Magnetic Leadership: Do You Live It?

If you were given the role of CEO of a company and put into a high-stress situation where you had 10 minutes to:

• allocate your limited resources (time, people, raw materials…) strategically
• deliver innovative, high-quality products
• get the products to your customers on time
• fix any product failures
• and ultimately meet all of the terms of the contract you promised to your customer

…would you exude magnetic leadership while doing so?

That’s the challenge that 25 high-ranking corporate leaders will be facing over the next two days under the premise that when the rubber meets the road your real leadership qualities come through.

The Context

I’m thrilled to be participating in an exciting new business simulation course on Magnetic Leadership that takes place today and tomorrow at Wrigley Field in Chicago and is being presented by Profitability Business Simulations.  I have the honor of playing the role of the customer and evaluating how well the leaders and their teams do at satisfying the contract to which we agree during each simulation.

The challenge:

Help 25 leaders test their leadership skills through difficult business challenges and identify certain behaviors and skills they must improve upon to successfully drive results.

These leaders will also work on giving and receiving constructive feedback, both of which are critical skills in leadership.

Four Focus Areas:

What I love about this particular simulation is the recognition of how important vision is to magnetic leadership, and the fact that values are also considered central to driving results.

The four areas the observers/evaluators will focus on are:

1. Vision- the ability to create it, inspire others with it and turn it to action

2. Values – demonstrating personal character

3. The leader’s ability to mobilize individual commitment by engaging others and sharing power

4. The leader’s prowess at engendering organizational capability by building teams and managing change

The Simulation

Each simulation will involve three key components:

1. Creating the vision and strategy for the business

Leaders and their teams decide how much risk they want to take on in deciding which contract to “go after” with their customer.  The greater the risk the greater the profitability if they are successful.  They must also allocate team resources strategically to specific roles (sales, product development…) and align their focus with the values of the customer.

2. The task

The team has 10 minutes to fulfill the contract for the customer in a product development simulation.  At specific intervals during the 10 minutes I (as the customer) will have “product failures” for them to fix and will also receive deliveries of new products as well.  They will be evaluated on their ability to meet the terms of the contract, the quality of the delivered products, their ability to resolve product failures and their business profitability.

3. The learning cycle

Immediately following the completion of the task each person on the team will have time to reflect on their performance and that of their team members.  This will be followed by a full-team discussion of personal behaviors that can be improved upon, with a focus on giving high quality, constructive feedback.

Key Question for All of You:

How would you do in this simulation?

What does your gut tell you others would say about you in such a situation in regard to your ability to inspire through vision, lead through values, mobilize individual commitment and manage change?

I’m looking forward to reporting back with the results of how these high-ranking leaders do, and what seem to be the overarching lessons learned.

Stay tuned!

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Thank you for reading and for being part of this community – it means so much to me.

You can find me on Twitter at @LisaPetrilli and on LinkedIn.To hire me for Visionary Leadership programs, Marketing Strategy work or for the Social Media Concierge program, email me at Lisa@CLevelStrategies.com.

Photo is Martin Luther King, Jr shaking President Lyndon Johnson’s hand after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act by U.S. Embassy New Delhi.