Friday, January 5, 2007

Outsight and Effective Leadership

Leaders need to be in touch with what is going on outside the organization and not be isolated by institutional boundaries. Kouzes and Posner (2002) suggest that changes can come from either outside or inside the organization. Successful innovation rarely comes from within. While the bulk of new product and product improvement ideas come from customers through salespeople and executives, this input should be rationalized by the marketing function before entering the product plan. However, this market research filtering mechanism is not precisely the outsight that leaders need. Outsight can be thought of as sensitivity to external realities presented by all constituents regardless of the context. Just as the metaphor presented in the textbook of turning our back on the ocean, we cannot let ourselves be swept away by not looking at the changes going on outside our companies. Leaders need to stay in touch with contacts in the marketplace and those with different social, political, technological, economic, and artistic backgrounds. Experienced managers can sometimes be at a real disadvantage when it comes to effective use of outsight – they fall into the trap of thinking that they have heard about that issue before. One of the keys to understanding outsight can be found in one of my Grandfather’s sayings, “Remember, the book of what you DO NOT know is a lot bigger that the book of what you DO know.” In sum, successful leaders work to tear down the walls that confine the organization, boundaries that are often self-imposed.

Reference

Kouzes, J.M., & Posner, B.Z. (2002). The leadership challenge (3rd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

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