But learn to use it effectively!

Perry Buffet’s very interesting article “Using Influence to Get Things Done” in the February 22, 2011 issue of strategy + business highlights a dilemma often faced by senior management: the need to advocate tough-sell positions in typically collegial small groups such as councils, boards, or committees, where critical decisions are often made informally. Decisions made at this level, even when they have to be passed up the line for approval, can be critical to an organization’s success. “Thus,” concludes Buffet,  “an executive’s ability to influence peers and superiors as they undertake a broad range of crucial decisions involving such issues as strategy, budgets, brand positioning and pricing, and capital investments is a valuable skill — a skill that could be called influential competence.”

Recognizing the critical value of influence competence to the ability of their executive clients to achieve maximum effectiveness, AvoLead professionals trained recently at Discovery Learning, Inc. in Greensboro, NC, to become Influence Style Indicator™ Assessment Consultants by learning to administer and analyze the exciting new Influence Style Indicator™ assessment tool.

The assessment tool helps the client understand the three primary influence orientations and the five main influencing styles, and it identifies his or her own predominant style. Even more important, it offers specific and implementable techniques and suggestions for interacting effectively with others whose predominant influence styles might be different.

Could you benefit from learning how to engage more effectively with your peers to get things done and add more value to your group or organization? Besides individual assessment, the Influence Style Indicator tool can be administered within a group or team to help members understand themselves and how they can work more strategically with their co-workers to accomplish established goals. Call AvoLead for more information.

When has influence competence been important to your career? Leave comments below.

BOOK REVIEW: Boundary Spanning Leadership:Six Practices for Solving Problems, Driving Innovation, and Transforming Organizations by Chris Ernst and Donna Chrobot-Mason

How refreshing and empowering to find a book on contemporary leadership that not only frames relevant issues that organization leaders face by identifying boundaries they are likely to encounter, but it also offers practical solutions to spanning these boundaries based on a decade of real-world research by leadership professionals at the Center for Creative Leadership. I’ll wager that readers of this book will: 1) either already be dealing with many of the issues presented and find the discussions a veritable lifeline or 2) they will instantly recognize situations they have encountered in the past and understand for the first time why they were so intractable and challenging.

The rapidly shifting landscape of corporate and nonprofit leadership creates unique pitfalls as well as opportunities. Research surveys of over 125 senior level executives revealed an appallingly low number who felt they were very effective at knowing how to collaborate effectively across boundaries in their current leadership roles. Five primary boundary types were identified for discussion purposes, though the authors recognized that often they are closely linked:

1. Vertical boundaries between hierarchical levels of the organization
2. Horizontal boundaries between functions
3. Stakeholder boundaries with customers and vendors
4. Demographic boundaries in working with people from diverse groups
5. Geographic boundaries of distance and region

Concluding that boundary spanning practices can turn boundaries into frontiers ripe with untapped potential, the authors explore what these practices might be, providing compelling actual stories/examples to illustrate them, and offering exercises and strategies to implement them in your own situation.

The authors first discuss the boundary management practices of Buffering (Creating Safety) and Reflecting (Fostering Respect). Then they move into practices that forge common ground: Connection (Building Trust) and Mobilizing (Developing Community). Next in the evolution of boundary-spanning are the practices that develop new frontiers: Weaving (Advancing interdependence) and Transforming (Enabling Reinvention).

“Together, these practices combine to create what authors Chris Ernst and Donna Chrobot-Mason call the Nexus Effect. The Nexus Effect allows groups to be more agile in response to changing markets; be more flexible in devising and deploying cross-functional learning and problem-solving capabilities; work with partners in deeper, more open relationships; empower virtual teams; and create a welcoming, diverse, and inclusive organization that brings out everybody’s best.” (From the Editorial Review in Amazon)

While the challenges described here will be familiar to those who follow leadership trends and practices, I believe the authors have developed and presented what many will find to be an original, useful and implementable approach to thinking about and managing them.

What boundary-spanning practices has YOUR organization used? Please let us know in the comment section below.

AvoLead is co-sponsoring a local train-the-trainer event with the Center for Conflict Dynamics (CCD) at Eckerd College.  This three-day training prepares and certifies participants to use the Conflict Dynamics Profile tool and to deliver CCD’s new 8-module workshop entitled Becoming Conflict Competent.

The workshop will be held February 14-16, 2011 at the Solutions Center in the Research Triangle, NC (http://www.thesolutioncenter.com/Directions.html).

More Information:

You may already be familiar with or certified in the Conflict Dynamics Profile, a powerful 360 tool for helping clients understand and work effectively with conflict in their lives and organizations.  This workshop is the next generation of applied knowledge of CCD’s solid work in this area.

Integration of ideas: The Course is shaped around Craig Runde and Tim Flanagan’s model of individual conflict competence, and Sherod Miller’s work on communications skills that encourages people to Cool Down, Slow Down and Reflect, and Engage Constructively.

Tools You Can Use: The course introduces practical maps, tools, skills and processes that improve talking and listening skills, help analyze conflict situations and systematically resolve conflicts.  These help participants manage conflict from within the Conflict Competence SkillsZone®, a place where communications is both focused and flowing.

CLICK on this link (2010 12 23_BCCFlier) for a more detailed description of the program this course qualifies you to implement.

The price for those who are certified is $1325; non-certified $1695.  Remember, completion of this workshop will serve as certification for both delivering the training modules and using the Conflict Dynamics Profile tool.

To register, call Patty Viscomi at 727-864-8972.

Questions?  Email Bonnie Wright at bonnie.wright@avolead.com.

We are so grateful to Bonnie Wright for her diligent efforts to bring this important work to our area.  We hope you’ll join us for this learning opportunity to make the investment to add to your leadership tool kit!

“The only constant is change.” First attributed to the Greek philosopher Heroclitus.

In his fascinating review of the best writing on business strategy[1], Walter Kiechel III guides his readers through the relatively recent history of “Strategy” as a business concept and corporate planning tool. It emerged in the 1960s from a corporate culture in which business leaders “felt themselves largely at the mercy of market forces, with little of the knowledge they would need to truly determine their own future.”

In Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise, first published in 1962 by MIT Press, author Alfred D. Chandler Jr. first established the principle for which he is remembered: “Structure follows strategy” and “A strategy is a response to changes in a business’s environment.”

Kiechel next credits Kenneth R. Andrews, and his 1971 book The Concept of Corporate Strategy, with the definition of Strategy that has driven much modern-day perspective: “the pattern of major objectives, purposes or goals and essential policies and plans for achieving those goals, stated in such a way as to define what business the company is in or is to be in and the kind of company it is or is to be.” Andrews went on to include a long list of criteria for evaluating a strategy, many of which have clearly been ignored in light of recent corporate failures. These criteria are now back in the spotlight as bank regulators and corporate watchdogs ask probing questions about sufficiency of available resources, risk versus reward, management communication with those who must implement their strategy, and alignment of values with goals.

The evolution of Strategy continued with Michael E. Porter’s 1980 publication of Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors, in which he most famously stated that Strategy involves only three alternatives: 1) Cost leadership; 2) Differentiation; or 3) Niche domination. He warned that companies trying to do all three were doomed.

Backlash to this came from the bestseller In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr.. Despite the embarrassment that many of the companies cited by them as “best-run” failed to live up to expectations in the years following the book’s publication, Kiechel reminds us that Peters and Waterman introduced the essential concept that Strategy must include consideration of “human energies and aspirations” as well as “an exercise in numbers and charts.

As business cycles have exposed the strengths and weaknesses of different theories, the temptation to abandon strategic planning as a viable tool is tempting. Kiechel concludes, “Probably the hottest term in discussions these days is adaptive.”

So what is an organization supposed to do? Many leaders say their most formidable challenge is deciding how to guide their organization through iceberg-littered channels and wondering if they’ll ever get back to open seas again. They face unhappy choices and wonder how to scale back for efficiency without stripping their organization of the human and physical assets it needs to grow again when the economy turns around.

AvoLead is the leadership consultancy with the tools to equip leaders facing these and other challenges. Besides having professionals with Change Readiness Gauge^TM certification that enables them to help their clients survive and thrive, AvoLead offers workshops such as Leadership Resilience: Leveraging Your Strength in Turbulent Times. Call us today at (919) 450-8930 to find out how to put our expertise to work for your organization.

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[1] Kiechel III, Walter, “Seven Chapters of Strategic Wisdom.” strategy+business magazine, Spring 2010, Issue 58, February, 2010: http://www.strategy-business.com/article/10109.

Photo credit: Jeu d’échecs en pierre” by Pascal Thauvin, via stock.xchng

Listen up leadership coaches! Here’s your chance to get PressTime Simulation Step One certification easily and affordably.

We all know this statement from Andrew Carnegie is true:

Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision…the ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.

Your clients’ organizations need PressTime Simulation, Discovery Learning Inc.’s dynamic and engaging simulation that’s now distributed with web-enabled software. The powerful program has garnered worldwide praise for its effectiveness in teaching team leaders and participants how to cut through limiting thoughts and behaviors to achieve common goals more quickly and efficiently.

Certification is required for product use, so your clients need you to step up to the plate and be there for them. You need this certification to round out your credentials. Don’t miss this opportunity coming up in Greensboro, NC, on October 21-22, 2010, to take the first step towards certification. Certified trainers will be listed on the DLI Website, be eligible for DLI referrals, and gain access to an experienced survey user group.

Register by calling 336-272-9530 or email smetzger@discoverylearning.com and ask about subsequent certification steps. The price is only $250, and the experience will be priceless. Invite a fellow trainer and add a new arrow to your quiver of tools.

Click here for more information about PressTime Simulation.

Click here to register now.

For a downloadable brochure, Click HERE.

Don’t miss it!

Coming together is a beginning.
Keeping together is progress.
Working together is success.

Henry Ford