5-D Leadership
HR Magazine, Jan, 2006 by Leigh Rivenbark

5-D Leadership
By Scott Campbell and Ellen Samiec, Davies-Black Publishing, 2005
250 pages, List price: $27.95, ISBN: 0-89106-197-5

Many business books promote particular leadership styles, from servant leadership to strategic leadership to leader-as-coach, because potential leaders are shopping for one leadership style with which they're comfortable, say authors Scott Campbell and Ellen Samiec. But different situations call for different styles of leadership, and this book's goal is to show readers how to increase their flexibility and adapt styles to situations.


Campbell and Samiec are co-founders of 5-D Leadership, a leadership development training, coaching and consulting consortium. They outline five leadership styles, with examples of each, and they show readers how to build each leadership style for themselves based on the strengths they already possess.

The leadership styles are the following:

* Commanding.
Used less often in today's collaborative working world, this style--"taking charge and seeking immediate compliance," as Campbell and Samiec describe it--still can be necessary in crises.
Building blocks to develop a commanding style include learning to set priorities, issue clear directives, track compliance and enforce consequences if directives aren't followed.

* Visioning.
If staff members are losing their personal connection to their work, if tragedy strikes the workplace or if the group's focus grows fuzzy, visioning leadership can create and communicate a clear picture of the future.
Visioning requires learning to create a picture of the organization's desirable future, to communicate that picture and to recognize people's contributions publicly.

* Enrolling.
These leaders seek input or use democratic processes at work to get commitment from employees. When leaders need to improve quality, enrolling leadership is appropriate.
An enrolling leadership style is built from eliciting input, actually implementing others' ideas, giving public credit for others' ideas and learning to make decisions by consensus.

* Relating.
The relating leader creates and maintains "harmonious relations" in the workplace in a style best used when there are rifts, communication problems or workplace stress.
Relating leaders care about the whole person, paying attention to employees' lives outside work and the impact those lives have on work. The book looks at ways to be more encouraging toward individual employees and workgroups and how to mediate conflicts.

* Coaching.
This leadership style develops individual employees' potential and performance while aligning their goals with the company's.
Would-be coaching leaders receive help in assessing strengths, weaknesses, motivations and potential of employees and teams. Finding stretch assignments, giving effective performance reviews and locating appropriate training opportunities build the coaching style.

5-D Leadership contains tools, including checklists of leadership strengths, worksheets to help you determine specific situations when you demonstrated successful leadership (and to help you figure out what you did right), and advice on soliciting and using 360-degree feedback about your skills. The book provides sample scenarios with questions to gauge your reactions and leadership styles in specific situations.

Once readers have learned about leadership styles and examined their own strengths, they can draw help from the book in identifying the leadership contexts at work in their offices.
For example, in a fast-paced workplace, visioning and coaching might be needed to maintain focus, while an organization dealing with a sudden crisis might call for a commanding style with visioning and relating aspects.

Campbell and Samiec provide worksheets that let readers look at varied business contexts and then decide for themselves which leadership styles apply.

COPYRIGHT 2006 Society for Human Resource Management
COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale Group

Business leaders lack critical skills
HR Magazine, Jan, 2006

Nearly a third of global business leaders don't have the skills they need to help their organizations achieve business goals, according to a recent study from global HR consulting firm DDI.

Leaders polled in 42 countries gave themselves low grades on 10 qualities that are strong indicators of leadership performance and potential. While HR professionals surveyed identified "passion for results" and "brings out the best in people" as the most important qualities for leaders, leaders rated their proficiency in these areas between 61 percent and 73 percent--barely passing.

That's a problem, since researchers found that strong leadership can increase the successful implementation of business strategies by 22 percent. In addition, organizations that do a good job of developing their leaders and of conducting succession planning have higher returns on equity and profit margins. DDI's senior vice president, Rich Wellins, says, "Companies that are worried about their future profitability should be just as worried about the future of their leadership."

Paul Bernthal, manager of DDI's Center for Applied Behavioral Research and co-author of the study, says many leaders know they lack necessary skills. "We're not doing as well as we'd like,' they say, 'but nobody's helping us.'" Only half the leaders surveyed are satisfied with their organization's leadership development opportunities.

Training is the most common leader development practice--

85 percent of HR professionals reported using formal workshops--
but only 42 percent of leaders found training workshops "highly effective."

More effective, they said, is working on special projects or assignments and getting help from mentors or personal coaches.

Although two-thirds of organizations believe it will be increasingly difficult to find qualified leaders to replace retiring baby boomers, only about half of them have a succession plan. "If nobody does succession management," says Bernthal, "eventually companies will be looking at each other to steal each other's leaders. That's not going to work. It's wiser," he says, "to look within and develop internal candidates."

Leader Qualities:
Importance and Proficiency (HR professionals rated importance; leaders rated proficiency)

Skill level Importance
(% proficient) (% critical)

Passion for results 73 73
Brings out the best in people 61 65
Adaptability 68 60
Authenticity 68 55
Culture fit 72 53
Conceptual thinking 63 47



Source: DDI. Note: Table made from bar graph.
COPYRIGHT 2006 Society for Human Resource Management

COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale Group

Developing a Team or Organization Vision
Jim Clemmer

As Mark Twain once remarked about the weather, there's a lot of talk about vision, but very few managers really do anything about it. Visioning is sometimes an innate natural skill just like leadership sometimes is. And the moon sometimes blocks out the sun - but none occur very often. Most people have had to consciously and with great effort continually work to strengthen their visioning. Visionary leaders are seldom born that way (how many of those birth announcements have you seen lately?). Nor are they necessarily charismatic. They have had to work at making visioning habitual.

Here are a few pathways and pitfalls to organizational visioning:

You and your team need to picture and describe your preferred future as vividly as possible. One approach is to imagine it's five years from today and you're being interviewed by Fortune magazine, a leading newspaper, or an industry journalist on the phenomenal success your company or team have had. Describe the results you've achieved and perhaps the approach you've used. Speak in the present tense as if it's all happening around you right now.
Too many managers try to delegate "the vision thing" to a committee. It doesn't work. If you're a senior manager, caring for the culture and providing organization focus isn't just part of your job, it is your job.

Unless you're an exceptionally clear and inspiring writer, be very careful about drafting a "vision statement" and using that as your communications centerpiece. Visions are about feelings, beliefs, emotions, and pictures. It's very hard to bring those across on paper (especially if the statement is developed by a committee).

Vision ideas or summaries can, and should, be committed to paper, and widely circulated - but as a "leave behind," follow-up, or reminder. Visions are the most compelling when they are delivered in person by a leader who's an effective communicator.

Powerful personal communication skills and energizing leadership are inseparable. Learn how to use "impassioned logic" by adding metaphors, stories, models, or examples to help everyone "see the big picture" and rouse their emotions to make it happen.

Your team or organization needs a shared vision, not something that only a few people own. You need to make everyone a "spiritual stakeholder." That's usually a cascading process, but it can start in any part of an organization. Ideally, the senior management team defines the broad parameters of what business you're in and which direction you're heading. They can prepare a rough vision for input and refinement or leave things wide open for the rest of the organization to fill in.

Invoke pride, stretch everyone's thinking, and stir the will-to-win emotions. Shoot to shake up the industry or change the rules of the game. Become the fastest, strongest, highest quality, most innovative, or best at something.

Vision is the critical focal point and beginning of high performance. But a vision alone won't make it happen. Unless the hard work of striving, building, and improving follows, even the most vibrant vision will remain only a dream.

Jim Clemmer is a bestselling author and internationally acclaimed keynote speaker, workshop/retreat leader, and management team developer on leadership, change, customer focus, culture, teams, and personal growth