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Sat, 02/27/2021 - 16:21
Thank you for sharing this. It is a very useful resource.
A Key Element of Great Leadership
There’s a lot to be said for clarity and simplicity. When business leaders make short, clear statements about their ideal customers, core strengths, desired future, and action plans, they eliminate confusion and anxiety throughout the ranks. They exude confidence and as a result, uncertainty is replaced with resilience and creativity. In fact, some would say, creating organizational clarity may be the most essential element for leading large groups of diverse employees toward a desired future.
To achieve clarity, leaders must be preoccupied with the future and the ability to articulate one’s vision of that future. Great leaders aren’t willing to settle for the status quo. Instead they envision a better future and strive to share it with others to achieve mutual success. When organizations have achieved clarity, they can face current challenges knowing what it will take to conquer them and forge ahead. They remain optimistic, confident and energized about creating the defined future.
“Effective leaders don’t have to be passionate. They don’t have to be charming. They don’t have to be brilliant. They don’t have to be great speakers. What they must be is clear. Above all else, they must never forget … [satisfying] our need for clarity … is the most likely to engender in us confidence, persistence, resilience, and creativity.” — Marcus Buckingham
Great Managing Versus Great Leading
Every manager’s starting point is the individual employee. Managers must assess talents, skills, knowledge, experience and goals to design a specific future that fosters each employee’s personal success. No manager can excel without hiring good people, setting clear expectations, recognizing and praising excellence, and demonstrating a sense of caring.
Leaders begin with an image of the future. They then focus their attention on helping others see how their individual and collective success awaits within this vision.
Great leaders play a different role from that of great managers: They rally people toward a better future. They are instigators driven to bring people together to realize this future, regardless of individuals’ unique personalities, levels of excitement and initial commitment. While great managers discover each employee’s unique qualities and capitalize on them, great leaders discover what is collectively unique and capitalize on it.
“Great leaders rally people to a better future, by discovering what is universal and capitalizing on it.” — Marcus Buckingham
One Thing a Great Leader Must Do
Every leader quickly learns that most people have some basic fear when confronted with uncertainty — and the future is always uncertain. Leaders must consistently find a way to guide people through the uncertainty of change. The most essential fear leaders must confront is “fear of the future.” The modern-day organization is challenged with dealing with many complexities and uncertainties. Success is dependent on meeting the challenge by transforming uncertainty into a spirited commitment to a vision for a better future.
Great leaders define the future in vivid terms. Through their own actions, images and their choice of exemplary performers, leaders enable others to see clearly where they are headed and how they can play a part. Clarity is the antidote to uncertainty and organizational anxiety.
Four Points of Clarity
1. What value do you create? Who are your customers? What do they want and need? Clarity comes from asking customers what value you are really providing them. Customers are your best source of information for establishing where you are today and where you need to go. With a little help from your customers, you’ll be able to craft a vivid description of your ideal customer and know exactly how that ideal customer derives value from your organization.
2. How are you different? By defining how your organization is different from others, you focus on how it will prevail in the future and how today’s obstacles will be overcome. Your employees will actively leverage their differentiation in the marketplace. Your organization’s anxiety about the future will be replaced by resilience.
3. What is the key measure of success? To ensure clarity, avoid too many measures of success. Leaders must stay focused on the most important measures of success to have a chance of maintaining clarity.
4. What actions can you take today? Although you may see many areas ripe for action, keep your focus on as few systematic actions as possible to drive lasting change. Choose specific actions that target the specific needs of your ideal customers, actions that highlight your differentiation and have a high likelihood of impacting your key measures of success.
How Do the Best Leaders Achieve Clarity?
Great leaders are skilled at distilling and dissecting complexity to find clarity, but practice and discipline are required to develop these skills. Here are a few suggestions from Buckingham to practice in your skills development:
1. Take time to reflect. Most great leaders take some time out of their busy schedules for reflection. Time dedicated to thinking is incredibly valuable, allowing high-performing leaders to achieve remarkable success, in spite of complexity. Some use their travel time for reflection; others utilize exercise or meditative practices. Any chosen method should allow you to sift through the clutter, define essentials and focus on what really matters.
2. Recognize your exemplary performers with great care. What gets recognized gets repeated. The individuals you recognize and celebrate become role models for others. Look to the people and events that you want others to emulate. When you recognize a high-achieving performer, be explicit in your recognition by explaining, in precise terms, how he or she created value for your customer, leveraged your organizational differentiation, and met or exceeded your key measure of success. Be specific about the actions taken and behaviors exhibited to bring your vision for the future one step closer.
3. Practice. Discipline yourself to use words, images and stories to help employees clearly see themselves in the future you envision. The best leaders don’t try to come up with newer and better speeches; rather, they practice and refine their favorite speeches, focusing on the essence that is real and pertinent. They aren’t afraid to repeat themselves. Discipline in refining your descriptions of the future will enable you to lead your people through uncertainty and anxiety toward a clearly defined future.
Leaders must never forget that all people have a universal need for clarity. Only by satisfying the need for clarity can leaders foster confidence, persistence, resilience and creativity within an organization. Today’s most respected and successful leaders are able to deal with the natural fear of the unknown by articulating a clear vision for the future. They enable their employees to pierce the veil of complexity and identify the single best vantage point from which to examine their roles. Only then can they repeatedly take decisive action to bring the future one step closer.
The ideas and concepts described in this article are attributed to Marcus Buckingham, author of The One Thing You Need to Know: … About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success. Buckingham is also co-author of two best-selling books: First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently (coauthored with Curt Coffman) and Now, Discover Your Strengths (coauthored with Donald O. Clifton). He is a leading authority on employee productivity and the practices of leading and managing.
© 2006 Réal Provencher, All rights reserved.
Resources:
Buckingham, M. 2005. The One Thing You Need to Know: … About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success. Free Press.