The Value of Leadership

How important is leadership? What difference does it make? What are the stakes?

We know from research how important good leadership is and the value it brings to teams and organizations.

Hundreds of real leaders in my past workshops have confirmed the research with their own experience. Here is some of the data I have collected:

Benefits of Good Leadership:  

• Better employee productivity and performance
• Clarity on goals, roles, priorities, purpose
• Alignment of individual & team goals with organizational objectives
• Strategic focus: line of sight to big picture
• Employee engagement, effort, motivation
• Employee retention and loyalty
• Mutual trust and respect: employees feel valued
• Better communication, teamwork, collaboration
• Better execution of complex projects
• More flexible, adaptable, change hardy
• Client satisfaction, confidence, loyalty
• Lower costs, higher margins and profits
• Employees learning, developing, growing
• More or better innovation

Risks & Costs of Poor Leadership: 

• Absenteeism and turnover
• Not achieving goals; under-performance 
• Poor focus, disorganized, not aligned
• Lack of initiative, accountability, and participation in general
• Conflicts, silos, turf wars, hidden agenda
• Duplication of efforts, waste, errors
• Acceptance or tolerance of bad behavior
• Not living the core values
• Poor talent development (talent pipeline)
• Greater resistance to change
• Problems resulting from poor EQ
• Employees do not feel supported: low trust
• Leaders don’t listen; don’t lead by example
• Employees do not have the resources they need to get the job done
• Negative impact on culture
• Negative impact on reputation / brand
• Negative impact on attracting and retaining talent

How to Use this Information:

You can read this data in a few ways:

Value & Results:

First, it is a nice little education on leadership: what leaders do; the value of leadership; and the results it can generate for your business. Understanding this helps you (as a leader) better determine how important “good leadership” is to your job, your company, and your career. I.e., it helps you decide how hard to work on your leadership skills and practices, and what kind of results to expect. And as an organization, this helps you make more informed decisions about how much to invest in leadership development, and to what end?

Priorities:

Second, a list like this can help you identify your priorities for development:

Leaders: Of all of these wonderful things, what are my priorities as a leader this year? What am I going to focus on in my leadership practice? What results do I most need to generate as a leader this year?

Organizations: The same applies to organizations: What are the “standards of leadership” in our organization? What kind of leadership behaviours do we want to see “more of” and “less of”? Where are we going to focus our leadership development efforts over the next couple of years? What kind of results do we most want to see from our organization’s leaders—and how can we help them generate those results?

Metrics:

Each item on the lists above is a potential metric for leadership in your organization. By metric I mean a sign, indicator, or measure of success that tells you when leaders are doing what they need to do, doing them well, and generating the desired results from their leadership work (their work as leaders).

To turn an item on the list into a clear and concrete metric, drill down to the level of specificity you need. Metrics can be either quantitative or qualitative (behavioral). If you need your leaders to be doing something specific, and you have the ability to see them doing it (or get some kind of confirmation), then that behavioral metric is empirically verifiable.

For me, therefore, tracking leadership metrics involves tracking both results and behavior: “Are we doing what we said we needed to do, are we doing it well, and is that generating the results we need to see (is it getting us what we want)?”

Multiplier Effect:

Finally, and fortunately, good leadership is so powerful (and bad leadership so wildly damaging) that working on any one area of leadership will have multiple benefits. In other words, if you spend the year taking any two leadership practices up to the next level (anything from the lists above), you will see multiple benefits—you will see improvements in several areas anyway.

That’s why it is better to focus on making two real improvement than having forty good intentions.

To conclude, let me share a little story. HR departments used to help employees map their skill-sets in order to identify the skill gaps. Then HR would help you fill those gaps. What we know now, however, is that if you spend your whole career working on your weaknesses, at the end of your career, you will end up with a very big bag full of very strong weaknesses.

Work on your weaknesses when you must, but make sure to spend important development time on building and leveraging your strengths. Those are the skills from which you make a living and in which you have the potential to do your best work and make your mark.

Copyright ? 2020 Joel B. Shapiro PhD; all rights reserved.