How Leaders Obtain Great Results In Today's World

Leadership has fundamentally changed:

• From one way directing to two way mutual influencing;
• From one managerial context of leading through organizational authority to five flexible dynamic elements;
• From being afraid of creativity to embracing breakthrough thinking and the resulting innovations;
• From a faulty emphasis on leadership style to a flexible tool kit of principles and skills that promote breakthrough thinking and action in mutual relationships across the five elements.

Side by Side Leadership Promotes Unbelievable Results
in the Business Environment of Rapid Change

Imagine an executive conference room of a large high tech manufacturing company. It is a hot summer day and the sunlight is brightly streaming through the windows. I had just presented the results that my company's leadership training programs had achieved with similar clients to a group of executives. Some of the results directly attributed to the training and the subsequent application of the skills and tools taught were:

• A reduction of 14 days cycle time to 2 days time to produce a key product;
• A 300% improvement in productivity;
• The information system and order entry system went from requiring four weeks to 2 days;
• A leadership team and its organization of 80 teams achieved documented cost savings of $50 million; and
• One large company went from having 25% less revenue per year than its best competitor to achieving 100% greater revenue than their competitor.

My presentation to the executives in their sunny conference room had not gone well. I expected the executives to get as excited as I had been about the results our leadership training had achieved for a similar company in the same industry. The executives had shared that they had major performance problems in the same areas within their organization. Their problems were even similar to those which the mutual leadership skills and tools had solved. When I presented the above results of a different approach to leadership, most of the leaders were stone silent. I even described how the companies themselves had collected and documented the improvements. The executives just quietly filed out of the room after the presentation.

One manager, Bill, who had gotten excited, stayed around until the conference room emptied. He said, "Dennis you have a major problem. The results you present are unbelievable." Bill described how their company just wanted to stop the bleeding. Here I was describing how they could be the leading company in their industry and make buckets full of money.

I offered that I could provide a list of names and telephone numbers that Bill's fellow executives could call. They could verify the results of the new model of leadership. Bill just shook his head and said they would not convince his fellow managers either. The business results were just too unbelievable given where the executives felt they were.

Let me describe for you where the leadership principles and tools came from to obtain great business results. For the past twenty years, my colleagues and I have been quietly working behind the scenes assisting leaders in business, industry, and government to achieve unbelievable results. We have used an extremely rigorous scientific approach to develop our leadership principles and tools. Only research studies that had control group results conducted in real organizations were used. To find the hard data studies we looked at over 5,000 research studies.

While Bill's company went their own way, leaders from Motorola, Dell Computer, Texas Instruments, Amoco, Arco, Monsanto, Johnson and Johnson, Raytheon, and over 100 other organizations did believe the results. They have achieved similar successes. The Side by Side Leadership Training Programs teach leaders how to facilitate great results for themselves and others in the new organizational environment of the 21st Century.