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Inside every great business leader-whether CEO or shop steward-is a great teacher. And the leader's job is to develop others throughout the company.
WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO BE AN EFFECTIVE LEADER IN business today? To find the answer, University of Michigan Business School professor Noel M. Tichy analyzed the traits winning leaders have in common. What sets such chief executives as John F. Welch, Jr. of General Electric Co., Lawrence A. Bossidy of AlliedSignal Inc., and Eckhard Pfeiffer of Compaq Computer Corp. apart is their ability to instill in others their ideas, values, emotional energy, and their "edge"-their ability to make tough decisions.
He writes about these well-known business leaders and a host of less famous ones much further down the corporate ranks in his new book (with Eli Cohen), The Leadership Engine: How Winning Companies Build Leaders at Every Level. As Tichy recently told Journal of Business Strategy, companies that can build a "leadership engine" that drives employees at all levels will enjoy a significant competitive advantage in the future.
jbs What do you mean by leadership?
tichy Leaders is accomplishing something through other people that wouldn't have happened if you weren't there And in today's world, that's less and less through command and control, and re and more through changing people's mindsets and hence alt the way they behave. Today, leadership is being able to mobilize ideas and values that energize other people: jbs Is that something people can learn to do? tichy The question is, are leaders made or born? And I often use a simple analogy: athletics. Are athletes made or born? I believe every one of us could make quantum improvements in our golf game, tennis game, or running game, whatever level we're at. And so there's the potential for improvement. Are we all Olympic material? No.
Leadership is the same. Almost everybody can be much better as a leader. Young high school students can exercise leadership, hone their skills at getting a teachable point of view in terms of their ideas and values, and how they energize others. Are they all contenders for Jack Welch's job at GE? No way. But I believe any organization that taps that latent potential in people is going to have a...