This is an excellent article about “new school” leadership practices. As our primary expertise is leadership roles we thought others might find this useful as well.
http://www.inc.com/paul-spiegelman/leadership-practices-to-stop-today.html
Of special note:
#3 – “Knowing your leadership team members and trusting them. Choose great people who have the right skills and fit the culture. And get out of the way.”
As well as…
#6 – “Recruit “A” players who will go the extra mile. They’re out there.”
Almost every client that contacts us wants to find the “A” players and we do a very good job of bringing them to our clients for consideration. More often than not, our clients have conducted earnest but ultimately unproductive searches on their own or through other recruiters, and/or sometimes don’t trust their own instincts as a result of previous bad hires. Ultimately all searches come down on some level to an act of faith – faith in your search firm for having brought you top talent, faith in that talent’s track record of success and pledge to make your business and equal or greater success, and faith in yourself as the hiring manager/leader that you’ve made a good decision. We can get you to #6 but it’s up to you to fulfill #3.
Also of interest:
#7 – “Invest in people”. Technology is important, no doubt. But the analogy we’ve used is if you are building a house, just because you bought the most advanced hammer on the market does not mean you can fire the carpenter and expect your tool to do all the work. It doesn’t work like that. It’s never worked like that.
#10 – “Being valued matters more than money”. Our response: “Yes, and…” Valuing and recognizing the positive contributions your teams make is extremely important. Valuing and recognizing the positive contributions your teams make and commensurately compensating them will mean a strong, productive company with minimal turnover and maximum success.
The bottom line: Micro-management is out, hire great people instead!