Okay, now that I have your attention…let’s talk about sexy stuff:
LEADERSHIP!
(What did you think I was going to talk about)?
Former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart is perhaps best remembered, at least outside legal circles, for his opinion in a 1964 film censorship case that “hard-core pornography is hard to define, but I know it when I see it.” Not too many folks remember that he went on to add “and this film is not hard-core pornography.”
I wonder if defining “leadership” suffers from the same difficulty. Go ahead and Google the term “leadership” and you’ll find about 23 Million entries. Why is it so hard to agree on a definition? This may not concern the average Joe on the street, but a band called BUILT TO LEAD ought to take a position on the matter, don’t you think?
“Leadership.” We know it when we see it, right?
Hmmm…not so fast. If this were a court case, we’d need to consider the objective facts of evidence, rather than mess around with a subjective definition. If you and your company were brought up on charges before a judge like Potter Stewart, would there be enough evidence to convict you of “hard-core leadership?”
Let’s examine the physical evidence of great leadership together. What conditions must be present for us to “know it when we see it?”
Please feel free to comment back as to what you think constitutes actual evidence of great leadership. I want to compile the most practical, hard-hitting evidence I can.
Here are a few observations Pete and I talked about today over lunch:
1. To be convicted of hard-core leadership, you’d have to be guilty of delivering exceptional, sustained financial performance year after year. Nothing substitutes for results, and leadership is just a fancy hobby if the results aren’t there. That means greater rates of revenue growth than your competitive peer group, and fatter margins overall. It does not necessarily mean higher market share, although the judge will admit that evidence if it’s there along with the growth rate and profits. Lots of big companies have stopped leading, and lots of little one are kicking proverbial butt. (Read Small Giants if you haven’t already).
2. Next might be evidence of what drove that superior performance. Surely happy, loyal customers would constitute hard evidence of some kind of leadership. This would be especially true if your customers were willing to refer you and your company to other potential customers. Since the purpose of all businesses is “getting and keeping customers” according to Peter Drucker, this would be another point in the indictment of your hard-core leadership.
3. It follows that happy customers are tough to produce unless there’s further evidence of smoothly aligned internal processes and supporting systems across your span of leadership. Evidence of this would most likely indicate an organization structured around the work of delivering happy customers, rather than around political silos, pet projects, insulated departments, or unresponsive bureaucracies.
4. Because it’s impossible to sustain happy customers with unhappy, incompetent employees, especially in a service business, the court would also hear evidence about how inspired and enabled your “followers” might be. Strong evidence for your conviction as a hard-core leader would be positive indicators of employee longevity, loyalty, pride, trust in one another, satisfaction with personal development, referral of friends for open positions, and the rate of applications per open position relative to your competitive peer group.
5. The best and the brightest employees gravitate to companies that are not merely delivering today’s results, but who are also innovating new products and services organically for tomorrow’s growth. This is perhaps the most practical example of hard-core leadership–a strong innovation piepline. It’s presence convicts a leader as someone who has defined the future vision, invested in that vision, and has people who are actively engaged in creatively bringing the vision about.
6. Finally, the most telling evidence of hard-core leadership, and the main reason why we “know it when we see it,” is the presence of other great leaders around you and in development as your successors. True leadership is always about enabling others to lead. Ipso Facto! If this is presented as evidence against you and your company, forget it. You’re busted. You will be convicted of hard-core leadership. But there’s hope of getting the charges against you of hard-core leadership thrown out: How many BAD leaders do you tolerate?
If we prepared a brief on your company, how would it look?
Which of these six points of evidence would make the case? Which wouldn’t?
What are you doing about it right now?
If we looked for evidence of great leadership in you and at your company, would we know it if we saw it?
Would any friends of the court care to comment?
BUILT TO LEAD 