6 Secrets of Successful Leadership
Table of Contents
Secret #1 - Prioritize the Work of the Organization..................... 2
Secret #2 - Manage Workload Capacity....................................... 7
Secret #3 - Remove Barriers to Performance............................ 13
Secret #4 - Establish Trust, Integrity and Respect.................... 20
Secret #5 – Facilitate the Success of Others............................. 25
Secret #6 – Take Sensible Risks................................................. 30
Secret #1:
Prioritize the Work of the Organization
You strive to accomplish a lot. You would not be reading this book if you did not. However, without intelligent prioritization, this drive to achieve can cause you to work hard but not smart. To work smart and to be as successful as you possibly can you must prioritize the work of your organization.
Criteria Based Prioritization
The best leaders establish priorities using a collaborative process. They involve their employees in discussions about what needs to be done and what can be done. They focus on relevant questions like; “What value will this task provide to the organization?” “Do we have the skills needed to accomplish this task?” “Do we have the necessary capital?”
A great way to assure that you consistently address these types of critical questions is to develop two sets of criteria that you will use to make prioritization decisions.
The first set of criteria is your Value Criteria. These are the key things that will determine just how valuable a project is to your organization’s success. The Value Criteria are unique to each organization based on what drives value for that specific business. Develop a list of 6 to 8 criteria. Any more than that is unnecessarily complex.
Some examples of criteria we have seen leaders use to great success are:
· Improves product quality
· Improves customer service
These are just a representative sample to give you some thought starters. The objective is to brainstorm with your team to determine the Value Criteria that best fit your circumstances.
The second set of criteria is perhaps even more important. The reason being that these criteria will prevent you from selecting unrealistic priorities.
The second set of criteria is Probability of Success (POS). Your POS criteria ensure that you consider factors that are often ignored and most often the downfall of projects. The POS criteria address the “can we do it?” question.
It is all too common for leaders to initiate a project simply because it appears to have some value, but there is little chance that the organization can effectively implement it successfully.
Again, we suggest that you develop 6 to 8 POS criteria. Reflect on both successful and unsuccessful initiatives you have been involved in. What criteria contributed to either their success or failure? This is how you will identify your POS criteria.
Here are some POS criteria other leaders have used successfully, but remember you want to make sure your criteria exactly fit your circumstances:
· Skill Set: Do the people currently have the necessary skills to successfully accomplish the objective?
· Organizational Structure: Do you have the required structure in place to facilitate successfully accomplishing the objective?
Discuss the assessment of each Value and POS criteria with your teammates. Select your priorities from the initiatives that have the best combination of Value and POS assessments. This is a far more effective approach than the usual process of people arguing for their “pet project” or debating what should or should not be a priority with no shared perspective on what criteria a priority must meet.
Clarify What Will Not Be Done
The prioritization process involves being very clear about not only what will be done but also what will not be done. An effective leader is responsible for coordinating with their team to answer both of these questions and communicating the answers to the people in the organization who will be affected.
There is another reason for being very clear about what you will not do. If you do not clarify this, many people will work on what they personally think is most important whether or not it fits your criteria. There are lots of reasons why people do this. We are not going to deal with those issues in this book, but it is enough to say that you must be very clear that people will only work on those efforts that you have deemed are a priority. Working on anything else is wasted effort.
On-going Prioritization
Too many leaders set priorities during their annual planning process and then just leave them alone. The best leaders view prioritization as a regular part of their daily responsibilities. They understand that priorities do not exist in a static environment. You want to continually assess emerging circumstances and adjust your team’s priorities to reflect these new circumstances.
Keeping your priorities freshly tuned in to your current circumstances will help assure that you are truly working on the right things. When you review your priorities, go back to your Value and POS criteria. Ask yourself and your team if each priority still holds up to the standards your criteria require.
Cross-functional Coordination
Another important aspect of effective prioritization is to involve leaders from functions that are interdependent to your own. You want to collaborate with them to assure that priorities are integrated across functions.
Determine if you and your fellow leaders are working on things that are compatible and together will leverage the success of the entire organization. Share your Value and POS criteria with your colleagues. Fine tune them together and take a fresh look at all of the priorities against the criteria. Do they all still meet the standards? These conversations with your fellow leaders can go a long way to assuring that the whole organization has selected the right priorities and that there is a high probability that the initiatives will be successful.
Selecting priorities is one of the most important responsibilities of leadership. Following the techniques we have described will make you a world class “prioritizer”!
Secret #2:
Manage Workload Capacity
In Secret #1 – Prioritize the Work of the Organization, we gave you a detailed process to set the right priorities. In your quest to be the best leader you can be, prioritization is important, but not sufficient.
“Do More With Less” A Smart Way
Perhaps even more important for leaders than selecting the right priorities is managing the workload capacity of themselves and their team.
The mantra in contemporary management is “do more with less.” Done smartly this can work. But, too often leaders interpret this to mean that they should load massive amounts of work on their people. This is debilitating to the people and to the organization. Let us show you the smart way to “do more with less.”
What do we mean by “workload capacity.”? We mean how much time a given employee has to do work. Workload capacity can be taken up by day-to-day operational tasks, process improvement projects, strategic projects, etc.
Setting Expectations
As you start to set your staff’s workload capacity you want to make it very clear to each employee what is expected of them, what they are accountable for, and whom they are accountable to. One of your most important roles as a leader is to clarify these issues.
Begin this task by talking to your employees about what you, as the leader, are responsible for. Tell them what you expect from yourself and what the employees can expect from you. Answer all of their questions about what you will do and not do. Assume nothing. Clarify everything.
Next, communicate to your people what is expected of them. Develop thorough implementation plans for all tasks that identify what each person is responsible for and whom they are accountable to. Then make sure that your staff has the authority to act on the tasks that they are accountable for.
This is really important. Managers have told us many, many times that they do not have the authority to make decisions on what they are responsible for.
We write more about this in Secret #3 – Remove Barriers to Performance. In that Chapter you will learn about the importance of pushing decision-making authority to the lowest appropriate level. Give them the power to do their jobs.
Assessing Workload Capacity
To set the right accountabilities and the right workload capacity, excellent leaders collaborate with their employees to establish these plans. This is particularly important when you are determining the right load for each employee. As the leader, you can never fully know what each employee is working on unless you talk to them.
Remember, it is common that they are getting assignments from more than just you. In most organizations, the structure is so flat that people have dotted line reporting relationships to more than one manager. We encountered a situation a few years back where a middle manager told us she had over 100 annual goals from 12 different Vice Presidents. We asked her how she determined what she should work on at any given time. She said that whichever VP was pushing her the hardest would get her time. Then, if another VP pushed harder she would shift and do their project. She was under tremendous stress and felt that she was falling further and further behind. None of the 12 VP’s were talking to each other about each other’s projects. No one was helping this manager set rationale priorities.
A common mistake managers make is assuming that employees have multiple “buckets” of time. They give their staff a full-time load of day-to-day operational work. But, then they think that people have “extra” time for special projects. That is not realistic. Each person only has a single “bucket” of time. Whether you agree that a full load is 40 hours, 45 hours, 50 hours or whatever, that is all that there is.
You can be better than that. Talk to your employees about what they are working on and who has asked them to work on each task. Then coordinate with your colleagues and work to help each employee set an appropriate set of priorities that take into full account how much capacity they have to do work.
While you always seek to stretch, the reality you must face is that workload capacity is FINITE. Balancing selected projects against finite workload capacity is a key responsibility of leadership. Managing workload capacity calls you to address the “how much of it do we do” question.
Trying to get a handle on workload capacity can be subjective and frustrating. What is a “full load” in one person’s opinion is “coasting” to another person. So, how do you as the leader get a valid assessment of your own workload capacity and that of your team?
Imagine this scenario:
- You have set the agenda for the prioritized initiatives. Because of your excellent Value and Probability of Success criteria and collaborative process you have used you are confident that these priorities are the most important things you should be doing.
- However, an important question remains. Do you and your organization have the capacity to execute this plan and perform your day-to-day operating accountabilities?
To answer this critical question, go through the following steps for yourself and with each member of your team:
- List all of the things that you spend time working on:
o Separate this into categories:
§ Day to day operations
§ Departmental performance improvement projects
§ Strategic or other projects
§ Be sure to include time attending meetings
§ Add “Firefighting.” Include the time you spend doing it. We recommend putting at least a 10% hold on your total time to account for this.
o Determine for each of these accountabilities the amount of time you need to spend each week and over what period of time.
o Take extra time to think the assignment through all the way to the operational detail.
o Collaborate with the people who will be doing the work to assure that you fully understand what it will take to meet the accountability.
- Compare your total hours against the total weekly “full capacity” load you and your team have agreed on (40, 45, 50 hours?). How far off are you? Do you have any time for anything new?
Truly Accomplishing More With Less (And a Hidden Secret!)
Be prepared to face some hard facts. It is highly unlikely that you and your team will have enough time to work on all of your priorities. You will need to go back to the priorities and trim them back to some degree.
This sounds like you and your team will accomplish less than you hoped to. But here is a hidden secret. By taking some priorities off the list, over time, your team will accomplish more than if you kept all of the priorities on the list.
Huh?! How does that work? It is basic human psychology. People build positive energy and momentum when they feel like they are winning. By setting an achievable set of priorities your people will accomplish them. They will achieve a “win.” You then go back to the priorities that you took off the list and work on them. The momentum gained in the “win” will create another “win” and then another and so on.
We have seen over and over again that this strategy of breaking priorities into achievable segments allows organizations to accomplish more than they ever did when they just loaded the full priority list on at one time.
Secret #3:
Remove Barriers to Performance
Every organization is filled with projects and processes. Left untended these always become cumbersome and convoluted. This wastes your and your staff’s time and hurts everyone’s morale.
The best leaders take accountability for removing the barriers that block effective performance. There are many facets to meeting this responsibility.
Collaborate
Start by asking your people what they need to do their work effectively and efficiently. Listen closely. Ask questions to clarify your understanding. Also, seek out the perspectives of people from outside of your department. Your objective is to gain broad and deep perspective on the circumstances that affect the issue you are dealing with.
But, be careful. Collaboration can be a double-edged sword. You want to collaborate fully, but also efficiently. If your collaboration is not efficient it will become another barrier. To collaborate efficiently set a context where people feel safe to be completely honest. Set this tone by being completely open and honest yourself. Do not be afraid to ask the tough questions, challenge the status quo and conventional perspectives. Encourage the people you collaborate with to do the same.
One last point about collaboration. The best leaders go beyond merely looking for the “best idea.” Instead, they use the collaborative process to tap into the collective wisdom of the team to find an answer that is better than any individual could have found alone. Thinking this way can lead to some real performance breakthroughs.
Get Out of Your Own Way
One of the most powerful things you can do to remove barriers is to remove yourself as one! Give your people room to do their jobs without micro-managing their work. Trust them to find efficient and effective ways to do great work. They know their jobs better than you do.
But, do not get too far away. Offer assistance whenever they ask for it. Maintain frequent contact with the people who are doing the work. This allows you to remove barriers as they arise.
This close contact also allows you to make sure that people are fully aware of their specific role. Finally, it avoids confusion and redundant efforts. We have seen so many situations where this simple leadership act of clarifying roles unleashes tremendous productivity.
To really do a good job of removing barriers a leader needs to be clear thinking and non-emotional in assessing circumstances that may be blocking performance. Be prepared to encounter issues that require you to do away with processes that you may have designed yourself.
A good example of this is the story of a CFO at one of our clients who had instituted a very detailed budget review process. The process required senior executives and their top managers to meet with Finance for a full day twice per month. The CFO had used this approach for years and trusted it a lot. However, the process absorbed a huge amount of everyone’s time. When, as part of an organization-wide effort, the CFO started looking for ways to boost his department’s productivity his staff pointed out the inefficiency of the budget review process. The CFO kept an open mind and made changes to the process. Finance and operations leaders now meet only once per month in a radically streamlined review. Everyone is happier, productivity is higher and the budget is tracking just fine!
Keeping your emotions out of the situation allows you to make good balanced decisions in identifying and removing barriers. You want to be decisive. Do not deliberate needlessly before making a decision to simplify work. Being clear-minded and unbiased will help you do this.
Get Rid of The Dead Wood
While we are on the subject of decision-making, here is a tip that will remove a barrier for your people. Remove unnecessary approval steps. It is amazing how convoluted some decision processes are. It is a wonder anything ever gets done! Push decision making to the lowest possible level in your management structure.
Another necessary requirement to effectively remove barriers is to deeply understand the details of your operations. This sounds like common sense for good leaders, but unfortunately common sense is not all that common. Many leaders find themselves getting drawn away from the details of their staff’s work. If you get too far away you do not have a good vantage point to look for new ways of doing things. When this happens you get stuck doing things a certain way just because you always have. But if you stay close to the work, not by micro-managing, but by talking to your people you can maintain the practical knowledge required to make changes that improve the way people work.
Here is a good thing to remember as you review your department’s work. Every organization builds up unnecessary processes over time. Regularly review your processes to identify the ones that are no longer useful and discontinue them. You will be surprised how much time can be saved. Also when you develop a new process determine whether or not it replaces any existing process. If it does, then discontinue the old process. We cannot tell you how many times we have worked with managers that are overloaded and when we ask them what they spend their time on we find that they are doing reports or sitting on committees that are no longer necessary.
Think Ahead
The very best leaders think ahead and anticipate hurdles and remove them before they become a barrier. To do this, maintain a good understanding of your industry, your products, your markets and your specific functional area. This will allow you to see an array of options for accomplishing work in simple yet effective ways.
Anticipation requires thought. Thought requires time. Take time each day to step away from your work, the phones, email, etc. and just think. The very best of the best leaders do this daily.
Be Careful of Overload
A hidden barrier that most leaders fail to see is a set of priorities that are simply unattainable. This is one of the biggest problems we see in business. We will address it in more detail in a later chapter, but it has an impact on removing barriers to performance.
When you layer on priority upon priority to the point that it is not realistic for your staff to complete all of them in a reasonable timeframe your staff feels like they cannot succeed. The feeling of working incredibly hard, but not succeeding, eventually wears people down. Tired people are a barrier to performance.
What you want to do is set achievable priorities. They can be ambitious, but they must be realistic. Doing this will help give your people the time and energy they need to perform effectively.
People as the Barrier
This next point is one of the most difficult. A good leader must address anything that stands in the way of people doing their jobs effectively. This includes dealing with people that are a roadblock to effective performance. It is very easy to let a few people drag everyone’s performance down.
You want to hold all of your people equally accountable for effective performance; do not play favorites with anyone. Do not let someone’s difficult personality dissuade you from managing his or her performance.
Do Something!
We have written a lot about how to make good decisions to remove barriers to performance. But, we have not yet referenced the most important thing a leader must do. Take action! Nothing is more frustrating to people than to be asked for input and have it completely ignored. Nothing is more useless than a decision that is never implemented. We heard a great comment a while back; “Experience is what you get when your efforts fail.”
Do not be afraid of failure. Implement your decision, monitor it and make adjustments as necessary.
Of course, you will not be able to make every change your staff asks for. But, you can still take action. Take action by communicating back to your staff why you cannot make the change they are asking for. Treat them like the adults they are by telling them the logic behind your decision not to make a certain change. They will understand and they will appreciate the respect you showed them by telling them your rationale. In turn, you will gain their respect.
Secret #4:
Establish Trust, Integrity and Respect
One of the most important roles of leadership is to guide the behavior of the people in the organization. Leaders are better able to accomplish this if they are trusted, they are consistent in what they say and do, and they have earned respect.
Be Honest About Difficulties
You want to honestly acknowledge the challenges and problems your organization is facing. Openly discuss these issues with your peers and employees. No organization is perfect. Every organization has challenges it must deal with. Your people know this. If you try to gloss over these challenges you brand yourself as someone who cannot be trusted. Or, the people around you lose respect for you because they do not think you understand the organization’s circumstances.
The best leaders we work with calmly and honestly face the toughest issues. A great example is the CEO of one our large hospital clients. The organization he led had experienced 100 years of success. But, at this time they were fighting for their survival. Revenues were flat at best. Expenses were skyrocketing.
But, he did not hide from this challenge. Instead he embarked on a communication campaign. He presented to his executive team. He spoke in formal and informal meetings with every employee. He made presentations to the financial community, to business leaders and to the State and Federal governments.
His message was clear. We are in trouble. This is why we are in this position. Here is what we are going to do to turn the situation around. Here is what you can do to help us. The turnaround is going to take time, but we will stay the course.
His presentations were incredibly well received. People rallied around him with great positive energy. Within 18 months he had turned the organization around and was named the Executive of the Year in his state.
What he did was not easy, but it was simple. You can follow his example.
Give People Room to Work
At the more detailed operational level you can earn trust and show respect to your people by not micro-managing their work. Allow your people to decide how they will accomplish their responsibilities. The best leaders understand that there are many paths to any destination. They allow others to select their own path while still holding them accountable for reaching the destination.
But do not get too far away. Stay close and follow up with your people. Ask them how you can help them accomplish their objectives. It is common for leaders to get so busy that they are not available to help. The best leaders can be relied on to respond thoughtfully and timely when people ask them for assistance or perspective.
Success and Mistakes
Look for successes and acknowledge people’s contributions and give them credit. Regularly celebrate successes. But, on the other hand, when things do not turn out well do not blame people. Instead, use mistakes as learning opportunities.
Understand Your Team
Take the time to understand the skills and interests of your people and align their work with them. By doing this, you provide opportunities for near term successes as well as longer term learning and growth. People feel greatly respected when they see that you are looking out for their success.
The Value of Diverse Points of View
The most effective leaders deal with strong differences of opinion openly and honestly without avoidance or passive/aggressive behavior. They tell the truth even when it is difficult. They work hard to hold everyone, including themselves, equally accountable. They do not play favorites. Their objective is to help everyone they interact with be successful.
Another great way to engender trust and show respect is to facilitate open dialogue of multiple points of view. Work to assure that the point of view of the most senior person or your own point of view is not automatically accepted as the answer. Instead work to allow all points of view to be heard and fully considered.
A particularly powerful action is to proactively seek out opinions from people who think very differently from you. Not only will you learn a lot, but also you will show people that you have an open mind and will listen. We reference this approach throughout this book because it is such a powerful leadership skill.
The Power of Not Knowing
Be unafraid of not having all of the answers. One of the best executives we have ever worked with would commonly say in meetings with all of the senior executives, that he did not understand the issue that people were discussing. He was totally unafraid to appear to be the only person in the room that did not understand. He gained so much respect by doing this. Also, the vast majority of the time he was not the only person who did not understand. But, he was the one who opened up the discussion to the heightened clarity that benefited everyone.
Be a Steward in Your Organization
You also want to be a steward of trust, integrity and respect throughout your organization. Pay close attention to what is happening to people in the organization. If you observe someone being treated in a manner that is not consistent with high trust, integrity and respect then be brave enough to do what is appropriate and necessary to correct that situation. It is usually enough to simply talk to the person in private that is acting in ways that detract from trust, integrity and respect. Generally, people want to do the right thing. Sometimes they just need a little guidance.
Secret #5:
Facilitate the Success of Others
Helping others be successful is something every leader says they do. But, to do it well requires that you think differently than most leaders.
Leave Yourself Out of the Picture
This secret of successful leaders is one of leadership’s great paradoxes. If you want to be successful as a leader, forget about being successful as a leader. Read that again. Success is not about you. It is about the people around you. It is about your team, your leadership colleagues, your organization, and your customers. If you take care of their success, success will flow to you without you ever having to think about it.
Share the credit and have no need for fame within your organization or industry. Keep your ego in check. You are in the position of leader to serve those around you.
Establish Your Center and Ground
Be available to help everyone, irrespective of their position or whether or not you like them personally. You want to be able to work with all types of people. You can do this if you are centered and grounded in principles of personal leadership behavior.
The six leadership skills in this book are an excellent foundation for your principles of leadership. By embodying these six leadership skills you will know where you stand and what you stand for as you work with even the most erratic and difficult people.
The Calm at the Eye of the Storm
Be prepared to mediate emotional issues without taking sides or picking favorites. Focus on clarifying the points of view of both parties and help them find common ground where both can be successful. This requires you to listen much more than talk. Do not seek to give them the answer. Continue to question to get to the source of the conflict. By doing this you will guide the conflicted parties to find a mutually successful solution on their own which is much more powerful than you solving their conflict for them.
Do not intervene unnecessarily. Give your team the space to run itself. Remember that your job is to facilitate their process of reaching success. Do not force your insights and objectives into the lead position of the discussions.
Even if your team is in great conflict, trust them to work it out themselves. If no one will talk, let silence be your friend. Let the silence grow and something productive will emerge from it. Or, if the team is arguing, let the argument run its course. It will dissolve into calm and greater understanding in its own time. By not intervening you give your team the best chance to reach success.
Really Get to Know Your People
For members of your team, take the time to understand their skills, talents and areas of interest. Seek to align their assignments with these capabilities and interests.
Also, look to put people in assignments that are challenging and provide opportunities for growth. Then regularly talk to them about their performance. Provide honest feedback to help them make progress.
The Power of Praise
Be forthcoming with both praise and constructive feedback. Be completely honest when you communicate to employees where they are doing well and where they can improve.
Create opportunities to establish regular, periodic successes. Acknowledge these milestones to provide motivation for continued progress. Too often people go months (or years!) without ever hearing their boss tell them they have done a good job. We had a senior executive tell us once that he believed that if you praised people they would stop working hard. He also said that the best way to motivate people was to keep them afraid of being fired. We cannot disagree more! Be honest with your criticism, but remember that motivation and hard work are born from praise.
Be a Leader of Leaders
The very best leaders not only facilitate the success of their employees; they also help their fellow leaders succeed. In addition to offering help and advice when needed, be willing to challenge your colleagues with honest, respectful debate.
The dynamic tension between differing points of view is vital for the creative and effective decision-making that leads to success.
Know Your Customers
Great leaders consider their customers as something much more than a source of profits. They see their customers, both current and potential customers, as individuals with problems they want solved and desires they want met.
You want to do everything you can to help your customers. To do this you really have to know and understand them. One of the most extreme examples of this is a hospital CEO we know. Periodically, he goes into the neighborhoods around his hospital. He walks up and down the streets knocking on people’s doors. When they answer the door he introduces himself as the CEO of the local hospital, shakes their hand and tells them that he wants to be there for them and their loved ones to help them get well and stay healthy. He asks if they know about the hospital’s programs. He asks them if there is anything that he and the hospital can do for them.
This CEO does this in a major metropolitan area in southern California. In these neighborhoods it is not uncommon for next-door neighbors to barely know each other. He makes a huge impression that he and his hospital really care about the health of each member of the community.
This is the standard you want to reach for. In your own way get to really know and understand your customers. Understand what their problems and desires are. Then put your mind to work to devise ways to help them be successful.
This is one of the true tests of leadership. How broad a positive impact can you have?
Secret #6:
Take Sensible Risks
To be successful, leaders must make informed decisions and take sensible risks. This certainly does not mean being reckless, but the success of everything you do cannot be guaranteed. Risk is inherent in launching new programs, establishing new processes, taking on new responsibilities and providing employees with growth assignments. Risk comes with the territory when you are a leader. So, how do you deal with it successfully?
Judgment
Because risk is such an integral part of leadership, it is important that leaders learn to practice good judgment when taking risks.
You want to exercise judgment in several ways. The first thing you want to do is define the risk you are considering taking. Work through questions like; "What is the cost?" "What is the potential return?" "How does this initiative connect with the vision of my organization?"
Multiple Points of View
Do not do this in isolation. Seek input from other people in the organization to broaden your perspective and minimize errors. We have written many times in this book about the importance of seeking out opinions that differ from your own. Before taking a risk is one of the most critical times to talk to people who think differently than you do.
There are two major styles of thinkers amongst leaders. On one extreme are the strategic visionaries. They are great at envisioning future possibilities and tend to be very optimistic about the prospect of being able to successfully reach those possibilities.
On the other extreme are practical tacticians. These leaders are great at thinking through what it will actually take to accomplish something. They are detailed thinkers. They are skilled at envisioning obstacles to success.
There is no “best way” of thinking. Most leaders can do a little of both. What is important for you is to understand which type of thinking is dominant for you. Then you need to balance yourself out with opinions from people who are dominant in the other style of thinking.
A Cautionary Tale
Here is an example of what can happen if you do not balance out your thinking. We worked with a CEO who was a super-optimistic strategic visionary. He always wanted to be the first in his market to buy the new technology, launch the new business line, etc. He had had a lot of successes. He had also had a lot of failures. Up until the time of our story none of his failures had been big enough to derail either his career or his organization. But, that was about to change.
He was in the biggest job of his career. He had surrounded himself with a senior team where every person either was a strategic visionary like him or was too weak to offer a differing opinion.
He decided to make a major acquisition of his largest competitor and implement a completely new and untested information management system simultaneously.
The financial risk was huge and the probability for success was very low to do both of these major efforts at the same time. He and the team charged ahead. They failed. The organization lost over 40 million dollars and the Board fired the entire senior team.
If this CEO had simply sought the opinions of other people who thought differently than he did, and listened, this failure could have been avoided.
Risk Management
Certainly, not every effort will succeed. So, it is important as a leader to look ahead and establish plans to manage the risk if things do not go as expected. You want to create an exit strategy if the plan fails. Also, be sure not to get too far away from the initiative. Monitor the plan's progress at periodic intervals to manage the risk before it can get out of control. In the story we just described, there were many indications of problems long before it got so bad that massive money was lost. Unfortunately no one was paying close enough attention.
In this monitoring process, collaborate with others to get their perspectives on how well the plan is developing. Be open to critical input. Listen and fully consider multiple points of view.
You Are Not Alone
One of the recurring themes in all of these secrets of successful leaders is that you do not have to “go it alone.” There is a popular image of the iconoclastic leader bravely defying anyone who differs with them and always winning. This is for TV and the movies. Leadership does not work this way in real life. You are not alone. Your greatest asset as a leader is all of the people around you and their diverse thinking. Tap into it and collaborate your way to success!
In the spirit of not “going it alone,” consider the effects of any risk on other areas of the business. Collaborate with the leaders of those areas to assess the full impact of the risk and keep them apprised of the decisions you make and the progress of your efforts.
Risk and Workload Capacity
A final point about taking sensible risks is the close connection between Secret #2 – Manage Workload Capacity and Secret #6 – Take Sensible Risks.
Workload capacity is the most critical factor that determines whether or not a plan will succeed or fail. If the people that are responsible to do the work do not have the time to focus, your effort will not succeed.
Let us emphasize that point. YOU CANNOT MANUFACTURE TIME. No matter how much you and your team care. No matter how much you and your team want to succeed, if you cross the fine line between hard work and overload your risk will skyrocket.
Before you launch any new initiative you must take the time to follow the workload capacity assessment process we outline in Secret #2 in this book. Do not let your optimism get in the way of the facts.
On the other hand do not let your pragmatic nature get in the way of a great opportunity. Again, you want to strike a balance that will allow you to take the right, sensible risks.