President’s Viewpoint
Leadership Imperative: Strategic Credibility Factor for the Millennium
It is easier to develop managers than to build leaders. The real challenge is to develop managers who can also lead.
As we round out the 20th century, the Logistics Institute is pleased to recognize more than 600 certified P.Log. professionals, and a further 600 in process, leading the way into the Millennium. If numbers mean anything, then the P.Log. is indeed acknowledged by the practitioner community as a public statement of logistics competence and leadership credibility.
| Leadership involves inspiring and enabling others to achieve, and to want to achieve, personal and organizational success through shared vision and cooperation. |
Many organizations and institutions successfully deliver management development programs. P.Log. certification, by contrast, focuses specifically on strategic leadership development: engendering leadership capabilities to realize the vision of the Millennium. Fundamental to our approach is the belief that:
The future is not the result of choices among alternative paths offered in the present. It is a place that is created: created first in the mind; created next in the activity.
Leadership is distinct from management. Management entails the planning and effective use of resources to accomplish operational objectives. It is the plans we write, the objectives we pursue, and concrete evidence identifying: What we intend to do [plans]; How we intend to do it [tactics]; How we are doing on the way [measurements].
“Leadership is the art of mobilizing others to struggle with you for shared aspirations” [J.Kouzes, Credibility: The Foundation of Leadership]. It entails vision, intuition and instinct, as well as confidence, competence and commitment, focused on: risk-taking and gut-level decisions; motivating others; and believing in yourself and people.
Strategic Leadership, more pointedly, is about change: “getting others to see a situation as it really is and to understand what responses need to be taken so that they can act in ways that will move the organization toward where it needs to be” [N.M.Tichy, The Leadership Engine].
Strategic Leaders initiate and sponsor change through three phases: Ending: disengaging from the past, and the way things were; Transition: letting go of the old, not yet knowing how to live the new; New Beginning: feeling at home with the new and being successful with new ways of doing things.
Thinking strategically emphasizes that leaders are responsible for providing vision. Vision leads to long-term goal setting and also provides a set of values by which the organization will “filter” all its activities. Ultimately, strategic leadership is value driven and results oriented.
If we value serving, excellence, integrity and learning, then we will engender such “full potential performance” behaviours as creativity and nurturing ideas, courage and decisiveness, accountability and collaboration, as well as “leaning, listening, empowering and sharing” [D.Poirier, Hudson’s Bay Company].
Refusing the “leadership imperative” fosters those “under performance” behaviours we easily recognize in any conventional work situation: fear, indecision, suspicion, avoidance, defensiveness, territoriality.
The Logistics Institute, by emphasizing professional certification, is an experience in strategic human resource development, reflecting the conviction that: