This is an introduction to PM Power’s upcoming book, Full Stack Leadership.
What is Leadership?
Leadership is influencing and guiding people to achieve a shared vision or goal. Leadership can be exercised by an individual or a group of individuals acting together. It is not influenced by the person’s title or position in a hierarchy. Even the lowest ranking member in a hierarchy can exercise effective leadership. You can see that in the army, platoon sergeants sometimes are able to exert leadership influence on and coach and mentor younger lieutenants that are technically leading the platoons.
An effective leader has emotional intelligence, has integrity, is self-confident, has a vision for the future, is a good communicator, has empathy, is a good manager, is willing to take risks when required, thinks differently, creatively and innovatively, listens to people and is willing to change when required, is resilient and persistent, and is proactive and reactive in times of crisis.
Leaders emerge in all groups and societies, unless suppressed by conflicting interests. In these cases, leadership is not a self-declared attribute. Leadership is evident and validated when there is a followership. Effective and persuasive communication is a key skill here.
Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela are examples of effective leaders that emerged in highly oppressive and discriminatory environments and managed to lead large groups of people to independence and self-confidence.
Jamshedji Tata, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are examples of leaders who started and led organizations to great success.
Strong leadership is critical to a business’s success. Good leaders can drive innovations and changes required for the business to stay competitive in the market.
What is Full Stack Leadership?
Full stack leaders are generalists who are versatile, adaptable and agile enough to steer their charges in fast-changing business or other environments. A full stack leader has skills and proficiency to navigate all levels and aspects of the object of leadership. They can work at conceptual, strategic and tactical levels of leadership with broad understanding of the whole canvas, while being able to focus and deep-dive into critical aspects of the job on hand. They can navigate the seas of technology and business and the complexities of the environment of different types of stakeholders.
The recent CrowdStrike issue of July 19, 2024 brought to focus the need for high levels of quality full stack leadership in organizations. This incident highlights the potential impact that software issues can have, even from reputable cybersecurity companies. It goes without saying this incident can be faulted to poor leadership. Some of the key values of leadership were not adopted. If you look at the business angle of leadership, while innovation was the reason CrowdStrike existed, clearly there were problems with customer focus (deploying code without adequate testing and QA), social responsibility (the common man was affected when banks, airports and such were affected) and organization value/worth (the brand value of the company was clearly affected). All these aspects were affected. If you look at the leadership of execution, alignment to the vision of the organization was affected (providing a secure system environment), the leadership was not transformational (stakeholders’ power and influence were not fully identified and taken care of), there was no people focus (people were not coached well) and no lean thinking at all Created bid wastes of commission). Leaders probably stressed on hurriedness rather than on Agility. Such incidents stress the importance of having full stack leaders at the helm of organizations dealing with all the aspects of leadership.
The objective of this book is to look at thee various aspects of leadership to be internalized by people aspiring to be full stack leaders.
What are the dimensions of full stack leadership?
PM Power has worked for many years in the area of leadership. PM Power coaches and consultants trained, coached and helped people to become leaders and leaders to become more effective. Over the years, we have found that full stack leadership is expressed through three aspects or dimensions, each equally important – Leading Business, Leading Execution (Process and People) and Leading Self. The book will expand on these three aspects of leadership. A successful business leader has to attain effectiveness in all these three dimensions of leadership. They have to be what we call a ‘full stack leader’.
This book will go into details of these three aspects or dimensions of leadership.
Leading business means creating an environment where the organization is able to understand, adapt and respond to the changing marketplace and market needs, customer asks, and competitor moves. It means continuous value delivery to stakeholders. Business excellence is driven by organisational agility, innovation, and high levels of quality, performance, and competitiveness. It is also driven by the people who lead the business. Ideating and creating business goals, deciding on the direction of the business, innovating, creating the capabilities, skills, and diversity required to run the business, establishing trust pipes with the stakeholders, providing continuous value to stakeholders are all done by leaders.
Leading execution means taking ideas put forward by the business and creating value with it– value for all stakeholders including customers, associates and shareholders. Execution here means much more than development and implementation. Bringing ideas to life, implementing them, taking them to market, testing them, improving them, letting them grow, and at the end of the day developing them from an idea to a true innovation by means of bringing value to the market and stakeholders – that is execution. Leading execution also includes leading the people in the execution. Leading the people in the execution means achieving required goals by working with others as a team using knowledge, skills, competence and understanding of how to engage, motivate and manage people. For this one must set the vision,
strategy and objectives and enabling people towards achieving those. This does not apply to only one’s immediate team. It means managing up – managing your managers; managing sideways – managing peers and other stakeholders; and managing down – managing one’s team.
Leading self refers to the ability of an individual to effectively manage and direct their own actions, behaviors, and emotions. It encompasses self-awareness, self-regulation, self-motivation, and a strong sense of personal accountability. Leading oneself involves setting goals, making decisions, and taking responsibility for one’s actions and their consequences. It is a fundamental aspect of leadership development, as effective leaders must first be able to lead themselves before they can effectively lead others. Leading self means understanding and preparing for the exercise at hand – in short, leading the self by imbuing oneself with the required emotional intelligence to lead the effort and transmitting these abilities to leaders down the line. And this needs understanding and employing mindful leadership or the ability to be present and having a non-judgmental and unbiased mind. This is what helps with developing empathy.
Values, principles and practices of the dimensions of leadership
For each dimension of leadership, the book identifies a set of values (beliefs and ideas) which should be internalized by leaders when they exercise their leadership. They are a set of beliefs that guide the decision-making and the actions of leaders. A leader adopts some values based on the business environment they find themselves in, to decide on how to operate and how to become a success. These values a leader adopts influences everything they do from stakeholder interactions to financial decisions. PM Power feels that these values are universal and fits the situations of leadership that we have come across, but when conditions or situations where the leadership operates changes drastically there may be a need to change the values. As an example, innovation or being innovative is a value that we think good leaders should have. But there could be leaders in particular situations where they feel that should not be innovative.
The book also identifies a set of principles that drive these values. Principles of leadership are objective truths that determine the outcomes of leadership behaviour. For example, Breaking tradition and finding trailblazing ideas is a leadership principle that is out there in the universe. If you believe in the value of innovation, you will have to adopt this principle. And for each principle, the book identifies a set of practices, or regular behaviors and actions, that needs to be followed by the leader to enable that principle fully. These practices may, too, change depending on the circumstance and the situation. The book identifies a set of practices which we feel are valid over most of the situations we normally come across. For example a practice that is needed to be implemented to enable the principle of Breaking tradition and finding trailblazing ideas is employ a business model that encourages innovation.
Thus, the book goes into the details of a total of around 48 principles and more than 200 practices.
There is a separate section on how some of the principles of leadership are affected by the new generative AI phenomenon.
Inputs for the book
The inputs for the book come from the experience of PM Power partners coaching and consulting with and training leaders of various organizations. The inputs also come form the author’s and other PM Power partners’ experience in leading organizations.
This book is based on PM Power’s Leadership framework. But we have made additions to the number of principles and practices to ensure that the book is comprehensive and addresses all levels of leadership, from the board, CEO, and President level of strategic leadership to the VP, and General Manager level of tactical leadership.
We have also made some changes in the way the dimensions of leadership are presented.
The leadership framework of PM Power looks at three dimensions of leadership as Leading Self, Leading People and Leading Business. This book presents the principles of leadership against the background of a case study. The principles are brought out and highlighted in the context of situations in the case study. To ensure the flow and continuity of the case study it was required to look at the dimensions of leadership from a different angle. In the context of the case study Leading People does not happen in isolation. It happens while one leads the business and the execution of it. We have therefore looked at leadership principles in terms of Leading Business, Leading Execution and Leading Self. Leading people is a significant part of both Leading Business and Leading Execution, with process aspects making up the rest. In Leading Business and Leading Execution, we talk of the principles of both process and the people elements.
The book is interesting reading
The book is made interesting reading by having many pictures and many quotations from leaders.
Objective of the book
The objective of the book is to inform leaders and aspiring full stack leaders, for whom the book is intended, that leadership is not just about leading people. It actually involves leading the business and leading the execution of ideas through people. And finally, to drive home the point that these two aspects of leadership – leading business and leading execution (process and people) – will come to nothing unless a leader is able to lead self. Mastering leading self helps the leader jump the chasm to the next level of leadership. The book is packed with practical insights, proven principles, and actionable practices to help you become a strategic thinker who anticipates market shifts and drives innovation; lead and motivate your team to achieve exceptional results develop your emotional intelligence and self-awareness for effective decision-making; and navigate complex situations and build resilience in the face of challenges.
Leadership can take on many forms. These different forms of leadership may require different mindsets and different thinking and may operate under different values and principles. Business leadership, technology leadership, military leadership, non-profit leadership, thought leadership, political leadership, and educational leadership are some of the many forms that leadership may need to take. This book focuses on business leadership along with some aspects of technology leadership.
I have to mention here that this book focuses on the ‘soft’ aspects of leadership like emotional intelligence, communication, empathy, motivation and so on, rather than on the ‘hard’ aspects of leadership like financial skills, planning, technical expertise and so on.
Author
The book is being written by Paramu Kurumathur on behalf of PM Power. Before he started working with PM Power, he has set up and developed the India Development Centre for one of the largest international IT organizations; he has started a startup and led it successfully; he has led the development and implementation the IT strategy of a large NGO across 40 countries.
Expect the book to hit the stands by early 2025.
The book is expected to be available for readers by early 2025.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to KP and JV for help in reconciling the matter presented in the book with the PM Power Leadership Framework. Thanks to JV for editing this and suggesting changes.
