Brought to you by Jeff Thoren, DVM  

Explore most corporate or business-school curricula on leadership and you’ll find a mind-numbing list of skills that an aspiring leader must master.  Have we overcomplicated the role of a leader?  Is it possible that true leaders have a unique ability to make things simple?

According to author Marcus Buckingham, skills and competencies like motivating, communicating and managing conflict, while important, fail to get to the heart of true leadership.  So what, then, are the core concepts that mark superior leadership?

Here’s this month’s feature ...

The Clear Leader by Bill Breen

From -- Fast Company, Issue 92, March 2005

Highlights from the article:

• A leader’s job is to rally people toward a better future.  Leaders can’t help but change the present, because the present isn’t good enough.  They succeed only when they find a way to generate mutual excitement and confidence in what comes next.  With leaders, the future calls to them in a voice they can’t drown out; the future compels them to act.
    

• For a leader, the challenge is that people fear the future.  So in order to succeed, leaders must engage our fear of the unknown and turn it into spiritedness.  By far the most effective way to turn fear into confidence is to be clear -- to define the future in such vivid terms that we can see where we are headed.  Clarity is the antidote to anxiety, so if you do nothing else as a leader, be clear.  Clarity is the essence of great leadership.
    

• Be clear about whom you serve.  If we are going to follow you into the future, we need to know precisely whom we are trying to please, i.e. which audience we are serving and who will be judging our success.  It’s a scary thing to try to please all of the people all of the time, so we need leaders to help narrow our focus.
    

• Be clear about why you’re going to win.  As a leader, your job is to help people be more confident about the future.  To do that, people will need to understand how they’ll overcome the inevitable obstacles that they’ll face and what core strengths they can draw from to remain resilient, persistent, and creative along the way.  Leaders identify their organization’s core strength -- its unique edge -- and talk about it all the time.
    

• Keep your core score.  Identify the one key score that will track your progress toward a better future.  Clarity is lost if you end up looking at 15 different metrics.  It’s a terrible leadership failure to tell your employees that all of these measurements are important.  When people are presented with numerous scores, they get confused.  The job of the leaders is to say, “Of all the things we measure, this is the most important.”
    

• If you want to be clear ... act.  A leader must take action -- action consistent with the organization’s core values and mission -- action leads to impact.  People will look to see what actions you take and found their faith and confidence on them.

For the full text article, go to ...
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/92/clear-leader.html

The 20/20 Visionary

As a leader, what can you do to find the clarity your people require?  Here are three approaches that will help:

1. Take a Time-out.  Many leaders are inquisitive and comfortable with ambiguity.  But your job is to distill the world’s complexity into a vivid path to the future.  If you’re not clear in your own mind, you won’t be clear to the people who are trying to follow you.  To become clear, you have to make time to think and reflect.  You have to get away from the tyranny of “busyness” and your “to do” list.  Consider hiring a coach to facilitate this process with you.
     

2. Practice Your Storytelling.  As a leader, you must practice over and over what to say to describe the preferred future and where you’re taking people.  After you’ve found the right words, stick with them -- in conversations, in meetings, in e-mails.
     

3. Show Us Your Hero.  Your heroes -- in addition to setting your own example -- are the people in your organization who clearly embody the future.  Praising and acknowledging these employees helps people see the future more clearly.  In so doing, be specific about whom the person serves, what strengths he/she embodies, what score he/she has achieved, and what action he/she has taken.

Next Month

Success in the knowledge economy, says the prevailing wisdom, depends on attracting and retaining great people.  Not so!  The real key is to build an organization that helps all employees perform like stars.

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