Vision, insight, skill, and stamina are the hallmarks of superior leaders, but those qualities alone do not make for great leadership. Absent a high-quality leadership team, such attributes often are squandered. Failure to build, align, and inspire a team will prevent a good leader from ever becoming a great one.
Assessment criteria help develop good leaders into great ones.
BY MICHAEL SHAPIRO, P.E., AND ELLEN E. COLEMIRE
To be a great leader, you must build a great leadership team.
Vision, insight, skill, and stamina are the hallmarks of superior leaders, but those qualities alone do not make for great leadership. Absent a high-quality leadership team, such attributes often are squandered. Failure to build, align, and inspire a team will prevent a good leader from ever becoming a great one.
There is a reliable method for shaping a high-quality leadership team, and it starts with assessment. We recommend a 360 assessment for your leadership team. So assess your leadership team (on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being best). If your group scores 85 or better, congratulations! You probably have a solid leadership team. But if your team scores below 85, your team needs self-improvement.
Leadership within the team
Team leadership behavior - Every organization expects leadership behavior from senior management. After all, that's what they are being paid for. But leadership behaviors can take many forms, at many levels. You must ensure that your leadership team is ready to deliver as needed.
List the leadership behaviors you consider mandatory, and define them. For example, state unequivocally that We prize integrity above all else. Speak the truth. Don't hide problems. Meet deadlines.
Don't shift blame. And be specific.
Most companies can list attributes they associate with good leadership, but they're often vague about the particulars.
Make it clear that those behaviors are expected. Articulate the consequences for failing to comply. For example, the first missed deadline might be cause for face-to-face feedback - from the company president.
Give constructive feedback early and often. But if the situation with any team member has deteriorated so much that it's not possible to give constructive feedback, there is a larger issue at hand; it is probably time for a personnel change.
Accountability - Consider the example of an executive team in which only the president would own any problem. A vice president routinely was foisting on the president whatever problems he could not comfortably handle himself. The president would then act decisively to solve the problems. Exhausted, overloaded, and on the verge of collapse, the president was becoming less and less efficient.
Understanding a task, agreeing on parameters (including deadlines), and delivering results are the elements that define and crystallize accountability. As for our paradigm president, he should not have tolerated or facilitated the upward delegation of problems. However, presidents often are so caught up in the avalanche of work that they fail to recognize and respond to warning signs in time.
There is a simple strategy for overcoming this: require every person who conveys a problem to also proffer at least one feasible, well-considered solution.
Development - Leadership means responsibility, and developing subordinates is a key component of that duty. An effective leader must examine corporate activities to detect and exploit learning opportunities. For example, when you engage in collaborative decision making with peers, share the process and your reasoning with subordinates. And one of the best tools for development is delegation. Skillful delegation - with a clear statement of the problem or task, the parameters, and your expectations - allows your subordinates to learn and grow.
Big-picture leadership - All managers - and especially senior managers - ultimately are responsible for leadership of the entire organization. So before making any momentous decision, consider the bigger picture to see if that decision fits the organization's overall goals. If such input is helpful and appropriate, involve key internal customers and other good heads (from any subordinate group) in the process.
Unacceptable acquiescence - When it comes to your team, great managers must not settle for mediocrity. All of your employees should be the best at what they do, and they should be developed to be even better, no excuses.
Leadership team cohesiveness
One company - No matter how they are structured, company elements must never compete against each other. The antidote to competitive-behavior disorder is the application of cross-responsibilities and the implementation of one-company ownership. There should be significant consequences for contrary behavior.
Sharing - Sharing techniques, strategies, and solutions is more than a good idea; it's elemental. Constructive suggestions to a peer should always be given generously and received graciously. But since it often requires a culture change, such sharing can be difficult to implement.
Modeling correct behavior is a good place to start. So when was the last time you consulted with or made useful suggestions to the head of another corporate division? In one remarkable example, a progressive organization's leadership team underwent a major culture shift in the relatively short period of three years. Meeting to work on leadership and management skills, the leadership team focused on communication, conflict resolution, decision making, trust, meeting effectiveness, and more. Hardened attitudes toward one another changed as the team members gained insight into top-tier issues and took on a more global perspective.
Collaboration - Good leaders collaborate.
But collaboration is very different from consensus building, which often leads to mediocre solutions – watered down half measures agreed upon just to obtain everyone's buy-in. In business, hard decisions must be made. So make them.
But make sure you have the information you need first.
Assemble your team to discuss a given problem in detail. Then, after absorbing their input, make your best decision. It might not be a popular decision with the majority, but it should be a decision made in the organization's best interest.
Organization-wide understanding- Unit leaders are paid to understand and manage the activities and issues in their area of operations. But that does not mean they can afford to neglect the bigger picture. In fact, disseminating such an organization-wide understanding is a vital part of the leadership mandate. And sharing this perspective gives your unit leaders greater leadership resources.
Substance - There is a difference between saying and doing. You've seen it before: A man or woman may say all the right things at leadership team meetings, but not do the right thing (or much of anything) in practice. For those people, team player is a role assumed only when the boss is watching. And they often get away with it, at least at first. They tend to get caught eventually, but they pose two major dangers in the interim.
First, an unaware leader may heap praise on such a pseudo teammate, based solely on the persona presented in meetings.
That undermines the motivation of real team players. Worse still, the situation could lead others to emulate the bad behavior. Second, leaders who fail to recognize such snow jobs will suffer a permanent loss of credibility.
Team implementation
Though difficult, creating a strong leadership team has several benefits, including productivity and improved bottom-line returns; the agility to respond to opportunities; the flexibility to cope with and exploit change; strategic, thoughtful leadership and management; and fewer unanticipated fire drills.
For the organization's overall leader, the benefits are no less significant, though slightly less tangible. They include increased succession options; heightened focus on important, high-leverage items; time for reflection, perspective, and innovation; and the return of fun to the job. A great leadership team is what makes great leaders. All too often, a good leader fails because of a single weakness - failure to build, align, and inspire a team. Don't let that happen to you.
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