Today, we’re looking for a few more.

Take a minute to glance at the call for papers below. If you have a piece you think would fit, check out the full guidelines here.

Strategic Leadership Review (SLR) is an open-access, refereed journal that features articles focused on the practical application of leadership research and theory. SLRpublishes theoretical or conceptual papers on a variety of topics, including:

• Leadership
• Followership
• Motivation
• Management
• Strategy
• Innovation
• Organizational behavior

Management seems to attract control freaks in inordinate numbers. My own experience as a control freak was a bit hilarious. I decided that it was time to research my OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) tendencies, and so I went online and ordered three books. Right. Not one book, but three. As I explained this to someone, she just laughed, rolling around on the floor. Ordering three books on obsessive compulsive tendencies seems to confirm the diagnosis before even cracking one of the books, no?

Laugh along with me about that, but being a control freak is not pleasant. For the perpetrator or the victims. Let me make two observations that might get you thinking—as kindly but directly as I can.

Quality vs. Control

One common line of reasoning I frequently hear from control freaks is that they are fixated on quality and unless they act like a control freak, too many things slip through the cracks. It’s as if no one quite measures up to their own standards, and so they’re trapped inevitably in the loop of approvals, sign-offs, corrections, and always touching things at every step. It’s no surprise, then, when they become a bottleneck and get even more frustrated.

This idea that the control freak acts in this manner to preserve quality is really just a ruse, though. Because if they were really that interested in quality, they’d put more systems and processes in place to ensure better quality. No, what’s really happening is that they want control, and so they define the standard as how they would do it (and that can change on a whim).

If you’re really concerned about quality, put the right systems and processes into place, along with the right people, and manage that way. Otherwise you’ll be a bottleneck, and that is frustrating for you and frustrating for them.

In the bigger scheme of things, your standards probably aren’t that important anyway. Frankly, you probably have people noodling the life out of projects, perfecting areas where no one notices except you.

The Terrors of Delegation

Take that bottleneck illustration above: the insistence on seeing everything before it’s approved. What’s really at stake, here? To answer that question, I want you to picture something with me.

Assume that you’re leaving on vacation tomorrow. Given that, what do you think you’d be doing tonight, capping off a long day in the office? We know the answer to that: you’d be putting everything you can in writing for one purpose, and that’s to ensure that people wouldn’t need to bother you on vacation. As a control freak, you’re probably so inundated with detail while you are at work that you really need a break when that vacation rolls around.

So you go on vacation and sure enough, all those notes explaining things worked. No one had to bother you and things went pretty darned well, right? They didn’t need you like they normally do.

But the story doesn’t end there, right? You get back to work and everything goes back to the way it was before. A little bit of chaos. A lot of scurrying around. You touching everything like before, ensuring that things are done well.

Stop for a second and think about this, though. You put everything in writing so that you wouldn’t be bothered. So it stands to reason that you don’t put things in writing because you do want to be bothered! What other explanation could there be?

This explains some of your control freak tendencies and your reticence to put better systems and processes in place: it’s designed so that you are kept inevitably in the loop. That’s an issue for your therapist, really.

David C. Baker lived in Guatemala until he was 18 and now lives in Nashville, TN. In addition to owning a thriving management consulting practice, ReCourses, David is a frequent speaker and author. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Inc. magazine,  Forbes, CBS Business Network, MarketingProfs, BusinessWeek, and dozens of other national publications. He enjoys travel, racquetball, photography, and flying airplanes and helicopters.

This is by far the least important question in leadership.

It’s not even the real question.

The real question – the question underneath – is: can leadership be developed and cultivated in someone, or should we just try and find the natural leaders and push them to the front of the line?

So why do we ask the other question – the born or made question?

We ask it because it is so unimportant. Because any time we ask the question we begin a great debate about qualities and behaviors of leaders. We dance around and around question underneath. We are trying to avoid settling on a firm answer because a firm answer has consequences – a firm answer means we have to get working.

If we believe leaders are born than we have to invest in a process to find them. If we believe leaders are made we have to begin to take accountability for developing leaders. Either way, we’re obligated to begin to take action to improve leadership in our world.

So let’s take action.

The answer to the least important question in the world is both – born and made. So let’s stop debating it and start finding those with natural abilities and developing them into great leaders. Let’s also develop those without abilities into better leaders.

It’s an unimportant question with a very important answer.

David Burkus is the editor of LeaderLab. He speaks, consults and serves on the faculty of management at Oral Roberts University’s College of Business.

They need to practice personal leadership.

Defining Personal Leadership

Personal leadership is the leadership of the self.  In addition to the visible and interactive work of organizational leadership, personal leadership is the private, introspective part of leadership that takes place within. Personal leadership is an introspective process that requires focus and attention. Given priority, it can be transformational. In fact, Peter Drucker once called it “the only leadership that’s going to matter in the 21^st century.”

Putting Personal Leadership into Practice

So how does a leader actually practice personal leadership? It looks like this:

1. Take time to think. Leaders need to step out of the daily rush and think about what they’re doing and why. Doing so, they will find the clarity and focus they need to get back into the action in the most effective way.

1. Look inside. Instead of being driven by the demanding urgencies, leaders can discover their inner resources – their strengths, their values, and their aspirations.

1. Look for ways to align and integrate your life. We are who we are wherever we are. The closer leaders can tie their true selves to their leadership roles, the happier and healthier they will be – on all fronts.

The economic and business environment may be out of our control. Leaders’ ability to thrive within this environment, on the other hand, is very much in their own hands. Personal leadership gives leaders a way to fill themselves up with the motivation that will help them thrive again.

Joelle K. Jay, Ph. D., MCC, is an executive coach, speaker and author specializing in leadership development and executive education in Fortune 500 companies. She is the author of The Inner Edge: The 10 Practices of Personal Leadership. For a Free Executive Summary of The Inner Edge, go to www.JoelleKJay.com. 

Marcus Buckingham is a soloist in the strengths movement choir. He has been a mouthpiece for the idea since seemingly the very beginning. Marcus is a gifted communicator with a talent for understanding the need for rigorous research. Which is why when he finally decided to create a market a self-assessment, StandOut, it should peak everyone’s interest. I’ll admit, I was actually a little confused at why Marcus had decided to create an assessment – I am a big fan of Go Put Your Strengths to Work and the accompanying Trombone Player Wanted film series. Both of these works rest on the idea that taking a test isn’t as useful as studying yourself at work.

So how good could this StandOut test be?

Good.

The book itself is a quick read, meant to introduce you to the test, have you take it, and then help you analyze your results. It’s how the test itself is structured that is really cool. The entire assessment uses behavior-based questions. Rather than ask you “Do you like ______ or ______ better?” it gives you situations and then asked you have you’d respond. Eventually, it locks in on the pattern behind your hypothetical behaviors – these are your strengths roles. When you complete the test, it generates a report that can be view online or download. The report explains your result and provides tips for how to make an immediate impact and how to craft a long-term strategy based on your position in an organization.

I’m inherently skeptical of self-assessments because the usually just ask you to describe yourself and then re-label your own description – sort of like stealing your watch and then telling you the time. That said, I believe StandOut has the potential to make a real impact in an organization because it deals with how you ACT in the world, not how you THINK you act. I’m especially looking forward to the release of the manager dashboard function, which will allow managers to access a website (or iPad app) that houses the results of their team and provides tips for interactions).

StandOut is the product StrengthsFinder 2.0 should have been.

Most people view organizational change the same way they view a clown standing down the street from them.

It may be a positive experience, but we’d rather it be someone else’s positive experience.

Despite our best efforts, the world continues to change and grow. In order to remain competitive, organizations need change alongside their environment. Changing certain parts of an organization are easy, but changing people is hard.

Most people try to avoid the clown.

For over fifty years, organizations have looked for help in leading people through change. They relied on thought leaders and researchers for help making sense of the mental processes people use to understand and cope with their changing roles. These models can help people become more willing and able to embrace change. At any level in the organization, leaders will be involved in leading change.

So leaders must meet the clown.

[Click here to download the full ebook.]

One fascinating example is that of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was the surprise winner of a hotly contested primary that included personal attacks and attempted coup d’etats. Once he had secured the nomination, and later the presidency of the United States, Lincoln assembled his cabinet primarily of the very men he quarreled with for the nomination. This “team of rivals” was able to provide a variety of perspectives and create a tension over the solutions that avoided the traditional, yes-man saturated groupthink sessions that marked so many other president’s cabinets.

What is important is for the leader of such diverse rivalries to sustain the right amount of creative friction, taking care to produce the tension needed to refine new ideas and challenge old assumptions while ensuring that the tension doesn’t get overbearing and melt the team. While there was a team of rivals in Lincoln’s cabinet, I suspect it was always certain who that needed leader was.

We tend to think of creatives as artists, musicians and writers. However, Lincoln’s deliberate attempt to leverage tension provided him with a style of creativity he found quite useful in navigating us through an equally tumultuous feud.

David Burkus is the editor of LeaderLab. He speaks, consults and serves on the faculty of management at Oral Roberts University’s College of Business.

Employees help each other by offering advice, lending a hand, resolving conflicts, and celebrating each other’s achievements. Employees that receive trustworthy help from others feel an obligation to reciprocate, which strengthens work relationships. Good citizens in thriving work relationships will be motivated to find ways to perform their tasks more effectively and efficiently. Employees that help each other strengthen the bonds of trust with team members and supervisors, and we know trust has a strong effect on performance.

Unfortunately, good team relationships won’t matter much if employees aren’t given the latitude to improve their jobs. And good team relationships will struggle to develop when employees can’t help each other because they are constrained to “just worry about getting your job done.”

A study by Muammer Ozer recently published in the Journal of Applied Psychology (full citation below) showed how autonomy affected the relationship between organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and job performance. This study of 266 employees, coworkers, and supervisors showed that citizenship behavior improved work team relationships, and work team relationships had a significant effect on job performance.

Those relationships between citizenship behavior, teamwork, and performance are expected. What’s new here is the importance of autonomy in enabling this virtuous chain of behaviors. The study found that the links to performance were enhanced for those with the most job autonomy. Highly autonomous workers were better citizens, had better team relationships, and were better at translating those team relationships into improved performance.

Because autonomy matters so much to most workers, it matters to your business. Constrain your employees’ ability to help each other and work together to improve their jobs and you will likely also constrain the growth of your business. Help yourself by helping your employees help each other.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

Citation: Ozer, M. (2012). A Moderated Mediation Model of the Relationship Between Organizational Citizenship Behaviors and Job Performance. Journal of Applied Psychology

Bret L. Simmons, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Management in the College of Business at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), where he teaches courses in organizational behavior, leadership, and personal branding to both undergraduate and MBA students. Bret blogs about leadership, followership, and social media at his website Positive Organizational Behavior. You can also find Bret onTwitter,Facebook, and Linkedin.

Linus Pauling is the only person to have one two unshared Nobel Prizes, so I’d imagine he knows a bit about good ideas. His idea is simple to generate lots of ideas and let most of them fail. The few that don’t might just be great ideas.

Modern popular press literature is starting to support this idea. In his new book, Peter Sims discusses how companies and leaders that produce breakthrough ideas often do so by placing many “little bets” and building off of small discoveries. Indeed, if the apocryphal story of Edison remarking, “I discovered 10,000 ways not to make a light bulb” is accurate, one suspects that creative leaders already knew this. It appears one of the most potent ways leaders can develop creativity in followers is by giving them freedom to fail. Within organizations, not often known for their tolerance of failure, leaders can act as human shields, protecting them from the potential negative impacts of their failure.

But most leaders are afraid to open the door up to failure. An objection I often hear is “how much failure is enough?” I’m not sure that question is all that important. A more important question is, “what types of failure it allowable?” Surely failure that stems from poor performance or a poor person-task fit cannot be tolerated and must be addressed. But failure that resulted from experimentation is different. The “little bets” are designed to push the creativity and innovation further (Sims, 2011). I’m not sure that setting a failure quota establishes that. Instead, leaders can build a culture where failure is welcomed, so long as it stems from the right kind of activity (experimentation) and, obviously, isn’t some moral or ethical failure.

I see this idea over and over again in my study of creativity in organizations. It’s such an elegant solution to the creativity problem, even if it relies on a messy process to creativity.

Sims, P. (2011). Little bets: How breakthrough ideas emerge from small discoveries. New York: Free Press.

David Burkus is the editor of LeaderLab. He speaks, consults and serves on the faculty of management at Oral Roberts University’s College of Business.