Tony Swainston - The 7 Cs of Leadership Success: Unlock Your Inner Potential And Become a Great Leader

What people have said about The 7 Cs of Leadership Success:

Tony provides a refreshing new view of leadership in a book that you can refer back to again and again. A wonderful resource for anyone who is already leading and for all those who aspire to be great leaders.

Susan Douglas, Senior Adviser,
British Council

This book is a real gem and a great resource for those who are serious about continuing development of their leadership skills.

Elspeth Jones, Emerita Professor of the
Internationalisation of Higher Education

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2012 Tony Swainston. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 8/6/12

ISBN: 978-1-4772-2210-2 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4772-2209-6 (e)

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Contents

The 7 Cs of
Leadership Success

The 7 Cs are the 7 Characteristics of
Highly Successful Leaders

Use the 7 Cs to
Unlock Your Inner Potential
And Become a Great Leader

Tony Swainston

Achieve Peak Personal Performance
through
Tested Success Strategies

This book is dedicated to Amy Rogers

Excellence is not a skill. It is an attitude. Ralph Marston.

My work involves leadership. To be more precise, I spend my life working with people to help them to develop as the kind of highly effective and successful leaders that they would like to be. I have had the fortune to be able to carry out this work with leaders in the UK and around the world. Whether I am with people in Europe, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kuwait or Turkey, the desire in people to find the right way for them to lead is the same.

Some people may believe that they have reached the summit of leadership and are able to look down from this mighty position. They have acquired a fixed mindset view on what leadership is all about. In fact this has become a strong belief and beliefs can be hard things for any of us to shift.

The plain truth is, from my own personal experience, that the very best leaders I have ever met (and I have met many who I consider to be exceptional) are those that are always ready to listen and learn more. They understand that leadership is highly complex. It often involves great contradictions such as:

A belief in myself plus a reasonable doubt

A passion for the work plus a desire to have a perspective on the world beyond work

A love of people plus a pleasure in being alone

Seeing work as an art plus a science

Appreciating that success involves change plus stability

Realising that success requires learning plus unlearning

Understanding that values are of vital importance plus the messages that people pick up are often from behaviours

This is the complex dynamic that makes up the essential yin and yang of leadership.

Figure 1: The essential yin and yang of leadership success

The complexity of leadership can seem overwhelming. At the same time when people perform as great leaders it appears to be almost effortless. This is what Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi refers to as flow. I describe flow as that stage when we enter a state where the subconscious mind steers our actions in a highly constructive and effortless way. And this is what the 7 Cs offers you in terms of leadership; the opportunity to absorb the seven characteristics (or the 7 Cs) of leadership in a structured and simple way in order that you can function on a consistent basis at a highly effective level.

You wiil be able to work on the multifaceted dimensions of leadership at your own pace. The 7 Cs contains 700 statements about great leadership. These can simply be read as a valuable way of reflecting on effective leadership. Used as affirmations, in the way described here, they can begin to be embedded in the way that you operate as a leader. Then your subconscious will be doing most of the work for you. You will enter flow. Figure 2 below shows how each of the 7 Cs has 10 dimensions and each dimension has 10 affirmations.

Figure 2: The relationship between the Characteristics (C),
Dimensions (D), and Affirmations (A) of the 7 Cs

The 7 Cs will help you to move from being efficient to being effective. It will support you being a great leader as well as a great manager. Management with its associated efficiency, systems and procedures is important but without leadership and its associated effectiveness, vision and direction it might well be that all the effort we expend could bring about only limited impact.

The 7 Cs is for those leaders who want to grow and make a real difference. It describes the qualities of high achieving people who are then high achieving leaders.

Leadership is about constantly trying to do your best and not giving up. I am reminded of the poem below that describes the kind of persistence and determination that leadership requires.

When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,

When the road youre trudging seems all uphill, When the funds are low and the debts are high, And you want to smile, but you have to sigh, When care is pressing you down a bit, Rest, if you must, but dont you quit.

Life is queer with its twists and turns,

As every one of us sometimes learns,

And many a failure turns about,

When he might have won had he stuck it out;

Dont give up though the pace seems slow,

You may succeed with another blow.

Often the goal is nearer than,

It seems to a faint and faltering man,

Often the struggler has given up,

When he might have captured the victors cup,

And he learned too late when the night slipped down,

How close he was to the golden crown.

Success is failure turned inside out,

The silver tint of the clouds of doubt,

And you never can tell how close you are,

It may be near when it seems so far,

So stick to the fight when youre hardest hit,

Its when things seem worst that you must not quit.

Anonymous

You can use the ideas, concepts and methods in the 7 Cs on a daily basis to enhance your own leadership. The 7 Cs turns leadership theory into a practical and user friendly guide.

Before you begin the 7 Cs here is a little problem to test you. Below you have a 3 x 3 matrix of dots. The challenge you have is to draw through each of the dots using just four straight lines. And once you begin drawing your lines you cannot take your pen or pencil off the paper!

Figure 3: The dot matrix

As you work through the 7 Cs I would ask you to adopt a similar strategy to that needed to solve this problem.

You can check on the answer to this in Appendix B.