Seven Leaders Lessons
by Patti Anklam
Living in a network age requires new skills, especially for leaders. It’s time to distinguish management practices based on context. Command and control may be required in some situations, but when it comes to collaboration and innovation, only a management style based on principles of net work will do. Here are seven for today, the seventh day of net work.
- Network intentionally. High-performing people tend to have stronger, more intentional networks. Think about your own personal network and ask yourself whether it is diverse enough and broad enough to support your goals. Also, are you networking your group or organization, making the necessary connections across boundaries to facilitate the flow of new ideas?
- Practice network stewardship. Pay attention to the health of the networks for which you are responsible. Use the three mapping tools, four design facets and the eight tensions (tomorrow) to diagnose problems and develop remedies.
- Know your place in the structure. We all have structural roles in a network as well as (perhaps) titles. As a leader, do you need to be the hub or the weaver? The orchestrator or the collaborator? Know when it is time to share or relinquish leadership. Be mindful.
- Embrace complexity. Learn to distinguish the complex from the complicated and act accordingly, using the complexity mapping tool listed on the Third Day.
- Leverage technology. There is no excuse for not surveying, learning about, and introducing social technologies to help people in your networks connect and engage. (You have to wait two days for the Nine .)
- Create the capacity for net work. Encourage those about you to develop skills to build and leverage networks in all their endeavors. The world is waking up to this. In a modest poll by Work Literacy, Network skills get the most votes for knowledge areas in which people see the most opportunity for improving effectiveness.
- Use the network lens. We live in networks all the time, like fish in water. We have to step outside of a context to see it clearly; apply the network lens to bring focus to action.
Happy New Year!
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