Foreword

The leadership course is exciting and challenging; it provides more than enough opportunity to score well, but it also presents many hazards. If you were to play a course for the first time, you would likely visit the pro shop and, if one is available, pick up a course guide. If one isn’t available, then you might find a marshall, or a frequent player of the course and talk to them. The information gathered would help you understand the unique nature of the course, in particular its special features, layout and hazards. Taking the time to learn about the course will not only help you enjoy the course more, but will likely save you strokes. The Forward to this book is your course guide. Hopefully, after reading the forward, you will understand both the opportunities that this book provides to improve your "leadership" game and the hazards that you must have the skills to master on the "leadership course."

Why another book on leadership? Because there is a need for a

practical, readable, applicable primer on leadership for those

who want to achieve more in the area of leadership, but don’t

know how. As a consultant, business owner and speaker over

the past fifteen years I have watched great leaders and not so

great leaders; but more than this I have seen men and women

who might have been great leaders, who truly might have made

a significant difference in their companies, fail to seize a leader-ship opportunity. These years of experience have convinced me of three incontrovertible facts:

take those organizations through the coming years of revolutionary transition;

the areas of business, psychology, and most importantly neurophysiology, be defined and followed.

There is also one "controvertible" assertion. The golf course

provides a wonderful metaphor for learning about leadership.

As Gary McCord notes in his introduction to his best selling

book on golf, "Golf for Dummies":

The same is true for leadership. To paraphrase this quote:

or the team will occur with less frequency and you’ll begin to believe that you really can be a leader. But sooner or later you will plateau. The improvements you have made in leading others will slow to a trickle and then stop altogether. Your will have reached your level of natural ability as a leader. And that is the maximum level of leadership that you will be able to attain for the rest of your life. Why? Because your leadership skills, or rather your lack of

them, won’t let you get any better. You will be good despite

your level of character and competence or bad because of them.

It doesn’t matter. As a leader you will be swimming at the deep

end of a pool filled with Jell-O."

And this is how I will use golf metaphors to teach leader-ship.

In both golf and leadership the goal is to continually get

better. So, my goal for the reader of this book is simply this.

Wherever you are on the leadership ladder, I want to take you

up a few rungs and show you how to get to the top. The days of

leadership being limited to a select few are gone, today if you

want a leadership position, if you want to achieve your leader-ship

potential, you can. This book will show you how.

Identify Your Target, Take Dead Aim

One of the most often used phrases in golf (and in this book) is

"Take Dead Aim." Take Dead Aim means just that. It means to

select a target or a goal and aim for it. Too seldom in business or

life do we do this. Too often in life we Take Broad Aim or we

Take No Aim At All. So let me identify a target for you and

then I want you to take dead aim. I want to use your imagination

to see yourself in that leadership role that has been eluding

you. I want you to take a moment as you begin this book to

imagine a moment. I want you to imagine that moment in the

future when you, through your leadership skills make a significant

contribution to the success of your organization. I realize

that this exercise is a reach for many of you, but it is critical. You

need to know what you want to achieve as a leader in order to

become a leader; you need to take dead aim at this target. Don’t

look at all the reasons you have not achieved what you might,

don’t look at the traps and water hazards that have kept you

from becoming more of a leader; just focus on your target.

Perhaps you have already experienced this moment of leadership

success; if you have, you know the satisfaction of achieving

the goal. However, if you have not experienced this moment,

you will. Leadership is not magic or some collection of

inborn character traits. True leadership is a learned behavior.

All of us have the ability to provide leadership at some level.

The purpose of this book is simple: To increase the leadership

ability of everyone who reads the book through the development

of the character and competencies required to lead.

Is This Book Just for Golfers?

Having just used a famous golf phrase, let me first answer the

most often asked question about this book, "Is this book just for

golfers?" The answer is no. This is a book for leaders and those

who aspire to lead. This is a book about leadership and management, about improving productivity through people, about time tested strategies for increasing individual and company-wide

performance. The book simply uses golf as a metaphor to help

inform, clarify and, occasionally, entertain. If you have never

played golf, if you don’t know the difference between a wood

and an iron, a par and a birdie, a mulligan and a gimme, you

can still learn from this book. Of course, if you are a golfer, you

may more easily relate to some of the stories, anecdotes and real

life descriptions used in the book. (Incidentally, for the golfing

purists who believe that the game is somehow reduced in value

by extending its lessons from the fairway to the floor, I ask your

indulgence in advance. I would argue that the game is there

to teach us about life as well as to provide the experience of

golfing.

The title of this book, Go for the Green was chosen because

it truly has a double meaning. In golf, "Go for the Green" means

to take aim at the pin, to set your sights on that target and go

for it. In business, "Go for the Green" means more than simply

seeking greater monetary rewards; it means to achieve a level of

leadership that allows you to influence others to achieve organizational and personal success. So, Go for the Green.

Leadership’s "Tyranny of the Or"

There is an underlying premise to this book and that is this:

since the beginning of the study of management and leadership

in the early 1900’s there has often been a serious disconnect

between theory and practice. Business schools have often focused

on the "hard" or management side of business (accounting,

scheduling, finance, technology—those things that could

be measured and controlled) at the expense of the "soft" or leadership side of business. In doing so, we have produced several

generations of managers (by whatever title) who have been well

educated in fiscal matters, in how to command and control,

plan and budget, who may have received some very rudimentary

training in how to solve problems and monitor results, and

who may have even learned something either directly or indirectly

about how to work effectively with people. But these same

people must simply do the best they can to provide leadership

when a crisis or opportunity arises because the skills and at-tributes

of leadership have generally not been codified and taught.

So, while the title of the book is "leadership" and the focus

is primarily on leadership, we also talk some about management

of people, because, at a micro level, the management and

the leadership of people go hand in hand. How you manage

and lead the people of your organization is one of the most

important, if not the most important determinants of, not only

personal development, but also productivity and profits.

In other words, my goal has been to write a practical book,

to provide steps, strategies and concepts to both demystify leadership and to make leadership (as opposed to just management) more widely practiced and more widely available. For all types of organizations, private and public businesses, educational institutions, governmental and non-profit entities, implementing the concepts in this book should be seen as a step toward improving bottom line results.

One of my favorite business books of recent years is Collins

and Porras’s "Built to Last." I was particularly impressed with

their concept of the "Tyranny of the Or." This concept says

that people and companies often think they have to choose between

two competing values, for example, productivity and satisfied

employees, or between investment for the long term and

short term profitability. Thus we have companies that have selected

one value or the other, they are "bottom line, profit driven"

or "they are people oriented, customer driven." Collins and

Porras effectively argue from their experience with successful

companies that these values are not mutually exclusive, that

companies can, in fact "have both."

Skills versus Character, Manager versus Leader

There is a similar dichotomy in the debate over leadership. Some,

like Kouzes and Posner, who have written extensively on leader-ship, say, "Credibility is the foundation of leadership." They

are on what I call, the "Who You Are" side of leadership.

Others writers and researchers focus on the "how" side, on

leadership skills. They suggest that leadership is manifested in

what one does, not who one is. What good does it do to have

credibility, they argue, if your people don’t follow your lead?

This is the "Tyranny of the OR" applied to leadership.

What I am going to suggest in this book is that effective

leaders have both. That is, they have a foundation of credibility

based on character (Golf ’s Greatest Lesson) and they have skills

to galvanize people into action. These skills, including the abilities

to motivate, to passionately communicate a vision, to mea-sure

performance, and the persistence to carry through on a plan to make the vision a reality, are critical for effective leader-ship.

In short, successful leaders must have character and competence,

they must bridge values and combine them under a banner that is more encompassing, less limiting.

The "Tyranny of the Or" applies equally to definitions of

managers and leaders. It is as if people have to decide whether

they are one or the other. Are they the ones, as Covey says, who

are making sure, as the road gets cut through the jungle, that

the supply lines are functioning well, that the road is straight

and properly crowned, that the tools are sharp and available

(the managers), or are they the ones who climb the tree, survey

the land and shout, "wrong jungle" (the leaders).

Covey’s assertion betrays the belief held by many authorities

on leadership that managing is one thing and leadership

quite another. I believe management is a subset of the overall

leadership function. In traditional thinking, managers plan,

control, organize, budget, and staff. They do all of those jobs

that are necessary for operations to function, for the organization

to produce results. This traditional thinking suggests that

leaders, on the other hand, provide direction, inspire, motivate

and align.

My position on management and leadership is this: you

(or manage those who budget and staff ), the vision won’t come into being; you can plan, control, and organize all day, but if you can-not motivate and inspire your people, your plans will go unfulfilled (or perhaps even be sabotaged).

So, this dichotomy is just one more manifestation of the

"Tyranny of the Or." We need a new word, "leaderment" or

"managership" or "manader" to clarify the fact that, in today’s

business climate, you cannot choose either, you must choose

both. This is frightening for a lot of people. We are comfortable

in our role as manager, we don’t want to have to lead. Or (less

often) we are comfortable in our role of leadership, we don’t

want to have to worry about those details of planning and budgeting.

I submit, with the pace of change in today’s world, you

don’t have the option, you must learn both—and both can be

learned.

The Need for Leadership

This book originally grew out of a conversation that I had with

a client over two years ago. I was consulting with a company

which was experiencing high turnover in professional ranks while

overall white collar productivity was plummeting. The president

of this company came to me and said, "I realize that book

learning isn’t the total answer to the problem, but I just saw one

of my top managers chew a subordinate out in public. I have

got to begin somewhere. Do you know of any practical, application-

oriented book that includes a compendium of chapters

on how to implement best leadership and management practices"?

He definitely did not want a textbook.

I mentally reviewed my bookshelf: Peter Drucker, brilliant

and yet theoretical, Tom Peters, creative, cutting edge, challenging,

but simply not practical for the average manager, Ken

Blanchard, practical, applicable, but focused on only two or

three aspects of management and leadership, Steven Covey, courageous, insightful, people-oriented but difficult to translate into

day to day operations. Then there were books such as Built to

Last by Collins and Porras, the Customer Centered Company by

Richard Waitely, Leading Change by John Kotter and Kouzes

and Posner’s "The Leadership Challenge" and "Credibility."

None of these books met the need of providing practical

application, of defining and detailing the skills and character

development required of managers and leaders that had been

identified by this company president. His company, like many

US companies was full of two kinds of managers: first, those

who had received "battlefield commissions", excellent soldiers

who had been promoted based on performance (often during a

crisis) to officer rank and then proceeded up through the ranks

based primarily on seniority; and second, degreed engineers

who had come into the company out of college, been promoted

because of technical skills, picked up additional technical skills

of a different sort in an MBA program, but really had no broad

understanding of leadership, of how to effectively integrate

people and analytical skills.

Oh, yes, and this company president was an avid golfer who

had completed many "deals" either on the course itself or later

on the "19 th Hole" following a game.

So, this book is designed to fill that void. It is for those

people who are in a management or supervisory role who want

to know why and how to improve their skills both as managers

and leaders—and to discover this in an interesting and practical

format.

The Front Nine

This book, then, responds to his request. It is subtitled, "The

Front Nine," because in leadership, as in golf, the deeper you

get into the game, the more your realize there is to learn.

Each chapter (or "Hole" on Front Nine) also includes a summary

section called "How to Play This Hole." This is the practical

application of the concepts taught in the chapter. For ex-ample,

in the second chapter we will look at strategies for

alignment; in this chapter’s "How to Play this Hole" we essentially

say, "Now that you’ve read about how important alignment

is, here are some strategies to make it happen. Remember,

my bias is toward results. In golf, you keep an accurate

score on each hole and for each game. You then submit your

scores and in return receive a rating called a "handicap." Over

time, the goal of every golfer is to improve his game and there-fore

his or her handicap. The same is true for leaders. Improve

your skills and over time you will see the results in terms of your

impact on the organization; your leadership "handicap" will

improve.

Because the game of golf is used to illustrate many of the

critical leadership practices covered in this book, and because

all readers may not be totally familiar with the nuances of this

wonderful game, we are going to begin with a slightly tongue in

cheek glossary of the most commonly used golf terms and then

proceed to a very tough hole on developing a vision. This is in

keeping with the strategy of all golf course designers, (a sort of

sadistic group of individuals) who always like to start you off

with a character challenging, skill stretching, and generally intimidating,

first hole.

Oh, and by the way, because I have played this course many

times, a little word of caution. The most difficult hole to par on

this course is not Vision or Alignment. It is not Motivation,

Communication or even Judgment. The number one rated hole

on this course is "Change."