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Today, organizational leaders operate in an environment of infinite complexity. Balancing expectations and priorities across constituencies and over time requires personal and professional attributes that are difficult to obtain and, most especially, sustain. Those must translate into the successful execution of management and leadership responsibilities. Our perception of many of the most important of those follows:
Organizational leaders' primary responsibility is to define, create and distribute value for constituents. They have to explicitly and precisely understand the things that constituents value and balance and prioritize those interests without extinguishing any in the process. End customers, employees, distributors, Boards of Directors and the communities in which they operate all have legitimate stakes in their success and claims upon their resources. They have to fulfill those expectations with prudence. It's tough, but it's what they get paid to do.
How do they do that?
First, effective managerial leaders run their organizations by crafting plans and then achieving planned results. That process starts with strategy, which defines longer-term direction, mission, the basis for competing (value proposition) and outcomes. They then create an operating plan that defines expectations for the coming year, outlines the actions, accountabilities and resources for achieving those expectations, establishes the one year increment of their strategy, and addresses high impact problems and opportunities that must be addressed immediately. All of this happens against a backdrop of change that grows in magnitude and accelerates with ever-increasing speed. Results have to be reviewed regularly to identify gaps in critical performance areas. Actions have to be developed and implemented to get back on track, in real time.
We often hear from managers, including many senior managers, "If I do all those things, when do I have time to do my job?" Our response: "That is your job!" Effective management is a system - a series of integrated processes. That's leadership's responsibility. That has to lead to the achievement of planned results, which is its accountability.
Beginning in the '80's, we began to abandon the notion that management was a useful discipline. In embracing the objective of creating forward thinking, evolved companies, we proceeded from autocracy directly to abdication without so much as stopping for a cup of coffee along the way.
For organizations to regularly and predictably achieve planned results, management must be a core skill. It has to be supported, however, with leadership behavior that will focus, engage and energize the organization.
Successful leaders make things happen. They listen; they preach; they engage. They don't lock themselves in their offices content with the delusion that an open-door policy means leaving the door open waiting for the troops to come in. They initiate contact. They talk to people at all levels, using those opportunities to build understanding and increase the wattage of organizational electricity. They don't create opportunities for people to end-run formal lines of authority, but they speak and (most especially) listen to people at all organizational levels.
Effective leaders abhor politics and bureaucracy. They embrace merit as a way of doing business. They support the resolution of issues based on the what rather than the who.
Successful leaders work with their people to convey what's expected of them, how their contribution affects the entire organization and how their performance will be measured. Context is important. Great leaders understand that. They recognize that success requires committed people, not compliant people. They know that committed people make aggressive contributions fueled by the energy that comes with context. They know that compliant people go through the motions. Superior leaders don't confuse loyalty with fealty.
Great leaders understand that while they put the plans, people and processes together to achieve results, they don't take most of the action. Consequently, they accept the fact that when things are going well, it's because of the people doing the work. When things aren't going well, it's because of managerial leadership. That's dogma; it's indisputable.
A productive environment places an emphasis on people achieving their own dreams as well as the organization's objectives. Great leaders understand the importance of alignment - that for people to make the kind of contribution needed today, their values, skills and contribution must be in sync with their organization's expectations of them.
Superior leaders are intolerant of poor performance. Fair does not equal indulgent. Time will not correct performance problems at any organizational level. Real leaders certainly work with people to improve, but they don't evade their responsibility to be aggressive performance managers. Indulging or, in some cases, rewarding anemic performance undermines the ability to achieve results. It's a sanction and a signal. Also, high fliers will not work in that kind of environment.
Successful leaders disproportionately reward exceptional performance. They broaden the spectrum of opportunities for people with the capacity to step up to the plate. They understand that people who demonstrate high potential and achieve superior performance are assets to be cultivated. These leaders relish the chance to surround themselves with people who are more capable than they are.
Productive leadership requires fact-based decision-making. Noel Tichy, former head of GE's management development center, calls it "edge." This is the courage to confront reality and act on it. It's the capacity to "face hard facts and make tough calls" without being deterred by risk or pain. These leaders recognize that when decision inputs are not fact based entire organizations can spin out of control. An adjunct to this is the proposition that complete candor (both with others and with one's self) is critical. That requires the leader to possess an ability for reflection and to create an environment in which the challenge of ideas (including his or her own) is not only accepted, but expected and encouraged.
In an effort to create a collaborative, people-oriented work environment, managers often create an environment of terminal niceness. Effective leadership is tough-minded leadership. Tough-minded leadership, however, isn't arbitrary, hard-headed or cold-hearted.
Think about the personal attributes that must be cultivated to be an effective leader and the organizational processes that are prerequisites for successful management. Helping organizations, their leaders and managers develop and sustain those skills, attributes and processes is what we do.
copyright 2001 Rand Golletz & Associates. All rights reserved.
