Page 291 - How Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations That Win

LEADERSHIP CHALLENGES AND ACTIONS AS MEANING MAKERS
Leadership Personalizing Contributions Challenge

Too often employees feel emotionally disconnected from the work they do;
their work may capture their talents and time but not their heart and soul.
Great leaders personalize work conditions so that employees know how their
work contributes to outcomes that matter to them.

Summary: Leadership Actions to Ensure Personalized Contributions
to Work Personalizing and Contributing Work
• • Learn what outcomes matter to employees; how does this job relate to their
identity, values, and purpose
• • Help employees articulate the line of sight between what they do and the
outcomes they value
• • Help employees discover the intrinsic value of their work and what they
enjoy in the work itself
• • Shape work conditions and match employees to conditions that appeal to
them (where, when, with whom, and how they work)

Leadership Growth, Learning, and Resilience Challenge

As changes compound and the risk of failure increases, people may fade, fail
to adapt, and get demoralized, which leads to organization stagnation. Great
leaders relish change and help employees grow, learn, and be resilient to bring
new life to their organizations.

Summary: Leadership Actions to Facilitate Growth, Learning,
and Resilience
• • Have a positive attitude about change, that you can learn from it and be
resilient when facing it.
• • Learn how to generalize new ideas through self-reflection, experimenting,
boundary spanning, and continuous improvement
• • Learn how to generalize, or share, new ideas by moving talent across
boundaries, sharing information across boundaries, and building incen-
tives to encourage shared behavior
• • Become resilient in the face of change by making the unspeakable speak-
able, turning what you know into what you do, and changing events into
patterns

Leadership Delight Challenge

Partisanship sometimes affects organizations where there is more hostility than
civility and where a we-they, win-lose, right-wrong, blame-and-shame mental-

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