Picture two business owners. The first leads his people in a way that makes them smaller over time: more anxious, less sure of themselves, less able to stand on their own. The second uses his leadership to help them grow larger over time: bolder, more confident, more self-reliant.

Which of the two companies will do better against the competition? Which will be more productive? Which will respond to customer enquiries more competently, and which will cope better with unexpected shifts in the market? Which will be more innovative? Which will have the better working atmosphere? And in which will the owner be more satisfied with his firm, his team and himself?

”Ermutigende Führung”: Encouraging Leadership for a Culture of Growth

Courage and encouragement make the difference.

An encouraging culture as a competitive advantage

If you can give another person courage, you help them grow beyond the limits they have known so far. If you can encourage a whole company, you open up new horizons for it. And anyone who manages to build an encouraging corporate culture secures their firm a competitive advantage that is hard to attack and extremely hard to catch up with. These are the guiding ideas of our new book “Ermutigende Führung – Für eine Kultur des Wachstums” (Encouraging Leadership – For a Culture of Growth). An encouraging leadership culture is the way to bring business success and “quality of working life” together: for business success to grow, the people who run the business have to grow. This book shows how you can actively foster that and lead it into being.

From practice – for practice.

Starting point: a sales project

This book grew out of a successful project. Before the financial crisis of 2008/09, Dr. Achim Kassow, at the time the Commerzbank board member responsible for retail sales, recognised that the existing sales model, with its detailed targets and extremely tight controlling, had no future. Everyone was doing it by then - and if Commerzbank did what everyone else was doing, it would also end up performing like everyone else. No competitive advantage was to be had that way.

From pressure and control to encouraging leadership

A critical analysis of the situation as it stood gave rise to the idea of building retail sales on a different view of people and a different model of leadership: encouraging leadership. Staff were not to be driven to higher performance by hard targets, pressure and control, but through a kind of leadership that helped them recognise their own potential, take on challenges they had avoided until then and so build up more and more skill and self-confidence, step by step. “If we really do succeed in building an encouraging leadership culture and thereby becoming a steadily bolder sales organisation, we will create a competitive advantage that is hard to catch up with and extremely hard to imitate.”

Implementation despite the financial crisis

It worked. On the eve of the financial crisis the Encouraging Leadership programme was ready, including the training design and detailed roll-out planning. And although Commerzbank was badly buffeted by the crisis - and by the simultaneous takeover of Dresdner Bank and the restructuring that came with it - encouraging leadership was implemented rigorously in one important sales division, Wealth Management, under the responsibility of divisional board member Gustav Holtkemper.

From pressure and control to encouraging leadership

And although Commerzbank, badly shaken for a time after partial nationalisation, legacy problems that surfaced unexpectedly and heavy write-downs, was certainly not the bank to which wealthy private clients would spontaneously bring their assets, Holtkemper achieved considerable growth in his area of responsibility year after year - and he puts that down, as he told us in an interview, not least to encouraging leadership. The approach thus passed its test under the most difficult conditions and made an important contribution to stabilising the bank. Today Gustav Holtkemper is probably the German senior executive with the most extensive practical experience of encouraging leadership done well, and the interview with him is a chapter of our book well worth reading.

The authors: the core team of the Encouraging Leadership project.

Project manager Thomas Vetter

One of the five regional branch directors who made the concept of encouraging leadership a success under Holtkemper’s aegis was Thomas Vetter, head of the Encouraging Leadership project and co-author of this book. As head of the South-West sales region, he and his team set out to prove that encouraging leadership is not merely an attractive but “sadly, sadly” unrealistic idea, but a leadership model that works in practice even in decidedly difficult circumstances.

Regula Hagenhoff, Encouraging Training lecturer

When the stocktaking made encouraging leadership emerge as the focus of the project, we brought in Regula Hagenhoff as an expert in individual psychology and encouragement. She heads the Adler-Dreikurs-Institut (Sibbesse / Hildesheim), founded by Theo Schoenaker. As a long-standing Encouraging Training trainer, she has a great deal of experience in bringing encouragement home to parents, teachers and educators and helping them put it into practice. That made her the best possible expert for designing our training programme.

Dr. Meik Führing, head of the project office

Dr. Meik Führing, then a consultant and today a principal at Commerz Business Consulting, headed the project office - an unspectacular but important role in a project of this size - and was at the same time a persistent critical questioner who did much to keep an eye on system and rigour, to clear up inconsistencies and to ensure the material was presented clearly and comprehensibly.

Winfried Berner

I myself took part in the project as an external change consultant and an expert in corporate culture and culture change.

The book’s main themes.

Part I: Courage and encouragement – key questions in our lives

“Ermutigende Führung” is divided into four parts that build on one another. Part I, “The key role of (social) courage and encouragement”, explains why courage and encouragement are not just one interesting subject among many, but a key question of our existence, one that has a large say in both our private path through life and our professional success. Here you will find out what exactly encouragement means, what its psychological background is and how it works in practice.

Part II: Learning to lead encouragingly

In Part II, “Encouraging leadership”, we present encouraging leadership as a particularly important field of application for encouragement. You will learn why encouraging leadership has a considerable influence not only on the climate within a team, but on business results as well. This part helps you understand encouraging leadership conceptually and also learn it and put it into practice - not just for the easy cases, but for the difficult ones too. Here we also present a whole series of exercises through which you can learn to apply encouraging leadership in your own work.

Part III: From individual leadership to an encouraging leadership culture

Part III, “Building an encouraging leadership culture”, takes the step from individual behaviour to the organisation. It shows how to build an encouraging corporate culture and why it is worth doing: not only because it promises a better quality of working life, but because it translates directly into higher performance and better results. In times of globalisation and digitalisation especially, the future belongs neither to the fearful companies nor to those whipped towards success with incentives and tight controlling, but to the courageous ones.

Part IV: Encouraging leadership in practice

Finally, in Part IV, “Encouraging leadership in practice”, we introduce three companies and organisations through interviews. Some have made encouraging leadership a systematic core element of their corporate culture; others use it more intuitively, because it matches the personality, the view of people and the sense of identity of the owner or the long-serving chairman. Alongside Gustav Holtkemper of Commerzbank, mentioned above, these are Volker Kronseder, for many years chairman of the board of KRONES AG, a “hidden champion” in the MDAX, and, from the non-profit sector, Prof. Dr. Hubert Weiger, chairman of BUND e.V. and of BUND Naturschutz in Bayern e.V., both of whom lead in a markedly encouraging way by their whole manner.

Table of contents.

Contents

Introduction: why encouraging leadership?

Part I: The key role of (social) courage and encouragement

• Courage and discouragement shape our lives
• What encouragement is and how it works
• Encouragement in practice

Part II: Encouraging leadership

• The benefits of encouraging leadership
• Learning to lead encouragingly
• Encouraging leadership beyond the hierarchy
• Dealing with conflict courageously

Part III: Building an encouraging leadership culture

• The benefits of a courageous leadership culture
• How to change a culture

Part IV: Encouraging leadership in practice

• Gustav Holtkemper, Commerzbank AG: “Our people should dare to take new paths”
• Volker Kronseder, KRONES AG: “It gives me pleasure when our people succeed”
• Prof. Dr. Hubert Weiger, BUND e.V.: “The celebrations have created a new sense of community”

Bibliography

Index

Sample extract

You can download the full table of contents and a sample extract from the publisher’s website.

”Deserves pole position” – extracts from reviews.

Press reviews

“The worst that can be said about the book is that the title does not ‘catch fire at first glance’ and does not inevitably stand out from the mass of average leadership guides. The book would certainly have deserved pole position. (…) Management Journal verdict: the rules of excellent leadership have rarely been described so simply, so soundly and so close to practice. Recommended!” ManagementJournal

”… aims to help others and yourself develop more courage and more self-confidence, to take on challenges with assurance and so realise more and more of your own potential. That includes prompting a member of staff who is intimidated by the difficulty of a task to take the next step boldly.” personalmagazin 01 / 16

”…The book is therefore very readable - thanks in part to the pleasant, clear writing style and despite being very text-heavy - and quite often offers starting points that reach far beyond working life.” humanresourcesmanager

“getAbstract recommends the book to all managers, and also to parents and teachers who want to get as much as possible right from the start.” getAbstract

And this is what readers say.

Extracts from Amazon reader reviews

”… what they are after is a basic attitude, the basic attitude of encouragement. Using encouragement to prompt staff to take heart even when things are difficult and to get over the hurdle in front of them – whether at the first, the second or the third attempt. Encouragement by the manager as a contribution to growth, step by step, so that people make more of what they are capable of. (…) My verdict – as always with books that Winfried Berner has a hand in: read it, without fail!” Stefan Teuber

“What stands out is the matter-of-fact description of questions, problems and routes to a solution, without any judgement; instead the authors reflect on observations, point out fields for action and use exercises to invite the reader to join in. This creates a willingness to reflect on oneself and tempts the reader into trying out an encouraging attitude (…)” Ute Straub

”… presented concretely and very vividly for practical use (…) It conveys deep impressions rather than merely skimming the surface. (…) I find the personal accounts given in the book very impressive, as well as the fact that what is written has genuinely been implemented in a DAX-listed group and lived in practice well beyond the life of the project.” Robert Algandon

”… anyone interested in the subject should reach for it without hesitation! (…) A book that stands between grey theory and over-colourful practice: not an academic treatise, not a collection of best-practice cases. To my mind, exactly the right mixture of both. Easy to grasp, with worked examples that help make encouraging leadership easier to put into practice.” Marc Thomas Bauer

Where can you get the book?.

Bookshops

The quickest way is to order it from Amazon or from the publisher’s online shop. (Ordering directly from the publisher earns both this mid-sized publishing house and us as the authors a considerably higher return.) But of course you can get it just as easily from a bookshop or another online retailer.