Case Studies – The Backward Way to Learn Leadership

For a century, case studies have played a major role in the development of leaders.

The thinking goes like this: Let’s study what happened to a particular organization and see how they responded – what they did right, what they did wrong, what they learned. Or let’s see what aggressive moves a new CEO made to shake up a company. Then let’s try to squeeze some useful ideas and practices out of their experience and apply it to…everything else.

The problems with this are many. One is ignorance. Do we really even know all of the relevant facts? Do we truly understand their context – economy, market, competition, regulation, etc.? What is their culture really like? Is this the whole picture or just a snapshot? Nothing is more difficult than understanding something fully enough to make pronouncements based on that understanding.

Another problem is applicability. Even in the same line of work, what does the experience of a $50 billion/year company have to do with a $50 million/year company (or the other way around)? If it happened even a short while ago, have times changed enough to render their experience much less than meaningful? What is the effect of a different workforce makeup – more or less technical people, or blend of personalities, or spread of ages?

A third problem is confusion and contradiction. In many situations, there are case studies that prove a point and others that disprove the same point. Faced with a similar challenge, one organization wins by “sticking with their knitting” and another one wins by “breaking out of the box.” So what’s “right?”

The overall problem with this approach is that it approaches leadership from the wrong end. Instead of finding leadership principles that work over time because they are connected to the real world and to what it means to be human in a team environment, they survey a variety of shapshots and then hope to draw something that makes sense out of the pictures.

At Luman, we believe that great leadership consists of having an array of powerful principles that work in all times and places, along with a toolbox of practices that can be applied and modified as necessary to allow leaders to win in specific situations. We’ve learned that examples can illustrate a principle, but can never create one or prove that it works.

Telling a story about how a leader or organization applied a principle and saw it work can be very encouraging. Telling that story to teach leadership is an exercise in wishful – and backward – thinking.

Leadership Models and the Diamond of Excellence

It doesn’t take long to figure out that there are dozens if not hundreds of leadership models out there.  Some are focused on individual areas (like teams and teambuilding) while others are intended to be comprehensive.  Frankly, most of them are useless, and some are actually counterproductive.  But you’ve got to have one.

Why does anyone need a great leadership model?  For a number of very good reasons:

• There’s so much to think about that it’s extremely helpful to have a grid into which you can place new learning, ideas, material, and tools.
• It’s important to have a framework by which you can see if your approach is balanced or out of whack (like spending all of your time on one or two areas instead of the whole realm of leadership requirements)
• It keeps you focused as a leader on what’s really important and helps you avoid a thousand meaningless distractions
• It allows us to evaluate books, articles, seminars and other arenas where leadership teaching is offered
• It helps us – especially with decent assessments – to determine with great accuracy where our challenges and opportunities lie

Should an effective model be simple or comprehensive?  Absolutely.  It has to be simple enough that a leader can keep it easily in his or her head.  Complicated 7 to 10 models with lots of sidebars are just too much to be handy or useful.  But it also has to be comprehensive enough to allow everything that’s important to a leader to be incorporated.  Too many models are focused on just 1 or 2 aspects of leadership, or worse – or built around a gimmick (you can probably think of a few there).

You want a model that has elegant simplicity.  We spent 25 years distilling our experience with hundreds of organizations and tens of thousans of leaders down into a model that is both straightforward and robust.  We call it the Diamond of Excellence™.  It has 4 facets that are easily grasped but rich enough to cover everything a leader needs to know and do to be top-tier effective.  We’ve been challenging leaders for the past 5 years to name one important leadership situation or challenge that isn’t covered by the Diamond, and to date no one has been able to come up with anything.

The spirit of the Diamond is captured in our tag line, Building Passionate, Thinking, Pure-Performance Organizations™ – all based on a foundation of facing and defining reality.  Please take a few minutes and check out the Diamond on our website.  Whatever you do, find a model that works – for you personally as well as for your team or organization.

Models come in all shapes and sizes.  Make sure you use one that you can build on forever.