Why your executive leadership isn't effective

When I was a young boy, my mother often chided me for the unsightly conditions of my room. I often left my toys, games, magazines, schoolwork and clothes strewn about. I recall one instance when she issued an ultimatum—no baseball practice until my room was presentable. The jig was up.

I leapt into action, dispatched my work quickly and called out for her to begin her inspection. She furrowed her brow as she looked around my tidy room. Then she slowly opened my closet door to unleash an avalanche of truth. I could no longer hide the fact that I had only partly done my job.

Fast forward forty years, and I see a similar approach being taken by executive teams. Content to focus only on the more immediate and visible aspects of their purview, they push important responsibilities out of sight and tightly brace the door.

~~

In this article, I will establish what effective leadership is, why it’s so elusive and the opportunity executives in particular have to get it right.

My definition of leadership

For all its importance, it may come as a surprise to learn that there is no universally accepted definition of leadership. You’re welcome to consult a dictionary entry, but what you’ll find are essentially pieces and parts. Any attempt to distill leadership to a singular element or aspect is woefully incomplete.

Nevertheless, I’m often asked how I define leadership. I’ll share it here not because it’s entirely complete or correct but just so you can see how I approach the topic:

Leadership is the practice of encouraging others to contribute their collective energies toward a common goal.

In my experience, each of the elements in this definition is meaningful, and each supports the others.

• Practice. A practice combines the three elements of study, reflection and action.
• Encouraging others. The etymology of the word courage is “heart.” We cannot directly control others by operating their hands, feet, thoughts, emotions, actions or their underlying beliefs that guide all of these. The best we can do is to invite them to commit and act from our heartfelt aspiration.
• Contribute their collective energies. Without energy there is no action, no change, no result and no improvement. When we lead others, we open a door and show them a path through which they can expend their precious energies.
• Toward a common goal. Common in this case does not mean mundane but rather shared. A common goal is one that all parties hold and commit to equally, not just going along to get along.

This abstract view amounts to my leadership philosophy.

What is effective leadership?

The rai·son d'ê·tre of leadership is producing results. If there weren’t any outcomes, what would be the point? In the business world, we’re naturally drawn to commercial results. These tend to relate to top line revenue growth, bottom line cost containment, and the reduction of risk. We may also pack on layers or indirect results that indirectly power these, but the less a given result ties back to these three pillars, the less interest and investment it’s likely to garner.

Yet truly effective leadership goes further. In fact, there are five key results for effective leadership:?

• Performance. The commercial outcomes I described above are of paramount importance. You could do a lot worse than produce a highly profitable and stable business. In fact, running a profitable business produces proceeds that can be used to fuel the remaining results. This is why I always tell my executive teams, “Performance is non-negotiable.”
• Engagement. The employee experience is equally important. One key dimension of this is employee engagement which is often described as the amount of discretionary effort they’re willing to expend toward the common goal.
• Well-being. There was a time when we didn’t think or talk so much about worker wellness. In fact, physical working conditions were once so dangerous that we needed to take drastic measures to curtail them. This included establishing the field of HR. Fast forward to today and modern work is still posing wellness challenges including isolation and loneliness.

• Development. One quote that always centers me comes from Mahatma Gandhi who said, “A sign of a good leader is not how many followers you have but how many leaders you create.” Our world of work continues to evolve, so it’s imperative that we invest in the growth of those around us. We may be excellent problem solvers, for example, but if we’re not helping others learn how to solve problems, our efforts are limited in scale and durability.
• Impact. It is more clear than ever that we live in a highly interconnected world. The way we conduct our business spills over into our employees’ family dynamics, our communities, our planet and beyond. We don’t need to solve the world’s problems, but we should seek to send out positive ripples that extend well past our own limited self-interest.

This last result requires us to demonstrate an unprecedented level of innovation, openness, compassion and stewardship. After you’ve finished the article, I invite you to come back and listen to my podcast interview with Tammy Day to learn how she has used her company, Daycos, Inc., to create a “virtuous flywheel” that mutually benefits all stakeholders.

Keeping score

Since leadership is about producing results, it’s a natural response to ponder the above target results and ask the question, “So, how are we doing?”

You may want to sit down for this section.

Performance

• According to the International Monetary Fund, while the global economy should hold steady at 3.2% growth over the next two years, the U.S. economy is expected to cool down.?

Engagement

• According to Gallup, only 30% of the workforce is engaged with 17% being actively disengaged.

Well-Being

• Nearly 3 out of 4 employees expressed moderate or high concerns about their workplace well-being according to a study by EBRI.

Growth

• Gartner found that over half of employees are dissatisfied with their career advancement and development opportunities.

Impact

• In a Deloitte survey of C-Suite executives, 90% noted a shift toward “stakeholder capitalism”, yet far fewer firms have made demonstrable progress at identifying their stakeholder interests and objectively verifying the positive benefits those organizations are having on stakeholders.

By nearly every measure, we have much work to do. Think specifically about your own organization. Are you currently measuring these outcomes, and if so, do you not see similar room for improvement?

Reframing the problem, reclaiming our potential

I’ll be the first to admit that the notion of addressing so many diverse needs can be overwhelming. It’s difficult, in fact, to even develop a mental model of the complex dynamics inherent in our modern work.

Over the course of writing my enlightened leadership book Expand the Circle, conducting scores of interviews through Perspectives webinars and my Lead the People podcast powered by The Predictive Index, and developing graduate-level courses at Boston College in the areas of leadership and human resources, I’ve developed a simple-but-illuminating framework.

It explains how organizations can elevate their operation and contribution and also where they get stuck. I call it the Progressive Range of Organizational Functioning (PROOF).

• The first stages in green represent the path of PRODUCTION. This is the domain of the technical aspects of work including things like technology, operations, requirements and strategy.
• The second stages in blue represent the path of PEOPLE. This is the human dimension of work including our social interactions, empathy and support as well as satisfying our needs for belonging and purpose.
• The third dimension in yellow represents the path of POTENTIAL. This is where we matriculate beyond our own individual perspective to embrace our highest level of intention, value, meaning, opportunity and achievement.

In a low-functioning organization—one that is ineffective based on our established definition—friction and challenges on the PRODUCTION path absorb all of the energy and attention. Without enough oxygen, the PEOPLE matters are neglected. Inevitably, workers suffer and they begin to retract their collective energies from the pursuit of the common goal. As a byproduct, the work suffers. A downward spiral ensues, and the rout is on.?

Once this begins, only effective leadership can stop the backslide.

The unique role of executive leadership

Executives play an essential role in organizations. Here are several reasons why:

• They set the rules. Executives determine the internal view of right and wrong. They establish or otherwise endorse the organization’s guardrails when it comes to every aspect of Production, People, and Potential. The buck stops here.
• They influence the culture. For all the machinations that go into establishing organizational culture, it basically boils down to what we reward and punish. The best cultures are those that are intentionally designed and aligned to fit the organization’s strategy. It’s up to executives to ensure this is the case.
• They set the example. The old adage that actions speak louder than words is spot on. If executives do their level best to honor the rules and the culture, their actions reinforce the ideal. If they act counter to these, people notice and will determine for themselves what’s really true.
• They make the big decisions. Executives control the purse strings, and they decide which among the competing programs and activities will receive funding in terms of resources, time and attention. This is not easy since no organization has unlimited resources.

For all these reasons and more, effective executive leadership is a prerequisite for realizing an organization’s true potential. It is impossible to have a highly functioning organization (via my definition, at least) without this.

Playing the part: the many roles of a CEO

The senior-most executive stands tallest in the executive crowd. In many organizations, this person has the title of Chief Executive Officer or President or General Manager. It could also be Founder, Principal or Chairperson. For convenience, I’ll simply use the term CEO in this section.

Being the principal executive voice and vote, as goes the CEO, so goes the organization. In a prior newsletter edition, I revealed how each stage of my PROOF model presents a distinct barrier. Here, I’d like to reveal the various roles a CEO must play in order to guide the organization to break down that barrier.

Here’s a brief overview of the roles:

• Operator. The CEO must roll up their sleeves and personally perform the most fundamental work in an effective and quality manner.
• Engineer. The CEO thinks about the end-to-end steps in a given process, the required actions and capabilities of individuals throughout the sequence and measures of efficiency.
• Orchestra Conductor. Well removed from the actual doing at this point, the CEO must take a systems-level view of the work by seamlessly integrating complex operations that both support and enhance one another.
• Camp Counselor. The CEO stokes the inherent drive, will and commitment of the organization toward the collective work to be done.
• Coach. The focus here is on helping workers design and implement a holistic wellness mindset as well as the constructive behaviors and habits required to maintain peak health.
• Guidance Counselor. The CEO ensures that workers are able to experience a sense of individual purpose and see how their local efforts are aligned with their personal values.
• Sage. At this stage, the CEO serves in a capacity beyond self-interest. They entrain the entire organization’s attention and energy toward external concerns, aims and benefits by creating a business that “does well and does good.”

If it seems like a lot, it is. What’s most important is to understand various friction points in the business and to play the right part.

At this point, a logical question arises: Okay, but what if I’m not the CEO?

I’ve often heard the maxim, “Act as if you’re the CEO of your area of responsibility.” This may be a bit glib, but it turns out that it’s not terrible advice. If you're a first-level manager, for example, you may not be able to influence systems-level problems and you may not be fully comfortable helping others find their purpose (as you may not have fully found yours yet!), but you can still don your Coach or your Engineer hat and have a significant impact on the work and your workers.

Common executive lapses

There are several potential pitfalls along the progression:

• Stalled progress. If a CEO has failed to embrace the roles required on the Path of People, the workforce likely won’t have the energy or interest to fully address earlier Production stage issues.
• Misalignment. The mindset, attention and effort need to match the stage or issue at hand. Taking an Engineer approach when considering the worker wellness aspects of a decision or policy is an example of a mismatch tied up in the Return to Office debate, for example.
• Mistrust. Many executive teams simply don’t believe that addressing the human needs of the workforce or embracing a higher-order mission is necessary to realize their limited definition of success.
• Doubt. Other executives quietly want all of these things but lack confidence in their own ability to make them happen.
• Headwinds. When any organization faces challenges—economic dips, loss of a key customer, appearance of quality issues—downward pressure ensues and there’s a reversion to earlier stages.
• Change. Nothing about our world of work is static, and change stirs up its own inner, interpersonal and technical obstacles. A large-scale change like a shift in generational values or a highly localized shift like the introduction of a new team member can both create challenges.

Executives need leadership (+ love) too

If it seems that I’m placing a lot at the feet of executives, I am. Leaders have a responsibility to act in accordance with their ability, and executives have a heightened ability compared to individual contributors. We simply need our executives to embrace their opportunity to lead us properly.

Having said that, it takes all of us.

I have a tremendous amount of empathy for executives, and in my view, you should too. They need our help to support, endorse, and reinforce their beliefs, decisions, and investments when those are sincere and true. We need to recognize the personal strain they can experience when trying to lead us while under the direction of their own boss (typically a Board of Directors) and faced with too few resources, and too many competing interests. Executives are every bit as deserving of compassion as any of us, up and down and inside or outside the organization.

We can’t be content to stuff our opportunity for next-level impact into the closet as I once did with my toys as a young boy. We may be tempted to narrow our focus and claim success, but in our conscience, we know better. True leadership is about doing the whole job and bringing our people along with us to be a part of that journey.

Explicit or not, this is what we’ve signed up to do. This is our opportunity and our responsibility as leaders.

~~

Thanks for taking the time to read my monthly newsletter! If you have feedback for me, I’d love to hear from you. I look forward to bringing you more fresh insights from the worlds of organizational science, advanced leadership practice, and beyond.

Looking for more next-level leadership inspiration?

Choose your own adventure:

• Subscribe to this Optimal Leadership Tips newsletter.
• Follow me on LinkedIn for daily leadership tips.
• Listen to my Lead the People podcast (powered by The Predictive Index)
• Join me on an upcoming Perspectives webinar (also powered by PI).
• Read my enlightened leadership book Expand the Circle.
• Enroll in one of my graduate courses at Boston College.