Leading from the frontline: Sustaining leadership at all levels in a large organisation.

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Executive Summary.

"Leadership" can be an elusive quality. How does one become a better leader? And what makes a great leader? Although there are no easy answers to these questions, key elements of leadership -- including communication, delegation, and team building -- can be studied and developed. Courage and integrity are at the core of successful leadership. These character traits are primarily learned, not innate. Large organisations find difficult to remain competitive in this changing environment owing to their complexity of processes, size and infrastructural limitations. In response to intensifying global competition, more and more organisations are striving to create inclusive work environments that can offer dramatic improvements in productivity, quality, creativity, customer service, job satisfaction and talent retention. Those experiencing the greatest success tend to be those that make creating and sustaining an organisational culture of inclusion a leadership priority, and establish tangible ways of holding leaders throughout the organisation accountable for making quantifiable progress.

Any change effort that is not supported and modeled by the organisation's senior executives will quickly be recognized as nothing more than a "flavor of the month" by the people of the organisation. But the effort also not supported by mid-level managers, work-group leaders and front-line supervisors throughout the organisation or it will evolve into an "us against them" scenario in which people are not held accountable for failing to buy into the senior leaders' direction for the organisation.

"... Praise loudly, blame softly." (Catherine the Great). Follow this maxim.

Introduction.

The most gifted athletes rarely make good coaches. The best violinist will not necessarily make the best conductor. Nor will the best teacher necessarily make the best head of the department. So it's critical to distinguish between the skill of performance and the skill of leading the performance, two entirely different...