Leadership

Vision & Strategy: needs to be properly communicated and internalized by employees, strategy should be consistent and not be changed too often, but it needs some adaption from time to time, discovering weak signals: z.B Hilti does monitor competitors closely

• Structure/ Leadership: often Top Management relies too much on themselves, managers often aren’t interested in encouraging their successors because they feel threatened, Customer touch points: contact with customers can energize companies, satisfied customers motivate employees and thus the whole organization

Feedback Cultur, talk about the brutal facts

--> Feedback on WHAT and HOW

Ambidexterity = the ability of an organization to efficiently manage their current business needs while being open to change and new requirements --> Exploitation & Exploration 

1. Structural Ambidexterity
2. Contextual Ambidexterity
3. Temporal Ambidexterity

Structural Ambidexterity:

Company creates separate organizational units dedicated exclusively to one activity, i.e., one unit focuses on exploration, while another unit devotes full attention to exploitation à difficult to manage integration of those units and many companies don’t have the resources for those extra units

Contextual Ambidexterity: Employees within a department decide independently when to explore, when to exploit, ambidextrous behavior should be achieved on an individual level --> Hilti: Sherpas: designated to design workshops, they find topics that might need exploration, constant questioning of status quo by all employees on all levels à not used by many companies, theoretical concept

Temporal Ambidexterity: Temporary strategy in which the alternation between explorative and exploitative modes occur. The modes follow each other in sequence and do not coexist à Hilti: with the Culture Team Camps they explore and discuss important topics, the aim of these workshops is to find explorative projects that they can employ afterwards, exploration not only on product level but also on organizational, cultural and external level à most prominent strategy

• Not establishing a great enough sense of urgency
• Not creating a powerful enough guiding coalition
• Lacking a vision
• Under-communicating the vision by a factor of ten
• Not removing obstacles to the new vision
• Not systematically planning for creating short-term wins
• Declaring victory too soon
• Not anchoring changes in the corporate culture

1. Emotional rational strategy (unterste Stufe)
2. Power-coersive strategy
3. Normative-reeducative Strategy
4. Advanced change theory

Method: Telling others to change

Objective: Align the change target with established facts

Limitation: Narrow, cognitive view, fails to incorporate the affective & normative domains

Method: Leveraging others to change

Objective: Align change target with established authorities

Limitations: Can evoke anger resistance

Method: Engaging other in conceptualizing change

Objective: Alignment of actors in a "win-win" dialog

Limitations: Neglects need for own change 

Method: Modeling personal transformation

Objective: Alignment with changing reality

--> Doesn't not reject but include aspects of each strategy!

Empower to self to be aligned with a vision for the common good

1. Seek to create an emeregent system --> new social reality (learn, adapt, grow)
2. Recognize hypocrisy & self-deception --> Willingness of leader to identify & reduce own integrity gaps to model exemplary behavior
3. Value clarification & alignment of behaviors --> Discard assumptions / ineffective strategies to close integrity gaps
4. Free Oneself from External Sanctions --> Question the status quo
5. Develop vision for the Common Good --> Freeing oneself from external constraints & allow new possibilities for the community to be discoveres (stakeholders are more willing to change if they act for what they believe in)
6. Take action to the edge of chaos --> Enact new order (integrating opposites through adaption to changing reality --> emergence of new self)

Attracting others to change

7. Reverence (consideration / respect) for others involved --> Build trust that change will spill over rather than forcing change

8. Inspire others to enact their best selves --> encourage stakeholder to strive for higher goals by setting an courageous example

9.  Model Counterintuitive, paradoxical behavior --> Problems are solved by asking questions / engaging in frame-breaking behavior that disrupts existing routinge & assumptions

• Conflicting goals between L and M but at the same time they need to work together
• In the past: Leader = at the top of the organization, below are the managers that need to implement
• Now: we need leadership at all levels, but that’s more challenging
  • if you’re not a good manager you won’t get people to follow you hence you can’t be a good leader;
  • being a leader takes time, the transition is hard, you actually need to take time to change your goals 
• It’s desirable and necessary to be a M and a L
   

Distribution of Time: Leading (20%), Managing (80%) or Leading (5%), Managing (95%), during challenging times, z.b Covid, the managing tends to be even higher, even though you’d need more leadership then (emotional support, inspiration usw.)

--> Both are important in the long run

Leader (L)

• Shape
• Create and Develop
• Inspire others
• Thing long-term
• Ask "what" / "why"
• Question the status quo
• Create Vision and Meaning, Change Culture
• Do the right things

Manager (M)

• Implement
• Administrative
• Persevere
• Think short-term
• Ask "how" / "when"
• Accept the status quo
• Act with established culture
• Do things right

Distinguish between leadership traits (innate, stable) and competencies (developable)

• Arvey et al. (2007): 30% of the ability to lead is innate, the other 70% are based on socialization, environment, experience, active development via training
• Keating et al. (2014): leadership interventions have a significant positive effect on the ability to lead
• The 70-20-10 rule of leadership development: 70% Experience and reflection (on-the-job development), 20% People (Coaching, Mentoring, Networking), 10% Knowledge (courses, books) à the 3 levels are connected, you need them all.

• Great Man Theories: 1950, Looking at historical figures or people in our environment that have certain qualities that made them great leaders, z.B attributing better leadership qualities to taller people, from a today point of view: only 30% are inert, so the theory doesn’t really make sense
• Behavioral theories: 1960, What behavior makes a successful leader, found the following two structures: initiating structure (task focused) and consideration (people focused)
• Situational theories: 1970, there is not one right way to lead, you need to consider WHO you’re leading, depending on the situation the leading needs to be different
• New leadership school: 1980, previews theories were rather rational, the new school it’s important to be transactional (rewards and punishment of people) and emotional (z.B painting a nice picture of the future, appeal to people’s emotions, needs charisma)

• Virtual Leadership: How to lead people that work remotely
• Shared Leadership: More than one person that leads
• Leader-Member-Exchange: Leadership based on relations (with followers) and how to manage these relations, not only the relationship you, important z.b for organizational ambidexterity (refers to the ability of an organization to both explore and exploit—to compete in mature technologies and markets where efficiency, control, and incremental improvement are prized and to also compete in new technologies and markets where flexibility, autonomy, and experimentation are needed.)

--> The theories are somehow also connected, z.B New leadership school & Leader-Member-Exchange

Leadership research has gone through varying phases of development, each of which has focused on a different factor as the key reason for leadership success

• Max. human resource, exploit efficient approaches e.g. for manufacturing
• Explore new ways for the future

(Even traditional org. need to adapt)

Is the ability to carry out accurate reasoning about emotions and the ability to use emotions and emotional knowledge to enhance thought

--> there are different definitions in science as well as in practice

1. Perceiving and expressing emotions (Erkennen eigener Emotionen + anderer)
2. Using emotions (Einfluss Emotionen auf kognitive Prozesse verstehen und damit lenken)
3. Understanding emotions (Zusammenhang events und folgende Emotionen verstehen sowie die Kombination mehrerer Emotionen zusammen einschätzen)
4. Regulating emotions (Emotionsregulierungsstrategien verstehen und umsetzen)

• Emotional intelligence is a very important ability in a wide range of life and work domains, because it…
  • Predicts academic success
  • Is positively correlated with entrepreneurship success
  • Is positively associated with job performance
  • Is correlated with higher job satisfaction, higher organizational commitment and lower turnover rates
  • Is a significant predictor of both subjective and objective health

The Emotional Intelligence of leaders predicts:

• Leadership emergence during project work
• The ability to lead transformational
• Leadership effectiveness
• Product innovation

• Higher hierarchy level tends to have lower EI
• Self-Awareness = the fundamental component for holistic EI: to build EI you need to start with self-awareness and learn to understand your own emotions, after that comes social awareness and you need to understand others, here it is important to know that there can be huge cultural differences, then comes self management, learn to control your emotions and as a last step: relationship management

Are the negative effects of leaders who can’t feel and read the emotions of others

= the difficulty people have with identifying their own feelings, differentiating emotions, distinguishing the difference between various emotions, and expressing their feelings verbally

• The interrelated facets of Alexithymia: Difficulty identifying and describing feelings, externally oriented thinking
• Negative Effects of Leaders with Alexithymia:
  • Weaker relationships with employees
  • Lower level in processing emotions
  • Reduction of organizational culture, creativity and innovative spirit of employees
  • High chances of being (falsely) labeled as an ineffective leader
  • Positive correlation to depression and emotional exhaustion