Agile Leadership in Practice by Dominik Maximini

Author:Dominik Maximini
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Books on Demand
Published: 2018-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

4.3 People Filling Leadership Positions

Are you a leader? How do you know? I believe that skill beats title. Many organizations in Germany and across the world, including NovaTec, attach great importance to titles. Do you hire people who have not attended university? If you do, do you pay them the same as the ones who have? Logically, if somebody has studied a topic at university, they have typically invested around 80 hours into the seminar. Working on it in a business context only takes you two weeks (forty hours per week) to reach the same level. I admit that having studied four years at university proves a point, but for me this doesn’t mean somebody who hasn’t is worth less (literally). At NovaTec, we still look primarily for people with university degrees and emphasize titles. While this might make sense for some positions, it is not helpful for leaders. Leadership aptitude can only be learned in real life, not in university classes. Still, my own business card has four titles on it: My two university degrees, my consultant level and my position as competence area manager. This is ridiculous. In phase one, there was no way around it. I tried to change it back then, but was rebuked by the CEO. Today, nobody has tried to change it again (the scars run deep), but we have it on the backlog for our team. Our customers want to know what skill we possess. This does not necessarily require someone to know how many years we spent at university. Especially in times of social networking, we don’t need all the details on the card, but just the essentials.

This is my basic philosophy for leaders: Skill beats title. Everybody can be a leader, if they have the skill and mindset. Missing skills can be learned, however a certain mindset is difficult to change. That means you have to choose people with the right mindset rather than ones with the right history of certifications and qualifications. What I am looking for in leaders is a can-do attitude, people who are looking for solutions rather than making themselves and everyone else miserable by just seeing problems. In addition, I am looking for leaders who want to empower people, rather than believing they are the smartest person in the room. A leader needs to want to see the best of his employees instead of wanting them to see the best in himself. Also, you should train your leaders in coaching and mentoring, which means that they must want to learn these skills. This leads to the most important trait of a leader: the inherent motivation for continuous improvement. If someone hasn’t read a single book about leadership or management within the last six months, he shouldn’t be in a leadership or management position!

Should you realize that some of the people filling important positions don’t exhibit these traits, remove them quickly. You cannot allow bad examples to lead, because they are the living role model to all of your employees.

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