From leadership to leadershift

Hello all! As promised ka…..here I am again to share with you what I learn from Leadershift by John C. Maxwell, entitled. I listened to its shortened version by Summary.com, 2019.

The author is a leadership guru and he doesn’t disappoint me to listen to his book ka.

This book aims for us to learn how to continually make leadershifts. According to him, it is “an ability and willingness to make a leadership change that will positively enhance organizational and personal growth.”

For leaders, CHANGE and GROWTH must be visible to their hearts, minds, and actions na ka!

The author has 3 questions to test “how open we are to change?”

1. Are you willing to start asking more questions instead of giving more answers?

Culturally for Thais, this could be a challenge due to Thais’ expectations of leaders to answer their questions and Thai leaders may have to look real like a ‘know-all’ na ka!

2. Are you willing to become a better listener, a better observer?

Again, this is another challenge culturally for Thai leaders. We’ve grown up in such an environment and would seriously need to practice harder to be a listening leader mai ka?

3. Are you willing to rely more on your intuition and your creativity?

Creativity is hard to occur in some of our Thai environments and we may need to care more for ideas from just anyone, not just from seniority/authority in some situations to ignite curiosity and sharing. Think of psychologically safe environment the senior leaders have to create loei ka.

Out of the 3 questions, are they all ‘yes’es ka? If not, as long as you think you could say ‘yes’ in the near future, you’re ready for the ‘leadershift’ ka.

This is what the author says further:

“Leadershifting will require you to rely on values, principles, and strategy, but it will also push you to rely on innovation.”

He then tables out 11 principles with my own interpretations of my understanding ka:

1.       Soloist to Conductor: The Focus Shift …. To work alongside with the team like a great conductor…..in our culture, this seems to be our challenge, requiring them to engage the team better by slowing down a bit too?!?

2.      Goals to Growth: The Personal Development Shift…. To think more of growing professionally further, not just too goal-oriented which won’t make the leaders and their teams more capable.

3.   Perks to Price: The Cost Shift ….everything comes with a cost and so don’t value the positions because of the benefits one will get (in our culture, like being called ท่านรอง ท่าน...... with cars, more budget, plus staff to handle logistics, etc.) It needs leaders to think that the more perks could mean more climbing up further to thrive for more growth of the organizations lae ka.

4.      Pleasing People to Challenging People: The Relational Shift….trying to balance between caring and challenging teams to drive forward. It could be seen clearly in some situations, e.g. when some bosses try to please their subordinates with hope to get more votes for the second term, or cross the balance line to grant approval to some personal cases, etc. This doesn’t mean caring isn’t good. A few leaders said one must know more about their staff’s families ka.

5.       Maintaining to Creating: The Abundance Shift…..this is clear for leaders not to be complacent on the status quo by getting more creative to be more productive

6.       Ladder Climbing to Ladder Building: The Reproduction Shift….somehow, this is my favorite ka. I like it when it says the leaders climb the ladder together and help their teams to climb and when timely, empower them with more tools for them to climb further and to build their own ladder finally

7.       Directing to Connecting: The Communication Shift…..Thais must do better on this one if we shift from being far too ‘top down’ to connect more with our team and let them have more share with 2-way communication na ka

8.       Team Uniformity to Team Diversity: The Improvement Shift….. our understanding of the importance of the term and how it could create innovation would need to be stressed much more in our culture so more (even strange) ideas could be shared to ignite some ‘out of the world’ thinking and actions

9.       Positional Authority to Moral Authority: The Influence Shift…..serious mak ka to focus more on professionalism and ethics being a leader who has to be a good model with consistency in showing how moral and ethical one is

10.   Trained Leaders to Transformational Leaders: The Impact Shift….. Senior leaders must transform for the organizations and their teams to grow amid the changing world

11.   Career to Calling: The Passion Shift ….. go beyond oneself to have ‘PURPOSE’ in life ka.

Hope you enjoy skimming through ka. I still want to go back to listen more to understand better ka.

Learning and leadership

Have been listening summaries of books to find several issues I really like...... againJJJ!

Kelly Palmer and David Blake wrote a book entitled, “The Expertise Economy” and summarized by Summary.com, 2019.

It talked about leaders’ needed skill set for success which includes “learning agility (the ability to learn new things quickly), collaboration and teamwork, perseverance, curiosity and the ability to question the world around you.”

The term ‘collaboration and teamwork’ makes me think of two different groups I met the past two days ka, one identifying collaboration for their work to help researchers work successfully while the other were promising leaders who stress teamwork over and over again.

We’re on the right track ka.

This book also refers to Daniel Pink who touches on human motivation to equal 3 main factors

1. Autonomy-- our desire to be self-directed

2. Mastery-- our urge to make progress and get better at what we do

3. Purpose-- our yearning to contribute and to be part of something larger than ourselves

The more I listen or read articles about leadership, the more frequent I see ‘purpose’ which will basically answer our ‘why’ and it could relate so well with Buddhism to ask ‘why were we born for?’ too ka.

A learning culture is also covered and the authors point out that it “goes beyond compliance and necessary training……… aligns employee development with organizational goals. In a culture of continuous learning, learning becomes part of people’s everyday work and a regular part of their day. In this way, it becomes a daily habit.”

When our world cries for more learning, we need to step back to see what and how we manage learning in our institutions. I can’t help thinking of what I learned over a decade ago not to count hours of training to be one’s success. I have this strong belief as well! Unfortunately, some of our universities and our own people haven’t realize the essence of learning and so we need to promote the ‘why’ question for them to feel the value in DNAs before moving on to ‘what’ and ‘how’ ka.

Answering ‘why’ to issues we’ve been doing or to those we plan to do retains to be the most crucial ka.

More for 'leaders' to think, act, and serve as a learning lover ka!

Still have one more summary on my list (Leadershift….sanuk mak!) and will do soon ka.

little things but lots about leadership

Hello all! These days, it seems I've been watching and listening to clips about leadership quite often and have some more thoughts to share ka.

I really like Indra Nooyi who worked as both President and CEO of PepsiCo for about 12 years. Here are little things I enjoyed loads ka: 

-  As a mother, she didn't have much time to be with her daughters so she made her office 'an extended family'. For example, her daughter would call to talk with 'my mom' and it would be her secretary to handle the girl's request sometimes. Nooyi was saying that once her daughter wanted to play nintendo and so her secretary had a list of questions she had to go through before a 'yes' was granted. Then, the secretary would report it to her.

My thinking: 

1. Could it be that she was born in India in the extended family culture, which could lead her to apply it into her life and work?

2. Would it be regarded 'crossing the line between work and family' in the workplace especially by asking her secretary to help with it in western culture?

3. I feel we've already gone too far in our Thai culture to use office staff as our extended family (to run personal errands) and it could cause so many complicated issues like nepotism, unfair treatment, etc. Agree mai ka?

- Her sense of humor and wit shone ka. She talked about her husband who said her priority list had work work work on top, followed by her two girls and then him down below. She then jokingly said that her husband should be happy he was still on the list. Her husband was in the audience and siting there smiling! They two must have joked about it quite a bit too ka.  

She was also jokingly talking about an armchair she had to sit for an interview which wasn't so friendly to women wearing skirts. She put it nicely to say more women needed to help design chairs ka!

My thinking was that in the first joke, with her big smile and shining eyes, it was filled with love and that made the joke a good fun to hear. For the second one, it was so true designs have to respond to different angles of usage including outfits.

- As a new CEO when looking back, she wished she could have made changes in haste so progress could be seen much faster. She was trying to change the mindsets of people but took real long without much achievement seen lae ka. She said those people would need to leave if they didn't want to go along. 

She said people should look at 'how the company spends in its operation', not 'what their CSR is'. It was because things could be carefully considered from all dimensions before starting working instead of spending money on CSR out of guilt to help better the envi ka! This is also what has been on my mind to เริ่มตนที่ต้นทาง na ka.

I also like it a lot when she shared her thought about 'sustainability'. She said leaders tended to look at the quarterly profits during their tenure over sustainable gains and so it was their successors to pick up the debris after these senior leaders were gone.

My thinking right away was about our politicians and sorry to say some university presidents as well. Some seriously wanted their policies to come up with short-term success without much thinking about longer-term impacts mai ka?

Hit and run dee gwa kaaa!