The Obama Image

I continue to be impressed with the leadership capabilities displayed by the new US President.  Not yet through his first 100 days and his list of accomplishments is quite outstanding.

But over and above what he has done, the three leadership qualities that stand out for me are:

• His inclusiveness.  This is an ability and willingness to include all possible stakeholders in his deliberations and decisions.  Whether people like the final decision or not, they feel as if they have been involved.  This too, was a strong characteristic of Nelson Mandela when President of South Africa.
• His "humaneness".  I watched him last night talking about the AIG bonus payments and he was truly angry.  He freely displayed the same feeling many people in the US were also feeling.
• His "commonness".  He is maintaining his "I am an ordinary person, just like everyone else" approach to life, despite holding the highest office in the US.  I hear that he is to appear this week on the Jay Lenno Tonight Show - a first for an American President.

It will be very interesting to track Obama's leadership skills over the next few years and I have a feeling that we will see some great leadership examples.

Business - Can too much success lead to failure?

My recent article on decision making at Management-Issues brought some interesting comments

• From Larry Underwood, Scottsdale, AZ, US.
  I think "stress" and "fear" have been a major part of big corporations for a long time, which in turn creates the pervasive impact of micro-management throughout those organizations. In this litigious day and age, big corporations are extremely afraid of lawsuits (sexual harassment, wrongful termination, discrimination, or some other type of negligence allegation) which could cost them millions of dollars, even if they really did nothing wrong to begin with. With attorneys' fees and out of court settlements (not to mention bad public relations), "fear" becomes the catalyst for how the nervous mid-level to high-level managers try to placate their immediate supervisors, to maintain the safe status-quo.

  This paranoid philosophy filters all the way down throughout the organization, to the front line employees who feel they need to perform their tasks almost flawlessly, to keep their bosses from badgering them to death. Of course those badgering bosses have badgering bosses, and so on, all the way to the top; the head badger, aka the CEO.

• From Nicola Hunt, London.
  Hopefully, the companies that are treating their people badly and creating workplaces based on fear will be the ones that are not innovative enough to challenge the Status Quo.

• From Izzat.
  Thanks! Very good article indeed. I will forward it to the Sales team at my company. Thanks again.

Check out the full article "Can too much success lead to failure?"

Coaching

For all of you involved in coaching, if you're into "clean" coaching, then check out the latest "How clean is your coaching".  It received 3216 hits in the first five days of publishing at TrainingZone.

The Swiss Countryside

In case you were wondering, the above picture was taken recently on a Sunday walk in the hills near our home in Switzerland.