One of the individuals I look up to as a great example of leadership is
Andy Grove. Grove emigrated to the US from Hungary in the 1950s and helped found Intel Corp. He later rose to the CEO position and was integral in Intel's growth. In his classic business book,
Only the Paranoid Survive, he outlines a number of principles for leadership. The ideas I try to uphold in my own role include:
- Seeking opinions at all levels of an organization
- Encouraging (Demanding) vigorous debate at all costs
- Not holding back on decisions due to imperfect or lacking information
- Challenge your opinion continuously and not being afraid to change course mid-stream
In this blog post I’ll focus on the first idea - seeking out opinions at all levels of an organization and I'll be posting a weekly update on this series on the 3 other topics noted above. (Note: This first post in the series was also cross-posted on ASAE's great
Acronym blog, which I was very pleased to contribute to as a guest author)
Seeking out and ultimately receiving unfiltered opinions from team members throughout (and beyond) your organization is a tough thing to do well. One of the requirements is to have a continuous focus on openness. Additionally, showcasing examples where input from all levels has been embraced and leveraged to the collective good of the group can help. If people believe their ideas will be ignored, or worse, put them in some form of jeopardy with superiors, your in-box will be pretty empty. Some people need anonymity to submit their thoughts, but many will speak openly if a culture supports dialog. Grove speaks to all of these issues as he outlines the concept in his book. One aspect of approachability at Intel was the fact that Grove and other senior managers had standard cubicles in an open office environment and made sure they were easy to approach. There are other ways to create this environment. For example, the founders of Hewlett-Packard were well known for the idea of “Management by Walking Around” where they frequently dropped in to informally chat with staff at every level of their growing enterprise.
Next week: Encouraging debate at all costs…