Executive Briefings

Published February 2010

Four Tips for Effective Leadership

Agatha Gilmore

As companies continue to try to chart a course for 2010, there’s no question that sound leadership will be one of the key ingredients for success.

“As economies change and accelerate, it becomes more and more important to be more effective in our leadership,” said Kris Girrell, a senior partner with Camden Consulting Group.

However, leading in this new business environment requires a specific set of skills that may or may not be immediately apparent to today’s executives. It’s up to chief learning officers to provide effective leadership coaching. Girrell said there are four key behaviors that should be encouraged.

1. Live comfortably in the gray area. “One of the key critical skills of senior leaders is the ability to deal with uncertainty,” Girrell said. “When you talk about top management, they’re really looking out into the fog. It’s all ambiguous, and it’s literally almost making it up day by day, trying to figure out what changes in the economy and changes in the wind and changes in the pleasures of the customer base are going to be.

“I think the second part of the answer is that we’ve gotten very technologically good in business, in our society; kids have more horsepower at their fingertips than most people ever imagined 15, 20, 30 years ago,” he continued. “We have all this technology that can take care of the details of things and get the information, but what’s not embedded in the technology is the ability to think, to have critical thought and analyze and extrapolate from the data. It becomes even more important because the acceleration that’s provided by all the technical tools really requires a lot more skill on the top end from our executives on how to use [it].”

2. Be counterintuitive. “What’s logical to the executive, or what’s logical to any of us, as the next thing to do comes from how we already do stuff. So it’s more of the same,” Girrell explained. “Doing more of the same only gets you more of the same results. A good coach really thinks and asks questions that push you beyond your known level into the unknown, and that’s kind of an iffy territory. That’s where coaching starts. They’re outside of the box of thinking.”

3. Learn by doing — and trust others to do so, too. “What an executive often [experiences] is, ‘I don’t have anybody I can delegate this to; nobody really has the skill set that is required.’ Well, in actuality, so many upper-level skills can only be developed by being in the position that requires that upper-level skill,” Girrell said. “We forget that what develops us is hardship. If you look back on the real formative events of your life, the things that made you [great], it wasn’t sitting on the beach sipping a mai tai. It was being in the cauldron. It was really being under fire and having to deal with some high-pressure situations. You’ve got to be comfortable with uncomfortable — and pushing a person to that level of discomfort.”

4. Exercise soft skills. “Much of what we do is in the realm not of skills, [but] in the realm of personality or spirituality or ethics. The only way to develop ethics is in these terrible dilemmas where you have to make a ruling, and there isn’t a right or a wrong to the answer. The really hard skills don’t have a right and wrong way to do them.”

Ultimately, honing these four skills will help executives develop into effective, passionate leaders. After all, as Girrell put it, “We’re going through a particularly turbulent time, and it’s just vitally important that we have some leaders with integrity and effectiveness at the helm.”

Agatha Gilmore is a senior editor for Chief Learning Officer magazine. She can be reached at agilmore@clomedia.com .

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