Real

A few months back I was reading Execution by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. It explains the importance of actually executing the plans and strategies you set forth and highlights the steps necessary to get things done. You can have the best plan ever, but if it's not executed well it's of little or no value.

Anyway, one of the important points they mention is that its not so much the values that need to be changed; its changing people's beliefs by changing the results and feedback they experience in your organization.

People are intelligent, and they only change their values if they believe that something is really valuable. That is done by creating formal and informal systems that reward/ discourage wanted/ unwanted behavior. In other words, you have to make it real. But this only deals with the physical, external aspect of performance.

But, for them to willingly follow you and voluntarily pour their minds, and hearts to achieve a common goal, you, as the leader, have to be real; you have to be about more than money for your followers to give more than what you paid them for.

You can get people to physically perform what you want through formal & informal incentive schemes, but for you to get them to tap their intellectual and emotional potential, you have to provide inspiration. And for you to be inspirational, you have to conquer yourself.

I mean you can set broad job descriptions/ portfolios, stretch goals, or whatever you want, but if they don't want to volunteer there creativity, you will never find out. In the knowledge worker age, the leader seldom knows more than the knowledge worker under him. If the worker is not inspired to work, he will feed you all the necessary bull to justify his current state, and you can't do anything about it.

In addition, to high ethical standards, you need competency (know-how) and capacity (raw intellect) to achiever the right results and gain trust; you can love them and want to serve them all you want, but if you don't know how to produce results and overcome obstacles, they'd love you dearly, but won't follow you! You have to be real from perspective, too.

Bottom line, people might not show it, but they now real stuff from fake. So, leaders have to get real by aligning all systems in the organization to elicit and reinforce the behavior they want (real physical reward). But more importantly, in the knowledge worker age, as Druker and Covey explain, you have to compel the knowledge worker to volunteer his heart and mind through being really about more than financial gain.

It is through this principle that the prophet produced the greatest organization of all time. It was So effective that it conquered two of the most powerful empires of its time, the Persian empire and the Roman empire.

But then again, the Prophet tapped a fourth dimension that most organizations just can't; the spiritual.

Islam from a leadership perspective, is topic that I have to touch upon in later entries, in sha' allah.

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