Bare Minimum Leadership

Happy Friday,

There’s no need to make leadership more complicated than it is. Distill it to its essence and what remains is the ability to influence people to care about the organization and its mission. 

The better the leader, the more people care. The more people care, the more they commit to the organization’s success, and many good things result $$$.

Yes, leadership also includes vision-setting, decision-making, problem-solving, and management. But if nobody cares, these things are already compromised and mostly moot.

The bare minimum expectation for every person with a title should be ‘to influence people to care about the organization and its mission’. Because in the absence of a stated minimum, there is no minimum. What's acceptable then? Employee indifference? Regular employee departures? And what's the motivation for leaders to become more influential, better leaders?

If a ‘leader’ is causing people to care less rather than more, they aren’t even leading, they’re driving people away. That's the opposite of leadership. So by definition, a leader must cause people to care more, or they aren’t even a leader.

Every organization paying people to lead should simply publish this easy-to-understand, minimum leadership threshold in writing. "To retain your leadership title you must cause people to care about the organization and its mission.” Then incentivize getting better and reward those who do it best. 

By making it an explicit (written) expectation it also becomes an implicit criterion for leadership selection. I.e., who's going to nominate someone destined to fail?Pretty elegant, right? Raise the bar further and it gets even better.

In the absence of a stated minimum, there’s no bottom to leadership performance and there's no expectation that those already having a role make any effort to improve. This is probably where your organization is now. You have management expectations and outcome expectations for each role, but no explicit expectations regarding the leadership of people.

Punchline: Before spending a lot of money on leadership training that might ultimately prove moot, publish minimum expectations for leaders in your organization. Doing that will also improve future leader selection. Then incentivize continuous improvement until leadership excellence becomes a hallmark of your firm, delivering the profit and competitive advantage it can and should.

Have a great weekend,

Dave

Feedback and blowback are certainly welcome: dave@goodnewsfriday.com

All past topics, including those related to this one, are available at @goodnewsfriday.com

This GNF was written by me, not ChatGPT, with Grammarly watching for errors.