Listening is a Central Competence for Success of Business Leaders

Koontz and O'Donnell defined leadership as the art or process of influencing people so that they will strive willingly and enthusiastically toward the achievement of group goals.

Leaders act to help a group attain objectives through the maximum application of its capabilities.

Each group of people that performs near its total capacity has some person as its head who is skilled in the art of leadership.

Koontz and O'Donnel stated in guarded terms: Leadership skill seems to be a compound of at least four major ingredients:

1. The ability of to comprehend that human beings have different motivation forces at different times and situations,
2. the ability to inspire group members,
3. the ability to act in a manner that will develop a climate conducive to responding to and arousing motivations, and
4. the ability to use power effectively.

Fundamental understanding of people is an important ingredient of leadership.

Koontz and O'Donnel state that the fundamental principles of leadership is: Since people tend to follow those who, in their own view, offer them a means of satisfying their own personal goals, te more managers understand what motivates their subordinates and how these motivations operate, and the more they reflect this understanding in carrying out their managerial actions, the more effective they are likely to be as leaders.

Can leaders understand people without listening to them?

Ram Charan in his HBR blog post aptly stated, "For leaders, listening is a central competence for success."
( http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/06/the_discipline_of_listening.html     )


28 Jan 2014
People who master the ability to listen to customers and employees have a far better chance at success.
“In the short term, we’re all impatient and want to find the short answer that’s time efficient, especially the busy manager,” Meldrum said. “But in the long term, people are going to think you’re an insensitive jerk.”
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20140127-the-fine-art-of-listening-at-work


Read more



A Leadership Competency Model: Describing the Capacity to Lead

www.chsbs.cmich.edu/leader_model/compmodel/onlinemodel.doc

The Best Ideas To Help Students Become Better Listeners
http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2012/07/23/the-best-ideas-to-help-students-become-better-listeners-contribute-more/

Listening by Ron Cotter
http://www.tlcllc.com/home/7-ron-potter-blog/87-listening.html

Leader Model
http://www.chsbs.cmich.edu/leader_model/development/media/books/leading_from_the_inside_out.htm

Leadership Theory and Competency Frameworks
http://centres.exeter.ac.uk/cls/documents/mgmt_standards.pdf

Technology Management and Research & Development - Chapter Contents

Technology Management and Research & Development

Authors

• Narayana Rao

Published

All Rights Reserved

Version 2

Last edited: 20 Nov 2010

Exported: 26 Nov 2011

Original URL: http://knol.google.com/k/-/-/2utb2lsm2k7a/3353

Collected Articles

          Technology Management - Introduction

• Technology Management - Interesting Web Pages
  

Organizing - Henri Fayol's Concept

To organize a business is to provide it with everything useful to its functioning: raw materials, tools, capital, personnel. All this may be categorized into two main groups: the material organization and the human organization. The body corporate would be capable of fulfilling the six essential functions only when these resources are provided to it.  Fayol mentioned that only human organization is dealt with in his paper. It is because he presented only a discussion paper highlighting what can be taught in management course or subject.

The latter day management scholars must have developed on the material organization development in their voluminous books. But they also neglected the essential portion of the organization.

Customer Satisfaction Focus - Resource Efficiency Focus

Managers have to simultaneously take care of customer satisfaction and resource efficiency.

Industrial engineers specialize in resource efficiency of engineering activities.

Eleven Customer-Focused Practices of Baldrige Award Winners

1. Multiple listening posts for understanding customer requirements
2. Highly refined recovery systems and complaint management processes
3. Comprehensive, creative, and continuous interface with the customer
4. Clarity about customer segments and their requirements
5. Customer focus is demonstrated at all levels and cascades from the top
6. Customer requirements and marketplace needs drive new product
development
7. Organization structures that support a customer-focused orientation
8. Information about customers is frequently and widely communicated
9. Missions that extend beyond customers and the boundaries of the business
10. Technology and operational processes mapped to customer service
11. Key results measures reflect high levels of customer service and satisfaction
http://www.pomsmeetings.org/ConfProceedings/001/Papers/QM-07.1.pdf


4Cs of Customer Focused Solutions
http://hbr.org/web/special-collections/insight/customers/silo-busting-how-to-execute-on-the-promise-of-customer-focus



Resource Efficiency Focus Initiatives


Deloitte Consultants are promoting resource efficiency now
http://www.deloitte.com/view/en_US/us/Insights/Browse-by-Content-Type/deloitte-debates/fa4e135d9aadf210VgnVCM1000001a56f00aRCRD.htm


A resource-focused approach to running your supply chain can enhance margins and help  win market share. If  suppliers are using too much energy, materials or water,  then they are spending too much money. And the extra expense is being born by  the supply chain. Help them become more efficient and then use the savings to increase the supply chain profit margins and market share.

Resource efficiency is a new and untapped opportunity, says Deloitte

Why? Efficiency initiatives of the past focused on systems and processes, rather than resources. A resource-focused approach – reducing energy, carbon, water, materials and waste – can offer an alternative and new way to achieve significant savings with rapid payback.

High Profit Supply Chain - Deloitte 2013 paper
http://deloitte.wsj.com/cfo/files/2013/07/High_Profit_Supply_Chain.pdf

Resource Efficiency - European Commission Netherlands 2013 Policy papers
http://www.ecn.nl/docs/library/report/2013/o13004.pdf

Shop Floor Human Resource Management

It is production who do shop floor human resource management. They are in touch with every employee eight hours or more every day. What is the theory that supports them in their managerial activity.

F.W. Taylor advocated that managers take the responsibility for developing methods of accomplishing the required tasks and for training recruit in those methods. He wanted a foreman in charge of discipline apart from other foremen who look after specific aspects of methods.

Juan López-Cotarelo, Industrial Relations Research Unit, Warwick Business School  points out that line managers play a central role in human resource management. In many organisations, they are charged with myriad HR-related tasks, such as filling out performance appraisal forms, interviewing candidates for employment, making salary increase recommendations and breaking employment-related news –good and bad- to employees.


He also points out that treatment of line managers in the human resource management literature has been at best patchy. The ‘functional’ or ‘micro’ HRM subfield (Wright and Boswell, 2002) has produced knowledge about the role of line managers in the separate HR processes, such as personnel selection and performance appraisals. Most of the work in this subfield however has focused on describing the various ways in which managers can be subject to biases in their decision making. For instance, the personnel selection literature has shown that the behaviour of interviewers influences the performance of applicants (Liden et al., 1993), and that interviewer similarity and affect towards the interviewee is linked to perceived job suitability of the applicant (Howard and Ferris, 1996). Likewise, the performance appraisal literature has devoted much effort to determining the effects of rater affect and rater similarity on performance evaluations (Levy and Williams, 2004) On the ‘macro’ or ‘strategic’ side of the literature (Wright and Boswell, 2002), research has almost universally espoused a research design which has limited attention to line manager actions.

BREWSTER, C. & SODERSTROM, M. 1994. Human resources and line management.
In: BREWSTER, C. & HEGEWISCH, A. (eds.) Policy and practice in European
human resource management : the Price Waterhouse Cranfield survey. London; New York: Routledge.

HOWARD, J. L. & FERRIS, G. R. 1996. The Employment Interview Context: Social and
Situational Influences on Interviewer Decisions. Journal of Applied Social
Psychology, 26, 112-36.

Juan López-Cotarelo, HR discretion: understanding line managers’ role in  Human Resource Management 

Juan López-Cotarelo, Industrial Relations Research Unit, Warwick Business School 

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/wbs/research/irru/publications/recentconf/juan_-_edw_-_lest.pdf

LEVY, P. E. & WILLIAMS, J. R. 2004. The Social Context of Performance Appraisal: A 

Review and Framework for the Future. Journal of Management, 30, 881-905. 

LIDEN, R. C., MARTIN, C. L. & PARSONS, C. K. 1993. Interviewer and applicant 

behaviors in employment interviews. Academy of Management Journal, 36, 372-

86.

WRIGHT, P. M. & BOSWELL, W. R. 2002. Desegregating HRM: a review and
synthesis of micro and macro human resource management research. Journal of
Management, 28, 247-76. 

Management Scholars and Thinkers

Business and Management Thinkers - Brief Biographies and Their Publications

Harrington Emerson

DOB  2 August


Peter F. Drucker

Obituary, New York Times, November 2005
He wanted to write "Managing Ignorance." Interesting as I argue that the cost of ignorance is much higher than cost of quality in the society.

Eiji Toyoda - Former Chairman Toyota Motors

Eiji Toyoda, was  a member of Toyota Motor’s founding family and an architect of its “lean manufacturing” method. He helped to turn the automaker into a global powerhouse and changed the face of modern manufacturing.

Mr. Toyoda was born on Sept. 12, 1913, near Nagoya in central Japan, the second son of Heikichi and Nao Toyoda. He spent much of his youth at his family’s textile mill.  He graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1936 with a mechanical engineering degree and joined his family’s loom business.

The next year, Kiichiro Toyoda, son of the founder, created Toyota Motor, taking the young Eiji Toyoda with him.

Assigned to a division devoted to resolving quality problems, Mr. Toyoda is said to have developed an uncanny ability to spot waste and eliminate it. He used to say,  “Whether you pick a up a problem and solve it or not is a matter of habit. If you have the habit, then you can do whatever you have a mind to.”

In 1950, he set out on what would turn out to be a pivotal three-month tour to survey Ford’s Rouge plant in Detroit, then the largest and most efficient factory in the world. By 1950, Toyota had produced just 2,685 automobiles, compared with the 7,000 vehicles the Rouge plant was rolling out in a single day

Mr. Toyoda wrote back to headquarters that he “thought there were some possibilities to improve the production system.” He brought back a thick booklet that outlined some of Ford’s quality-control methods; the company translated it into Japanese. Mr. Toyoda went on to oversee Toyota’s Motomachi plant, a huge undertaking that gave the automaker the capacity to produce 5,000 passenger vehicles a month at a time when all of Japan produced about 7,000 vehicles a month. The plant, completed in 1959, was soon running at full capacity and gave Toyota a decisive lead over its domestic rival Nissan and the confidence to turn its eyes overseas.

He died on 17 September 2013.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/business/global/eiji-toyoda-promoter-of-toyota-way-dies-at-100.html

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323981304579080842742449138.html