Wednesday, January 20, 2016

CEO SPECIAL................ROLE MODELS

ROLE MODELS


Young leaders are inspired to mimic the behavior of present-day CEOs says IE Business School's Margarita Mayo

A generational shift has reinforced the authentic personal nature of CEO power. New generation employees wish to participate in the decision-making of the company and want to see the social impact of their work. Millennials (born 1980-2000) demand participation and meaningful work from their leaders. If you're a CEO looking for success with the new workforce, you'd better provide more than a paycheck.
Laura Guillen and Konstantin Korotov, professors at ESMT, and I recently conducted several studies published in the Leadership Quarterly showing how managers use their leaders as role models.Participants indicated the leader who had been the most significant to them in the past or in the present as their role model.They described this individual with ten statements and evaluated how well each of the statements matched their own characteristics. Some of these descriptions were: “encourages people to grown“ or “charismatic.“ We found that the more managers shared the leadership characteristics of their role models, the more confident they felt in applying for leadership positions and the greater their desire to lead in an authentic manner.
Some CEOs might wonder whether focusing on their authenticity and personal power will make them vulnerable, and ask whether they will end up losing their formal power.The surprising truth is that authenticity makes a CEO more powerful. Authenticity comes from the Greek word “autoridad“ ­ control and being agent of your own destiny.People trust a CEO who they see as authentic and in touch with his or her inner values. More than that, authenticity means acting in a way that is consistent with those values to gain the trust and respect of people.
To build authentic personal power, CEOs need to change the way they relate to employees. The usual focus is on transactional relationships. To achieve authentic personal power however, CEOs need to develop meaningful and charismatic relationships.They need to go further and build social capital around charisma. Research shows that when the CEO is imbued with charismatic qualities, followers display greater motivation to go the extra mile and perform beyond expectations.
To achieve authentic power it's not enough to be imbued with CEO charisma. If CEOs don't make it clear that they behave in the best interests of the organisation, they end up overlooking their power. A CEO should be able to find authenticity beyond the limits of his or her own existence to pursue solidarity.Being greater than themselves makes leaders more authentic.

ET30DEC15

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