Today’s post is by George Kohlrieser, author of CARE TO DARE: Unleashing Astonishing Potential through Secure Base Leadership (CLICK HERE to get your copy).  George is a veteran hostage negotiator, an organizational and clinical psychologist, and Professor of Leadership at IMD.  Here’s George… Great leaders all over the world aim to unleash astonishing potential within themselves, their people and their organizations. Secure Base Leadership is the key to doing this more effectively. A Secure Base Leader builds trust, delivers change and inspires the focus that people need to actively engage in their work and create conditions for innovation. Secure Base Leaders generate high performance by acting as a “secure base” for the people they lead. Secure Base The term “secure base” comes from the post-war attachment theory research of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth (1). According to this theory, all humans have an innate desire to seek closeness to and comfort from a person who gives them a sense of protection. Without that sense of protection, when an actual or perceived threat to survival emerges, the human brain prompts the person to resist change or avoid risk. However, when a secure base provides the person with that sense of protection, the person can turn the focus away from pain, danger, fear or loss toward a focus on reward, opportunity or benefit. For the purposes of our work in modern organizations, we define a “secure base” as:

Today’s post is by Irv Rothman, President and CEO of Hewlett Packard Financial Services and author of Out-Executing the Competition: Building and Growing a Financial Services Company in Any Economy (CLICK HERE to get your copy).  Here’s Irv… I’m all for a sound control environment and playing within the rules and I’m not advocating coloring outside the lines per se. However, an environment that does not allow the most basic freedom to use reasoned business judgment is one which will invariably result in dissatisfied customers. And there is a direct corollary between highly satisfied customers and profitability. You are no doubt smart enough to draw your own conclusions as to the less than satisfied customers scenario. It’s the age-old question: how to exercise sufficient control without stifling responsiveness and creativity? Perhaps it is a gross generalization, but it seems that the larger the organization, the more bureaucratic it tends to be. The challenge for big companies then is to align against organizing principles that promote a small company atmosphere where people feel sufficiently free to strike that delicate balance between maintaining good order and market differentiating customer responsiveness. Not an easy task, but not impossible either. Organizational choices and messaging are where it starts. Great leaders inspire with long term vision and operational direction to help make it a reality. For many businesses today, the word “team” is in common usage (perhaps overused?), but it is almost a cliché because it is rarely deployed as anything more than a catch phrase. Yet despite the general absence of formally designated team structures, employee satisfaction surveys often give working within “my team” and for “my team leader” high marks for leadership, integrity and engagement. Far less often are the same high marks used to describe senior management.