CADDManager on August 1st, 2013
This entry is part 2 of 8 in the series Leadership Dispositions

Your leadership is driven by getting things done.  Results are what you are all about. Whether it is small or large tasks.  Your work or helping others.  What you think of first is getting done.  The project needs to stay on track and on time.  The effort must be completed.  The task at hand must move forward.

Your Actions will be just that… Actions.  You move forward.  Get things back on track.  You do what it takes to get things to progress. What matters most is project delivery.  Meeting deadlines.  Completing your task or helping others be able to complete theirs.  You are seen as a person who makes things happen.  People come to you because you can fix things.  You tell people what needs to be done and who needs to do it and do it now.

Your first thoughts are “What needs to be done to get this fixed?”  “What can I do to get things working again?” “What is causing this delay and how can I move past it?”  “What made this fail and what can we do to minimize the damage?”

All of the above items sound positive and they are.  Getting results is what business is all about.  Guiding derailed processes back on track is great.  Focusing on the outcome keeps things rolling and targeted.  You can move around the politics and people issues to get to the root of the problem.  But there can be some negatives that go along with the positives if this disposition stands alone.  Everyone should be results oriented, but if it is overemphasized, it can cause some concerns.

The Positives

Your value is anchored in the fact that you quickly assess the damage and define to remedy.  Others comment on the fact that you got it working again and saved the day.  The firm could not survive without your “can do” attitude.  When given a project or task, others do not have to worry about it getting done.  You guarantee that.

The Negatives

Being the “go to” person for all problems (if you are seen as that) can cause you to become reactive in place of proactive. You wait for troubles to come instead of working to avoid them.  Subliminally you may think that if there are no troubles, then you may not be seen as “needed”.  But the point of leadership is to avoid problems, not to just address them as they come.

Plowing toward the goal can sometimes make you tend to overlook the people side of things.  Fixing the problem without educating the person that might have caused it will not prevent it in the future.  By moving quickly to restore progress, you may overlook key people or events that may have caused the issue in the first place.

Having laser focus on the results or fixes can also make you move to quickly past opportunities that might present themselves along the road.  You move fast, which is good, but too fast to have made a slight adjustment as you were moving forward. An example would be the gains that can be made when there is an outage of some sort that causes downtime that could be used to replace hardware while you also restore services.

Result oriented leadership is a great disposition when softened and blended with other perspectives.  We will continue looking at dispositions of leadership with the positives and negatives and how mixing them together produces better “results”.

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