Thanks for joining us. LeaderChat is a new weekly blog devoted to exploring the ways that innovative human resource practices can create engaged, passionate, and high performing work environments. Our departure points for discussion each week will be the content that appears in our Ignite newsletter on the first week of each month and the material covered by different subject matter experts in our monthly webinar which are presented in the second week of each month. Both of these resources are free and you can find links to both on the front page at www.kenblanchard.com.
This week in LeaderChat we are looking at some of the qualities that make up a great leader. Many of you are coming to LeaderChat after participating in Scott Blanchard’s January 21 webinar on Managing People’s Energy: The Power of Alignment where he outlined three key tasks for leaders in moving forward—acknowledge reality, define a direction, and manage people’s energy.
Others of you are visiting here for the first time in preparation for a February 11 event by Ken Blanchard on Leading in Uncertain Times. Between both groups, I think we have the opportunity to start a lively discussion that can help all of us as we begin to formulate strategies that can help our respective businesses get through the tough times ahead.
For this week, I’d like to focus on the points that Scott raised first. There was a lot of emphasis in the webinar on the importance of senior leadership keeping people informed on what is happening in the business environment—even if it isn’t good news, and even if they don’t have complete answers. What are your thoughts on that?
The second question I want to raise is your response to a question I asked Ken Blanchard during an interview a week ago for the upcoming February 2 issue of our Ignite newsletter. I asked Ken what he felt were the characteristics that people were looking for in leaders these days given all of the gloom and doom that is surrounding us. Ken’s number one response? Leaders need to be hope champions.
What are your thoughts on hope as a key ingredient in helping people move forward? I’m usually suspicious of simple answers to complex questions. I had always heard that “hope is not a strategy” but now I’m beginning to wonder. Given the present mood in most work environments, is hope one of the most important things that people are looking for from the leaders in your organization?
What are your thoughts? Drop me a line. I’ll print your responses and we’ll use it as the starting point for our conversations going forward.
Dave
Hope may not technically be a strategy, but in difficult times it definitely needs to be an important component of a leader’s strategy. When you are providing direction that is supposed to get your organization out of tough times, the direction needs to lead up out of the hole. You must paint a picture of what a better future looks like. Otherwise there will be no motivation to follow.
In regards to my thoughts on hope as a key ingredient in helping people move forward? Hope is always good! Hope is always necessary. And hope is always relevant—even in good times. However, I personally think hope is really an end goal, and not a strategy. In answering the question, what is the key ingredient in helping people move forward, I would submit that it is teaching, encouraging, and inspiring individuals to help people move forward on their own will is the means to the end goal. Encouraging people to become better Self Leaders is the key to helping people move forward! The ancient proverb, “Give a man a fish, and you’ve fed him for a day. Teach him how to fish, and you’ve fed him for a lifetime,” is a timeless notion that helps people to be prepared for moving forward in any situation, while giving them a hope and destiny that they have more control over. The key ingredient for leaders to help people move forward, is to teach individuals how to become better leaders of self and thereby contributing to a greater hope for the good of the community, organization, or nation!!!
This is an important moment in national and world history and that moment hinges on leadership. Not only leadership at international and national levels, but at local, corporate, and personal levels as equally, if not more importantly. I am grateful that The Ken Blanchard Companies is taking such an active role in stimulating and encouraging conversation around as critical of a topic as leadership!! Leadership was and always will be a key component to resolving conflict at every level society, and cultivating outcomes for the greater good. Thank you Ken Blanchard and The Ken Blanchard Companies!!!
I agree with Dave hope is not technically a strategy. But, if you look at the history of our nation when times were tough we tended to lean towards “the strategy of hope”. People not only are motivated when there is hope but are willingly to stretch, pull together and go the extra mile when there is hope.
Hope – interesting. Without it we have nothing. Think about hostages they have to live without their loved ones and many other emotional comforts like love but without hope they can’t live for the next day. Those who gave up hope eventually died as they had no driving force. Hope was what kept prisoners in the Holocaust alive. Hope is part of the strategy for those who want a professional Sports/ Acting Career.
So is hope a strategy – I think it depends what else you have to draw on if you have nothing else then Hope becomes your only strategy.
I would certainly agree that Hope is a vital component of a strategy in times such as these. If management have been doing their job, then their teams will be inspired by the hope that eminates from management’s comunication. At times such as these, it is vital to communicate regularly, at all levels, with regard to all matters pertaining to the teams. By getting the ‘buy in’ from the teams they are given more confidence and by extrapolation; more hope.