LEADERSHIP EFFECTIVENESS

 

After many decades of formal debate in business and academia, leadership remains a dynamic and challenging concept. Indeed, a great number of people still see leadership as a mysterious collection of difficult to define traits or processes. Moving beyond trait and process models of Leadership, however, and more deeply elaborating the art of management execution, the programs of The Newkirk Group illuminate the perpetual journey to achieve performance at the highest level attainable, the Ulthule level.

Effective leaders identify the causes of individual, group, and organization effectiveness by making the distinction between the causes and the indicators of effectiveness. While leaders recognize that a wide range of criteria may indicate effectiveness, they recognize a more narrow range of causes. For example, leaders identify the causes of:

  • Individual effectiveness as ability, skill, knowledge, attitude, motivation, and stress.
  • Group effectiveness as cohesiveness, leadership, structure, status, roles, and norms.
  • Organization effectiveness as environment, technology, strategic choices, structure, processes, and culture.

Striving for peak effectiveness in any occurrence of more than one criterion, leaders optimally balance the most desirable relationship among the criteria of effectiveness. A closer look reveals that effectiveness occurs through two concurrent paths: (1) goal achievement, maintenance of systems processes, and environmental adaptation, and (2) political acumen in directly responding to the often conflicting differences in interests shared by groups and individuals within the organization.

Mastering the dynamics and complexity of modern leadership requires leaders to expand their range of action skills, intellectual capabilities, and emotional strengths. Today leaders must learn to think more dynamically, not just strategically, and to link operational objectives to the business mission. Beyond this, leaders must master the ambiguity that defines workplace dynamics.

Leadership Effectiveness Services

We designed our Leadership Effectiveness Services to guide the transformation to Ulthule Leadership. Our services clarify the impacts of leadership style on groupwork and provide an innovative framework for executive success termed Ulthule Leadership (UL). We analyze leadership from the strategic perspective as a dynamic process enabled by emerging management thinking and group practice. We progress from a group dynamics description of organizations and design a personal charter to implement leardership for optimum results. We discuss the rationale driving the UL approach as an action lever for reducing unwanted group conflict, enhancing group performance, and improving profitability of the 21st Century organization. We explore the theoretical perspectives of UL and address the organization and psychological issues which negatively impact leadership, followership, and team performance in the organization environment.

Our Leadership Environment and Management Effectiveness Audits enable leaders to develop highly effective leadership approaches relevant to the environment, challenges, and situations they face. Our audits provide rapid recommendations for change in leadership style, intensity, and processes. They evaluate leadership values, interface style, and staff attitudes. They also recommend improvements in project leadership approach, political control, and communications impact. They further evaluate the motivational environments impacting project employees and assess the level of management effectiveness.

Objectives

The objectives of our Leadership Effectiveness Services enable clients to establish a powerful and productive leadership framework more appropriate to the situations they face. To this end, we assist clients in (a) building their own personal leadership effectiveness contract, and (b) establishing a standard of ethical team work norms. Here we describe the leadership life cycle from formation to termination, clarify the relationship between leadership and the business mission, and enable clients to apply the Ulthule approach to the management of team work.

We further enable clients to better understand the dynamics and characteristics of productive leadership, examine the psychological factors that impact groupwork quality, and establish a safe environment to charter a personalized leadership effectiveness program. Finally, we assist clients as they design their own UL Model as a competitive edge to achieving exceptional groupwork.

You Will Learn How To

Become an exceptional leader by making ethical decisions and promoting ethical principles. You will learn how to identify the unique personal qualities of effective leadership while employing the "Mechanism-of-Action" to build team cohesiveness and leverage the personal factors of leadership to improve groupwork. You will further learn how to identify the modifying factors of team performance and focus team performance using context and the "Nominal-Group Technique." Finally, you will become a more effective leader by applying the techniques of "here and now activation"and mastering the "Principle of Group Composition".

Develop powerful socializing techniques by identifying the power source of team work. Here you will learn how to better balance the sources of power, influence, and change while balancing the power of the many with the power of the few. Along the journey to effective leadership, you will learn how to resolve intergroup conflict by mastering collective dynamics. You will also lean how to integrate social facilitation, social combination, and social motivation to accelerate individual and team performance while managing the roots of conflict and overcoming the Group Think Tragedy by linking corrective emotional experience to the theories in Group Work Dynamics. You will further become an effective leader by applying the principles of Mindfulness to facilitate team learning and applying principles of Social Cognition to guide management practice. Finally, as one of the most powerful socializing techniques, you will learn how to differentiate your views as a leader from those of your group workers.

Form exceptional teams and workgroups to achieve the highest level of performance attainable. Here you will learn how to better identify, design, and manage the various types of workgroups. Moving from concept to practice, you will also lean how to form and terminate teams and manage the challenges of storming and norming in groups. Here, you will learn how to define the Ulthule process for competitive leverage and select Ulthule team members. Building on this innovative platform for effective leadership, you will also learn how to defuse problem team members as well as develop norms and differentiate the roles of team members. Finally, you will learn to how to better manage the positive and negative variables of Group Dynamics by identifying the properties and processes of Ulthule team work.

Lead culturally diverse teams and build a Ulthule culture within diverse organizations. Here, you will learn how to achieve performance at the highest level attainable, the Ulthule level by leveraging the diverse perspectives of multicultural teams. You will learn techniques to acknowledge, explore, and use team member differences to improve performance and facilitate change. Finally, you will learn how to assess the range of cultural diversity in your teams or workgroups and work more directly with the different cultural populations forming your teams. Our leadership effectiveness services enable leaders to attract and retain the right employees, take appropriate actions to sustain competitive leverage, improve the ROI for all programs through the enlightened expenditure of costly resources, engage in effective planning, control, and reporting, and build the effectiveness of individual managers by increasing attention to those management issues that increase organization productivity by an attractive percentage.