I don't know

Have the courage to say I don't know.

Louis Agassiz

Brave companions: portraits in history by David McCullough. Simon and Schuster, 1992. p. 35

providing purpose, direction, and motivation

Leadership is the process of influencing people by providing purpose, direction, and motivation to accomplish the mission and improve the organization (ADP 6-22)...

Influencing is getting people... to do what is required. Influencing entails more than simply passing along orders. Through words and personal example, leaders communicate purpose, direction and motivation.

Purpose gives subordinates the reason to achieve a desired outcome. Leaders should provide clear purpose for their followers...

Providing clear Direction involves communicating what to do to accomplish a mission: prioritizing tasks, assigning responsibility for completion, and ensuring subordinates understand the standard. Although subordinates want and need direction, they expect challenging tasks, quality training and adequate resources. They should have appropriate freedom of action. Providing clear direction allows followers to adapt to changing circumstances through modifying plans and orders through disciplined initiative...

Motivation supplies the will and initiative to do what is necessary to accomplish a mission. Motivation comes from within, but others' actions and words affect it. A leader's role in motivation is to understand the needs and desires of others, to align and elevate individual desires into team goals and to inspire others to accomplish those larger goals. Some people have high levels of internal motivation to get a job done, while others need more reassurance, positive reinforcement, and feedback...

Improving for the future means capturing and acting on important lessons of ongoing and completed projects and missions. Improving is an act of stewardship, striving to create effective, efficient organizations...

Headquarters, Department of the Army

ARMY LEADERSHIP (INCL C1) 6-22. Army Doctrine and Training Publications. 8/1/2012

objectives and key results

LinkedIn manages its teams using a task-tracking system called ‘Objectives and Key Results,’ abbreviated as “OKRs.” First developed by Andy Grove at Intel, the strategy was popularized by John Doerr from Kleiner Perkins. Today, this shorthand is all over Silicon Valley. But it’s easy to dismiss a corporate-sounding acronym as just another leadership trick for distilling people’s work. Nothing about OKRs sounds inspiring. It’s how LinkedIn used them that helped employees connect more to the company’s collective mission.

In Grove’s famous manual “High Output Management,” he introduces OKRs by answering two simple questions: (1) Where do I want to go? (2) How will I know I’m getting there? In essence, what are my objectives, and what key results do I need to keep tabs on to make sure I’m making progress? When you think about it, these questions are very personal, speaking to the core of how people spend their days. It makes sense that everyone within an organization should have their own OKRs every quarter. The important thing is tying these individual OKRs to team OKRs and, ultimately, organizational OKRs. This alignment packs power and efficiency.

Understanding the personal nature and motivating potential of OKRs, Weiner defines them more broadly. They should be about “something you want to accomplish over a specific period of time that leans toward a stretch goal rather than a stated plan. It’s something where you want to create greater urgency, greater mindshare.” For all these reasons, OKRs should become more important the more senior an employee becomes. When you’re in a leadership position, “You are sending the signal to the rest of the organization that ‘this matters,’” Weiner says.

OKRs should definitely not be is easily achievable. Low expectations may seem to yield glowing results, but they eventually stall people, teams and companies in the long run. OKRs shouldn’t be too malleable either. They’re supposed to be quarterly beacons, not shifting from week to week. Along these lines, Weiner prefers that his team members set three to five OKRs for themselves in any given quarter. Anything more than that has the potential to distract from what really needs to get done.

Interview with Jeff Weiner, Linkedin CEO

"The Management Framework that Propelled LinkedIn to a $20 Billion Company" First Round Review. 8/2/2013

a company's true north

“Vision is the dream,” says Weiner. “A company’s true north. It’s what inspires everyone day in and day out. It’s what you constantly need to be aspiring to.” He defines LinkedIn’s vision as “Creating economic opportunity for every professional," where 'professional' refers to every single one of the over 3.3 billion people in the global workforce.

The mission, on the other hand, defines how the company strives to fulfill that vision. For LinkedIn, that means “connecting the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.” Here the term ‘professional’ is all about the company’s immediate audience of more than 600 million knowledge workers in its network, and the opportunity to change their lives.

Visions aren’t immediately achievable. They’re pie in the sky ideals that may take generations, many partnerships, and many people to achieve — and even then, perhaps only in part. Missions, however, can be defined in terms of concrete objectives, and a company can be measured by how well it achieves them, Weiner says. Most companies, even startups, will only have one or the other. But a vision without reference to what the company actually does is unmoored from reality, and may not serve its purpose to inspire and organize employees.

Interview with Jeff Weiner, Linkedin CEO

"The Management Framework that Propelled LinkedIn to a $20 Billion Company" First Round Review. 8/2/2013

there is always a way forward

Navigating severe challenges requires strong, courageous, and authentic leaders. That’s what Alan Mulally offered at Ford Motor....

Mullaly... set up mandatory weekly management meetings he called the business process review (BPR) for his top executives to get to the root cause of Ford’s long-standing problems. He quickly discovered that Ford’s challenges went way beyond financial losses: the culture at Ford was broken and in need of massive transformation. He observed, “Ford had been going out of business for 40 years, and no one would face that reality.”

In response, Mulally developed One Ford, an initiative based on “focus, teamwork and a single global approach, aligning employee efforts toward a common definition of success.” He started by redesigning internal meetings. As described in Bryce Hoffman’s American Icon, meetings had become “arenas for mortal combat” in which employees practiced self-preservation, trying to identify flaws in each other’s plans instead of recommending solutions to their problems.

Mulally reframed these meetings from negative to positive, fostering a safe environment where people had open and honest discussions without fear of blame. Instead of attacking executives for the issues they brought to the table, Mulally encouraged collaborative approaches to problem solving. He noted, “If you have a common purpose and an environment in which people want to help others succeed, the problems will be fixed quickly.”

Mulally introduced a “traffic light” system to weekly BPRs in which executives indicated progress on key initiatives as green, yellow, or red. After four meetings in which all programs were labelled green, Mulally confronted his team, “We are going to lose $18 billion this year, so is there anything that’s not going well?” His question was met with stony silence.

The following week, Ford’s North American President, Mark Fields, showed a red indicator that a new vehicle launch would be delayed. Other executives assumed Fields would be fired over the bad news. Instead, Mulally began clapping and said, “Mark, that is great visibility.” He asked the group, “What can we do to help Mark out?” As he frequently told his leaders, “You have a problem; you are not the problem.”

Mulally describes his leadership style as “positive leadership—conveying the idea that there is always a way forward.” He says a critical part of positive leadership is “reinforcing the idea that everyone is included. When people feel accountable and included, it is more fun. It is just more rewarding to do things in a supportive environment.”

With determination and positive leadership, Mulally created a culture of effective problem solving and teamwork. As a result, his team kept Ford out of bankruptcy, reversed market share losses with improved auto designs and quality, brought jobs back to the U.S. from overseas plants, and restored the company’s profitability by becoming cost competitive with foreign producers.

Bill George

"The Massive Difference between Negative and Positive Leadership" Forbes. 3/21/2016