StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 53 – An Interview with Randy Dobbs, author of Transformational Leadership

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StrategyDriven Podcasts focus on the tools and techniques executives and managers can use to improve their organization’s alignment and accountability to ultimately achieve superior results. These podcasts elaborate on the best practice and warning flag articles on the StrategyDriven website.

Special Edition 53 – An Interview with Randy Dobbs, author of Transformational Leadership examines what it takes to achieve real and meaningful organizational change in a way that improves overall performance and ultimately enhances the bottom line. During our discussion, Randy Dobbs, author of Transformational Leadership: A Blueprint for Real Organizational Change, share with us his insights, approaches, and real-world experiences regarding:

  • the importance of having earnings as a transformational goal and how to link that goal to an organizational change
  • personal qualities, characteristics, and attributes transformational leaders embody
  • the ‘secret sauce’ of transformational change and how a leader creates it
  • basic building block steps to achieving real organizational change
  • signs the organization has achieved a true transformation and won’t revert back to past habits or the way it used to be done
  • achieving and maintaining a balance of both personality and style and knowledge, skills, and experiences among members of the senior leadership team
  • when inheriting a leadership team, how to identify who on that team should stay, who should go, and what role each person should fill

Additional Information

In addition to the incredible insights Randy shares in Transformational Leadership and this special edition podcast are the resources accessible from his website, www.DobbsLeadership.com.   Randy’s book, Transformational Leadership, can be purchased by clicking here.

Final Request…

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About the Authors

Randy Dobbs, author of Transformational Leadership, is a Senior Operating Executive at Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe; one of the largest and most successful private-equity firms in the United States. Randy rose to become a CEO in a General Electric Company business with the encouragement and coaching of high-level executives including the legendary GE Chairman, Jack Welch. In a string of GE positions of increasing responsibility, Randy excelled as a turnaround specialist who transformed every organization he led and established a winning record of improved earnings. More recently, Randy used the same ‘secret sauce’ to transform and improve earnings as CEO of Philips Medical Systems, North America, and USIS, a leading global security services provider, where he led 7,000 knowledge workers to a new understanding of how to work together to achieve business results. To read Randy’s complete biography, click here.

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Selfless Leadership: Putting Our Cause First

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In the fourth couplet of his poem ‘If-,’ Rudyard Kipling wrote:
 

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

 
Kipling is telling us that as leaders, we must be willing to put our cause or beliefs ahead of our personal gain. He is reminding us that true leadership requires a degree of selflessness. It requires us to put our cause and those we lead ahead of ourselves.

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About the Author

Doug Moran has more than twenty-five years of leadership experience in a variety of industries. Doug is the author of the forthcoming book, If You Will Lead: Enduring Wisdom for 21st-Century Leaders. He founded IF YOU WILL LEAD, LLC to help leaders and organizations reach their fullest potential. The firm focuses on leadership development, organization excellence and information technology. His book, speaking, and consulting leverage the power of story-telling and enduring wisdom to help leaders and their organizations excel and grow.

Relational Leadership and Employee Retention – A Match, part 3

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This series of articles explores the connection between relational leadership and employee retention. I discussed creating a ‘learning – thinking’ organization in the first article and a trusting organization in the following two. This final article examines creating a respected organization.

Respected organizations are often marked by the depth of esteem in which the community holds them. Because the community embraces the company, it produces a deep sense of pride in the employees. Community Marketing becomes strategic to a respected organization.

Relational Leadership is people-centric. People are defined in the relational diagram as employees, vendors, customers, and community. Many business plans leave out the community component or treat it lightly deeming it disconnected to the business purpose. Actually, a Community Marketing strategy helps define the business purpose and elevates the concept.

Figure 1: The Community Marketing Strategy

The relational diagram involves the entire spectrum of people. Just like the Building Blocks of Trust, you can’t skip a people component and be truly relational.

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About the Author

Frank McIntosh is author of The Relational Leader (Course Technology PTR, Cengage Learning 2010). During his 36 year career, Frank has worked with many of the most recognized companies and executives in the world. He has provided consulting services for peers across the country and helped initiate Junior Achievement programs in Ireland, the Ivory Coast, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Uzbekistan. Frank was inducted into the Delaware Business Leaders Hall of Fame in October 2008, one of 38 individuals so honored and the first not-for-profit executive to receive this distinction in Delaware’s 300 year business history. To read Frank’s complete biography, click here.

For more information regarding this subject, visit Frank McIntosh at his website www.FJMcIntosh.com.

StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 51 – An Interview with Priscilla Nelson and Ed Cohen, co-authors of Riding the Tiger

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StrategyDriven Podcasts focus on the tools and techniques executives and managers can use to improve their organization’s alignment and accountability to ultimately achieve superior results. These podcasts elaborate on the best practice and warning flag articles on the StrategyDriven website.

Special Edition 51 – An Interview with Priscilla Nelson and Ed Cohen, co-authors of Riding the Tiger examines what it takes to lead a thriving global organization through an Enron-like catastrophic event. During our discussion, Priscilla Nelson and Ed Cohen, co-authors of Riding the Tiger: Leading Through Learning in Turbulent Times, share with us their insights, personal experiences, and illustrative examples regarding:

  • a brief history of the catastrophic events that took place at Satyam Computer Services and the impact those events had on the company
  • the six components of the ‘Lights On’ strategy
  • the role of communications and learning in executing the ‘Lights On’ strategy
  • the most important leadership guidelines when dealing with a crisis
  • what executives should do to ensure their organization’s leadership team is prepared to deal with a crisis should one occur
  • what leaders should do to ensure their personnel don’t revert to an undesired way of behaving during a time of crisis
  • how leaders can keep their employees focused on the good of the company and its salvation during troubled times

Additional Information

In addition to the incredible insights Priscilla and Ed share in Riding the Tiger and this special edition podcast are the resources accessible from their websites, www.NelsonCohen.com and www.RidingTheTiger.com.   Priscilla and Ed’s book, Riding the Tiger, can be purchased by clicking here.

Final Request…

The strength of our community grows with the additional insights brought by our expanding member base. Please consider rating us on iTunes by clicking here. Rating the StrategyDriven Podcast and providing your comments online improves our ranking and helps us attract new listeners which, in turn, helps us grow our community.

Thank you again for listening to the StrategyDriven Podcast!

About the Authors

Ed Cohen & Priscilla Nelson, partners at Nelson Cohen Global Consulting ( www.NelsonCohen.com), provide thought leadership and strategic guidance to leaders and companies around the world. They are co-authors of Riding the Tiger: Leading Through Learning in Turbulent Times (www.ridingthetiger.com) published by ASTD 2010.

Ed has worked in more than 40 countries with organizations including Booz Allen Hamilton, Satyam, Seer Technologies, National Australia Bank, Larson & Toubro and the World Economic Forum. He is the only Chief Learning Officer to lead two companies to ASTD BEST Award #1 ranking; Booz Allen Hamilton and Satyam Computer Services (only company outside United States to achieve this).

Pris has 30 years of experience with Fortune 500 companies around the world. She has received international acclaim for her work in global leadership development, diversity and executive coaching.

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Set the Stage for Engagement

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Low pay is a dissatisfaction for employees but high pay by itself won’t keep the best people around. Transactional leadership might be a motivator when money and better benefits are available, but today’s climate seems to lend itself more to transformational leadership where a caring leadership can stimulate innovation, creative thinking, and productivity.

In Healing the Wounds, David A. Noer writes how the emotional impact of downsizing and the subsequent extra workload disturbs employee morale and productivity long after the fact. The study found that such feelings of stress, fatigue, and depression can last five years and more, imposing a strain on organizations’ competitiveness. Not only was there a sense of unfairness and anger over top management pay and severance, but symptoms of insecurity, anxiety, and fear that discouraged innovation and creative thinking. As Noer wrote, “There seemed to be a much stronger feeling among lay-off survivors that the organization was not in the business of looking out for its employees and that their loyalty was to themselves and to their unit, not to the overall organization.”

Clearly, after as much as five years, employees still suffered from the “survivor-blaming phenomenon,” as Noer called it. Managers and their staffs were unhappy and could be easily tempted to check out other job possibilities if they surfaced. New recruits heard stories that made them question their decision to join the company ranks.

Gallup, one of the world’s top research organizations, has always found the ratio of engaged to disengaged employees to be problematic. The recent economy would suggest the situation to have become more severe. This would suggest a review of corporate management practices to see that these 12 elements as proposed by Gallup are supported within the organization:

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About the Author

Florence Stone is editorial director for AMA and editor of MWorld, AMA’s quarterly membership journal. She is the author of Coaching, Counseling & Mentoring, The Manager’s Question and Answer Book and The Essential New Manager’s Kit.

To learn more about the American Management Association, click here.