…management as we know it is not dead. But it darned well ought to be!” There is no mention of management in their book. The result is an overloaded concept of leadership. One problem with this account is that it makes it hard to see how lower level employees can lead. Greater specialization, driven …

Mark is a sales manager of a housing company. As the company prepares to launch a large scale state of the art residential apartment, plans have been made to carry out an ambitious 72 hours sales initiative, where the sales agent of Mark’s team will take turns and take positions at various locations in the city which enjoys high traffic and aggressively promote the upcoming launch of the apartment, with the goal to achieve sales of eighty percent of the units available.
On the day of the launch, however, Mark was …

“Leadership by Example” is a phrase that can often be found on the creeds and pledges of many military organisations all around the world, and for a very good reason. Due to the unlimited liability of military leaders, the responsibilities for not just the careers and development of the soldiers under them but the very lives of their subordinate, they are placed in a position where their leadership skills and abilities are of utmost importance, and leading by example may well make a difference between a successful mission and a …

Countless articles have been written on the topic of “Leadership by Example”. This just goes to show that leadership by example is not just the more desired form of leadership (though not necessarily the most practiced) but also a more productive style of leadership. However, while these articles address the sheer necessity of leading by example, only a handful of these actually show us how we can take action to lead by example. In this leadership lesson on leading by example, we shall examine five areas of our workplace where …

“Heroes are rebels with a cause. Rebels because they challenge the traditional ways of thinking and refuse to follow the herd. They have a cause, a vision, that’s larger than life.” – Sharif Khan, author of Psychology of the Hero Soul
From a small-town Polish boy born to a retired army officer to become Pope; from a hard life in Nazi occupied Poland, his mother dead of kidney and heart failure, an older brother dead from scarlet fever, to become quite possibly “man of the century.” How did such an unlikely …

Among the numerous leadership qualities that are desirable in a leader is leadership by example.
I believe that some time in our life, we may come across two leaders who hold the same intent of, say, enforcing a particular standard. The first goes about doing this by an ‘imperial edict’ style, announcing publicly that everyone would henceforth have to comply with the mentioned standard. All well and good, but soon everyone was taken aback when they realize that the leader completely ignores his own words and undermine his own standards. This …

A transformational leader is the opposite of a transactional leader. A transformational leader is one who motivates his team by inspiring loyalty and confidence in them. He takes the operations of the team to greater heights by working on the units that run the operations- people.
A transformational leader works his team through inspiration and persuasion. Rather than using the carrot-and-stick method of motivation, the transformational leader chooses to persuade his team to follow him via inspiring the team to gain confidence in him and themselves, allowing them to willingly commit …

It is important that as leaders, we are aware of our own leadership styles, and the effects of it. One of the largest mistakes a leader can make is to be uncertain about his own style of leadership, as when he can’t make up his mind as to what kind of leader he wants to be, he’ll not just create confusion for himself but for his team too. Can you imagine if one fine day your boss wakes up and can’t decide whether he wants to be a dictator or …

So far, we have discussed how we can set standards, gain agreement in them, and achieve clarity in them. The final step towards having effective standards would naturally be to enforce them. In this final issue, we shall discover how we can enforce the standards we set so as to create an effective framework and culture for the team to work with.
If you were of the impression that setting standards is the end of it all and the start to a beautiful working culture, you’d be in for a rather …