Business Results vs. Leadership

Recently an executive told me he didn’t think leadership was valued and the only thing that matters is delivering results. He explained most CEOs only want business results and don’t care if their leadership effectiveness is poor. If you don’t produce results, it doesn’t matter if you can or cannot lead others successfully. Does this resonate with you? If business results are the ‘scorecard’ for executives, does leadership effectiveness help leaders deliver better business results? Yes! We are paid as executives to create business results, and leadership effectiveness is a powerful tool or enabler that creates results.

Leadership Matters

World leaders leading others is hard to do well. But is good leadership, good enough? The saying that if better is possible, good is not acceptable applies to leadership as well. Because our organizations expect better results every year, just creating good results is not good enough. Therefore, good leadership is not good enough. Your team, company, family, community, church, etc. need you to be the best leader you can become. Outstanding or extraordinary leadership should be our goal. We need more effective leaders in all aspects of our world. With nearly 7 billion people alive, we need better solutions to the challenges of the world. The Zenger Folkman company has researched the impact of poor, good, and great leadership. Through their ongoing research, they have proven that “extraordinary” leadership creates dramatically better business results than poor leadership. Their research has shown that employee engagement, customer service, sales, and profits are better when we have great leadership.

How Great Leaders Are Made

Leaders in the past have developed themselves through an ‘organic’ process of connecting the dots and learning from both the good and bad leaders around them. Great leaders often develop themselves through “learning agility”; observing what works and what doesn’t and applying those observations to their situations. They seemingly profited from what was happening around them. 7 Keys to Creating Outstanding Leaders Who Drive Results A new process of developing leaders is emerging. The idea that a leader can intellectually learn their way to be more effective is not valid. Mike Myatt wrote an article in Forbes called the #1 Reason Leadership Development Fails, “training is indeed the #1 reason leadership development fails. While training is often accepted as productive, it rarely is.” Leadership education and training, even though important for new leaders, is not effective in creating new leadership behaviors that outstanding leaders use to be effective. To truly develop your skills to an extraordinary level requires a better process. A process that is based on deep practice is more effective than the organic, learn-from-experience process that the previous generation used to become better leaders. The organic process is slow; it often takes many years, sometimes 10-15 years before leadership emerges and is noticed by others.

‘Rapid’ Leadership Development

Your business needs better results now and will not wait for leaders to develop over a long period. We need more and better leaders today, not in 10 years. The question is how do we more quickly transform leaders into outstanding leaders? “Rapid” refers to a new way of using a development process in an intentional way to create new habits, Rapid Leader Development (RLD) enables the learner to identify the one thing they need to develop. (RLD) utilizes deep practice to ingrain the mindsets and behaviors into habits of thought & behavior and enables the good leader to become great in the eyes of their followers. RLD is transformational: It may take as little as 6 months or up to 5 years, depending on where the leader is starting and how hard they work on their development.

The 7 Keys to Rapid Leadership Development

1. Know where you are starting (through the eyes of your followers).
2. Envision what it will look like when you get ‘there’.
3. Determine the ‘one thing’ that will lift your effectiveness.
4. Create an engaging & inspiring development plan.
5. Practice, reflect, learn, practice, reflect, learn, over and over.
6. Seek help; ask for feedback and ideas.
7. Reassess to measure how far you came through your development.

#1 - Know Where You Are Starting.

How do others see you? Do your direct reports see you as a great leader? How about your boss? What do your peers think of you? Do you know, or do you just think you know? Most people don’t know how they are perceived. Even good leaders are often surprised that they do not share the same perceptions as their followers. If you think you are leading but you find out no one is following you, are you really leading? If you only rely on your self-assessment, you will probably miss some key things about yourself. Because you are leading others, knowing their perceptions is important. Don’t think you know everything about yourself. You may be disappointed if you don’t start by seeking reliable feedback. A common mistake that I witness is leaders do not engage and enroll the people they are going to ask for feedback. Your feedback providers need to know why you are doing a 360 and whether it will be completely confidential. Letting those you lead know you want their feedback is a leadership act and is sometimes harder than you think. Additionally, being able to compare the feedback to normative data is important. You need to be able to compare your scores to other leaders. Working with a leading assessment company and knowing the data will be accurate and precise is critical. Not all 360-degree assessments are equally predictive and accurate. Use a “best-in-class” 360-degree assessment that measures strengths & potential fatal flaws and correlates those results to significant business outcomes like employee engagement, retention, and bottom-line profitability. "I highly recommend using Zenger Folkman's Extraordinary Leader 360-degree assessment."

#2 - Envision what it will look like when you get ‘there’

Stephen R. Covey in the 7 Habits of Highly Successful People wrote this about the second “habit”: “to begin each day, task, or project with a clear vision of your desired direction and destination, and then continue by flexing your proactive muscles to make things happen.” When a leader begins a journey, they need to know where they are going. Knowing what outstanding leadership will look like is important so that when the journey is over, the finish line will be recognizable. If you don’t know where you are going to end up, how can you know you arrived? You need to visualize yourself as an extraordinary leader before your new habits of effective leading emerge. Dewitt Jones in his TED Talk Celebrate What’s Right with the World; said “Believe it and you’ll see it”. Belief is what separates those who become outstanding leaders and those who do not. Without creating a story about our leadership effectiveness, it is hard to “see” what it will look like. Changing habits is challenging. To be able to see ourselves act in new ways is important and helps us reinforce the small increments of progress that occur in the process.

#3 - Determine The ‘One Thing’ . . .

Nothing is more important in the busy lives of people who declare they are going to become extraordinary leaders than focusing on the highest leveraged opportunity. The temptation is to work on multiple things or the least important. Research shows trying to fix a flaw may not be helpful unless it is a big flaw. Sometimes there is a fatal flaw that needs to be removed but most of the time a leader needs to let go of trying to be perfect. So many of us are perfectionists and it is hard to let go of trying to “fix” weaknesses. Outstanding leaders know their leadership strengths and can grow their effectiveness because they are working on making their strengths, stronger. They know that if they can master 3 - 5 things they will be more effective than leaders who try to perfect their skills in all areas. Not identifying the ‘one thing’ that a leader should develop often means they will try to work on multiple things at once and this usually results in failure. RLD is predicated on knowing what the one thing is that will elevate leadership effectiveness more than anything else. The ‘one thing’ changes others’ perceptions and creates improvement faster.

#4 - Create An Engaging and Inspiring Development Plan.

Would people think you were crazy if you tried to do something you had never done before (climb Mt. Everest, walk the Camino De Santiago, sail around the world, double sales & increase profits at the same time, etc.) without a plan? An engaging development plan is critical to becoming an outstanding leader. Part of a great plan is to include tactics for overcoming obstacles. Obstacles always arise in the wake of doing something new, especially if it includes changing behavior. A good plan also needs measurements and something that can be tracked. Not measuring progress is one of the biggest downfalls in development plans. It is also critical to measure effort. At times, our efforts will wax and wane. Without a way to measure effort, we can let ourselves off the hook and not get back to implementing our plan. A great plan will identify ways for the leader to cross-train their skills and do things that might not be directly linked to the habit they are trying to create. If developing emerging strengths, a leader needs to improve those skills in a different way than if they were developing weaknesses. Strength-based development is vastly different than overcoming weaknesses. All plans must provide a pathway to ‘run on’ for the entire development process. They must provide the leader with inspiration and motivation. Development is hard work, and you need to be passionate about what you are evolving into. You need to incorporate other people into your plans. Ideally, you continually seek their ideas and feedback. The other critical aspect of a great development plan is that it needs to integrate our development practice into our work. The plan to create outstanding leadership is best done while you are doing your work, not on top of the work you do but as we do our work. You lead all the time, so practicing new leadership skills should be done as you do your work.

#5 - Practice, Reflect, Learn, Over & Over

When practicing your leadership ability, you need to be intentional. You cannot expect to find ways to practice our leadership haphazardly. You must know in advance, what you are doing next to practice your skills. What will you do next week? What do outstanding leaders practice? They practice various skills to develop the one thing that will make them an outstanding leader. For instance, if they want to become a great leader, they need to learn how to be a great listener and ask great questions. Therefore, they look for times when they can practice different ways to ask curious questions and actively listen. They will practice in their meetings and afterward will reflect on how well it went. They will ask themselves what worked and what didn’t and what they learned as a result. Practicing without reflection is not effective. Life gives us so many opportunities to learn but you must be paying attention and the best way to pay attention is to journal. When you ask yourself questions and journal the answer, you see things you don’t normally see, and you learn things you don’t normally learn. “Deep practice” means being able to make every practice a learning event. Leaders who can learn from their experiences will harness the power of deep practice and will become outstanding leaders.

#6 - Seek Help; Ask for Feedback & Ideas

Help comes in many forms. One of the best forms of help is feedback. For those leaders who want to speed up their development, they will need to learn to ask for feedback from multiple people. Ask for feedback from multiple sources. Your boss views you differently than others. You need to know what their perception of you is. Being aligned with them is important. When you think about who you lead directly - it's your direct reports. They have critical observations about your leadership effectiveness. Asking for feedback demonstrates vulnerability and role models the importance of seeking feedback. Peers don't see the same things as direct reports and tend to rate harder than others. Seeing your leadership effectiveness through their eyes will stretch you and improve your collaboration.

#7 - Reassess And Determine Progress

Why would anyone start a process and not determine how much progress they made? The only real answer is that they didn’t do the work, or they already knew they didn’t make any progress. At the beginning of the process, a leader determines when they are going to reassess to see how much progress has been made. Always use the same assessment that the development process started with. It can be 12–18 months later. Sometimes less time can create more urgency. The key to determining enough time is to ensure the right amount of time to do deep practice has been done. Reassessing is the easiest part of the process. If a leader has done the work and invested the time into deep practice they will be pleased with the results. Reassessments tell the truth and leaders who invest in the process are rarely disappointed. Results I have had tremendous success and I have talked to others who didn't make any progress. I have seen firsthand that it is possible to become truly extraordinary, but it does not happen for everyone. Most people who fail, do so because they didn’t put the work in and they didn’t have someone who could keep them accountable. One way to ensure you stay accountable at the highest level in your development process is to hire a coach who has done this before. Would you like to be an extraordinary leader? Think about how it would affect your ability to do your job... Think about how it would change your relationships at work and how your influence would grow... Think about how valuable you would become to your organization... Think about the satisfaction you would have because of being perceived by your team as the best person they have worked for in their career... Your ability to be more fulfilled and to drive better business results hinges on your ability to become a better leader.

Success Story

When a determined, persistent, and motivated person works with a process, amazing things can happen. When a determined, persistent, and highly motivated person consistently follows a process, amazing things can happen. One person stands out because of their simple but powerful application of the process. The student seemed interested but no more interested than anyone else in the class. In this case, the person’s feedback from their 360-degree assessment identified that they had some weaknesses, five emerging strengths, and a profound strength. This person was a 10-year veteran at their company. to the leader had some narrative comments that suggested others see him as "too nice" and that they should "develop others" more. Fast forward eighteen months, the leader was reassessed with mostly the same direct reports and a new manager. The results as measured by the 360-degree assessment were incredible. The person was now rated as an extraordinary leader; with 10 profound strengths and 5 emerging strengths! They improved in all competencies. Truly amazing!

How can this happen?

In his own words, the leader reflected that they did a few things consistently:

1. Carefully chose the one thing to work on and then consistently worked on it. Like the consistent drip of water, the focus was on doing something every week to ‘practice’ his leadership.
2. He reflected consistently on what was happening and what he was learning.
3. He also talked to others about what he was working on and enrolled them in giving helpful suggestions and occasionally, feedback.

He told me that he didn’t really know what he did to create the incredible results. He said; “I just did what you told us to do.” Follow the process, it works!