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The Question
"What's the difference between a leader and a manager?"
Well-worn as that question may be, it remains worth asking because times change, and leaders succeed when their words, decisions, and actions address prevailing conditions. We all suspect, for example, that solving today's extraordinary problems will take someone other than the allbusiness manager who kept us on the tracks - and then ran us off the tracks - over the past few years.
To answer this and other questions, the AchieveGlobal research team set out to discover how leaders succeed - to isolate their central concerns and activities - in today's business climate.
The Research
We defined a multi-phased process, exploring secondary and primary sources, to collect and analyze qualitative and quantitative data. To begin, we captured key themes from two years of articles in eight respected peerreviewed journals from Europe, Asia, and the Americas.
We reviewed all article abstracts, read and summarized 80 full articles, and developed a provisional leadership model - a hypothesis, if you will - to guide the primary research.
We presented this early model to focus groups of executives and middle managers in a range of industries and the public sector. Their real-world experience confirmed some themes, added new ones, and helped refine the model for quantitative testing.
We then designed and launched an online survey in the United States, Mexico, India, China, Singapore, Germany, and the United Kingdom, gathering 971 responses from business and government leaders and associates. Respondents represented global and domestic-only organizations ranging from fewer than 500 to more than 25,000 employees.
The Findings
Our principal findings were 42 leadership practices^ - some behavioral, some cognitive- required to meet key global leadership challenges isolated by the research:
* Cost pressures
* Competitors
* Improving customer satisfaction
* Technology challenges
* Driving sales growth
* Employee productivity
* Product/service innovation
We sorted the 42 practices into six categories, or "zones," to form a comprehensive model of leadership in the 21st century.
The Leadership Zone Model
Statistical analysis confirmed that all six zones correlate very highly with each other, suggesting that the six zones triangulate on a larger leadership construct. In other words, the six-zone approach is very accurate. ^
The Practices
As useful as statistics may be,...