Set 3: Eight Essential Leadership Skills for Any Leader

As I have noted I am a firm believer in the power of recursive leadership to create enduring and winning organizations. Companies that invest in building leadership strength at all levels are more resilient, can move and adjust faster, have more engaged employees, and can achieve much more. ‘Team’ in this framework could be a 10,000 person organization or it could be a small team of three people—the fundamental ideas presented in the next eight slides scale to any size.

First and foremost a leader needs to set a compelling vision that is ideally grounded in a deep-rooted belief or value-set that others can rally around. An example that I experienced directly was Microsoft in the early 1990’s. In that period Bill Gates articulated a vision around the power of the personal computer. He believed at his core that this technology needed to be put into the hands of everyone in the world and the stated vision of the company in those early years was exactly that: to put a computer on every desktop and in every home. In that simple sentence he articulated both a scope (the entire world) and a success metric (100%).

The second lever that leaders need to master is the ability to translate a vision into a concrete strategy. Think of this as the game-plan for how a vision will be achieved. Whereas the vision can be aspirational and even emotional the strategy becomes tangible and concrete--and it will require hard choices and trade-offs to be made. The articulated strategy could take years or even decades to play out depending on the scale of an organization.

Once the strategy has been defined the organization needs to know what specific work to go tackle. Enter the world of priorities—a world of clear scope, specific success metrics, timelines, and tangible deliverables. There is an entire section devoted to priorities in another set of slides so please refer to those for more details.

Organizations need to continually adjust and modify their inherent capabilities (whether people, processes, or technologies) in order to best deliver on a given strategy and set of priorities. In my opinion this is one of the hardest things to master as a leader. Setting a vision, strategy, and priorities and then hoping that your current organization can move it forward is much easier than doing the painful surgery to change the inner-workings of a complex organization. One caveat here: don’t assume that building capabilities means you are necessarily importing new talent into your organization. Taking existing teams and building new skills within them can be far superior but requires strong leadership (yet another reason why a recursive leadership engine is so critical).

Your priorities are defined and you have teams in place that can execute on them. Now you need to ensure that these teams are actually working on the right priorities. This seems like such a simple thing but it requires constant attention and focus. Teams by their nature hold an inherent momentum and once they start working in one direction it takes continual pressure and adjustment to get them moving in another. You can find more detail on line-of-site in the Prioritization and Decision Making sections.

An organization or team is an open system with many leaky edges. This means that in the absence of continued energy its performance will necessarily degrade (thank you Second Law of Thermodynamics). One of the core jobs of a leader is to provide that continued energy injection. When I describe this expectation many people assume I am requiring every leader to stand on a pedestal and give a rousing oration that tugs at the heart-strings of their team. That’s one way to create energy but I put it last on the list (the reality is that very few people, myself included, have been gifted with that kind of contagious personal energy). Much more powerful are tools like: leading by example, constant and transparent communication, and a robust set of operating mechanisms and priorities that keep the engine humming.

One of the greatest tools in a leader’s arsenal is putting the right operating mechanisms in place and ensuring that they run flawlessly. Some look skeptically at operating mechanisms as unnecessary overhead and process--and they are partly correct. If operating mechanisms are not defined correctly, if the resulting meetings are not run tightly, etc. then they definitely can become useless time sinks. When run correctly, however, they are foundational to scaling, running and energizing any organization. See the operating mechanism slide deck for more details here.

If I could choose one word to describe the typical business environment it would be: messy. Maybe the single hardest trait for a leader to acquire is what I call the sequencing gene. How do you determine which of the other seven levers to pull when you are in the middle of a maelstrom? Do you spend time and energy building capabilities or do you push forward now with the capabilities you have? Is your foundational strategy off-the-mark, do you just have a problem with priorities or simply with execution against those priorities? Given the complexity and unique challenges of any organization sequencing cannot be readily taught—but the skill can be built and honed through experience and shadowing.