Featured Corporate Story - September 2003

Stories of Today's Leaders:
Ensuring Employees Don't Say, 'This Isn't the Company I Joined'

Describing leadership as "the art of engaging the hearts and minds of ordinary people to achieve extraordinary results," Carol Kinsey Gorman, Ph.D., Kinsey Consulting Services, summarizes the six attributes that comprise the core of leadership. As reported in the new edition of her book, This Isn't the Company I Joined, due out in January, the six attributes are:

• vision
• integrity
• trust
• vulnerability
• values
• motivation

Each of these attributes is closely connected with the ability to tell the company's story with honesty, conviction, and commitment, first by painting the picture of the vision for the future. Gorman says, "To transform an organization, leaders must adopt and communicate a vision of the future that impels people beyond the boundaries and limits of the past." To do so requires commitment, as FedEx Chairman Fred Smith points out, because if people sense that the leader is not committed, "all the sweet talk in the world will not get people to support it."

The same is true of the other character traits Gorman has identified as the core of leadership, and she gives examples of companies that demonstrate these traits across the organization. Based on her interviews with executives in a range of industries, the book promises to be an interesting read for anyone in business, and a crucial lesson for companies that are continuing to lead the old way--top-down--instead of giving today's knowledge workers what they need: clarity of vision, commitment, trust, independence, and genuine support for creating both individual and corporate success.

For an article Gorman wrote on these leadership traits and the findings reported in her book, go to http://www.nwen.org/venturer/0603/feature1.html