Just Seven Things

7 Lessons from Steve Jobs’ Career

Some takeaways from Steve Jobs’s career – and what other leaders can practice for success:

1. Relentlessly pursue bold ideas – Organizations must have the patience, courage, and foresight to encourage, provide resources, and remove barriers for their “wild ducks” to pursue and realize break-out ideas.
2. The customer rules – Organizations need to identify and accelerate the careers of high potential employees who are attuned to the marketplace in ways that drive products and/or services intended to always surprise and delight the customer.
3. Ego serves the organization – Leaders can have big egos, but their efforts are fundamentally channeled in the service of making organizations successful.
4. Don’t confuse activity with results – Successful leaders leverage competitive drive to maintain traction/deliver distinctive excellence. They are not distracted from achieving the organization’s strategy and primary objectives.
5. The 3 Rs – Strong leaders ensure that the right people are in the right jobs and that the right conditions have been created for them to succeed.
6. Truth-telling – Don’t tolerate mediocre ideas, and be willing to take decisive action when people are not cutting it in their assigned roles.
7. Inspirational communication – Provide frequent and intensely motivational communication about compelling objectives, and the importance of speed to market.

Avoid the following pitfalls:

1. Prizing boldness to a fault – Don’t push ideas at the expense of forming and maintaining relationships with key stakeholders; inducing unnecessary political problems both within and outside the organization.
2. Misreading the customer – Customers may or may not be ready for the next “shiny object.” Objectively gauging customer readiness is key in the pacing and release of technological advances.
3. When ego doesn’t serve the organization – Acting like the 800-pound dominant gorilla and/or always needing to be the smartest kid in the room can have intensely de-motivating and or dis-empowering effects on others.
4. Excessive drive for results – People will feel trampled, unnecessarily stressed, pushed beyond what is reasonable, neglected, or otherwise de-humanized in the name of achieving results.
5. The 1 R – Getting the people right, but failing to assimilate them well or supporting them fully, expecting them to solve organization obstacles that really require senior management intervention, and failing to mentor employees won’t build talent bench strength within the organization.
6. Destructive truth telling – Excessive negative feedback that gets personal, and also the absence of “psychological paychecks” that recognize and affirm stellar efforts and results does nothing to drive results.
7. Un-inspirational communication – Messages that are diminished by a leader’s hyperbole, grand-standing, and/or failure to help employees see their place in the journey leaves workers uninspired and lost.

via The Real Lessons from Steve Jobs’ Career | ChiefExecutive.net | Chief Executive Magazine.