Why is it important to intentionally invest in developing leaders across levels?

Talent is attracted to organizations with great leaders – talent knows they’ll grow more and perform better in organizations with strong leaders. However, most organizations don’t have enough great leaders, and talent will eventually leave if they think they can find better leadership and mentorship somewhere else. 

Great leaders multiply the talent in organizations – failing to develop leaders means your organization has untapped potential. Great leadership drives productivity and engagement gains through simple but powerful skills, like: setting clear expectations, navigating ambiguity, building clear vision, and situational coaching.

Strong job performance doesn’t guarantee leadership skills – someone can be good at their job without having the capacity to become a great leader. Leadership, like any muscle, must be developed and maintained, not taken for granted.

What are the most important components of great leaders?

Leaders with these four qualities will have the strongest impact on organizational performance:

• Compelling vision – leaders need a clear vision for where they want to go and how that will impact the organization. The vision must motivate people to believe in a version of the organization that doesn’t yet exist.
• Self-awareness and empathy – self-awareness is the prerequisite for having empathy for your team. If someone lacks self-awareness, they can’t develop the interpersonal skills that are critical for leadership. 
• Communication effectiveness – leaders must be clear, caring, and set clear expectations. Good communicators work cross-functionally and tailor their communication styles based on the situation and the audience. 
• Business acumen – in order to make good decisions for the organization, leaders must have strong business skills and understand how their work impacts the business. 

Create a Compelling Vision

What is the process for creating a compelling vision statement for your company?

Leadership must start with the big picture and distill that vision into a one-liner that is easy to understand – there are four steps to this process, and each step revolves around a key question.

Steps	Notes
1. Understand what priority matters most  to the company	Align on the company’s north star – the reason the company exists. This is an opportunity to focus on true priorities and step back from the day-to-day concerns of running a business.
2. Understand what’s changing as you progress to your goal.	Some call this the “burning platform”. Evaluate where the company is today, and where it’s going. By asking what you want stakeholders to say about the business in three years (and noting the gaps between that future and the current state), you can identify what needs to change.
3. Figure out what has to happen to accomplish your vision.	The organization needs a clear path to bring this future vision to life. This can be a list of “from-to” shifts.
4. Refine it into a one-liner.	To make sure everyone is aligned on what matters most, distill the future vision into one line that will be shared throughout the organization.

Vision statements get worked into the organization at 3 levels:

• Strategic level – where you want to be in the future state. This is an opportunity to take a step back and plan for transformational changes.
• Operational level – breaks the 3-to-5-year vision into clear priorities that ladder up to the critical transformational shifts that will bring your vision to life. 
• Tactical level – the day-to-day, week-to-week execution that in turn ladders up to the operational priorities. This should be planned by the people doing the work

What does a strong vision statement look like?

Clear and concise – a vision statement should reflect the essence of what you’re trying to do. It should include the most important elements of your vision without being “cluttered” by unnecessary words.

Easy to visualize– vision statements make big ideas easy to understand. If you can’t visualize your vision based on the vision statement, then it needs to be more tactical. 

Inclusive but not vague – vision statements must be broad enough that they still apply to your business even if your product changes in the future. However, they can’t be so vague that they could apply to any business. 

Prime Example: Google’s Vision

“To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

How should a vision statement be “lived” throughout an organization and its individuals?

Every employee should feel connected to the vision – every individual needs to understand why the organization’s vision exists. This connection can also come from feeling a sense of ownership of the vision. 

Reshare the vision every time the team gets together – by consistently acknowledging the vision, you reinstate its importance and remind employees that the projects they’re working on are important. 

Organizational goals should tie back to the vision – it’s easier for employees to understand how their work drives the vision forward if their goals are clearly related to the vision. This also helps managers ensure that employees are working on the right things.

Developing Self-Awareness and Empathy

What are the benefits of self-awareness and empathy in company managers?

They are the basis of every important business decision – decision-makers need a high EQ because businesses are about people. Every business decision has personal implications.  Empathy for customers, shareholders, boards, employees, or other stakeholders should always factor into the decision-making process.

How do you put empathy into action?

Self-awareness is a prerequisite for empathy – if you can’t understand yourself and regulate how you handle stress, it’s difficult to be a good leader for your employees. Effective leaders are able to distance themselves from their own internal experiences and use empathy to work well with others. 

Empathetic leaders can influence behavior by leveraging pain points and gain points – since people make decisions based on emotion, leaders who leverage empathy have an easier time directing the behavior of others. Two types of emotional “triggers” drive people to action:

• Pain points – things that frustrate people.
• Gain points – things that energize people. These are likely related to an individual’s core values.

Leaders should accentuate gain points and minimize pain points in order to motivate others – leaders become talent multipliers when they understand how to effectively mobilize their teams. Leaders should always know the pain and gain points for their direct reports and for the people they collaborate with.

Finding Your Core Values

Why are core values important?

When people live their values, they’re energized and are motivated to perform better – when core values are compromised, people become stressed and less productive. Core values can play a key role in improving performance. 

Core values help people define their leadership purpose – knowing their true purpose can empower individuals to become better leaders and provide direction for their professional development.

How do you find your core values?

Look back on the moments in your life that are the most meaningful to you – These should include the highest highs and the lowest lows. 

Look forward and visualize what a fulfilled life looks like 10 years from now – picture where you want your life to go, what you’re doing in the future, and what is bringing meaning into that future. 

Look at the present and what effects you – think about what stresses you out the most, and when you feel energized or “in the flow” of something. 

Pick from a list of 100 words correlated to your values and narrow it down to 3 – whittle down the long list using insights from the important moments and common threads you identified during the earlier part of this process, choosing the 10 most important words from the list. Next, narrow those down to 5 and then 3. These should represent the core values that matter most to you.

Communication Effectiveness

What are the keys to effective communication from leaders and managers?

Leaders create trust by building a foundation of good communication – trust is the unspoken currency of an organization. Creating a feedback culture is one way to build trust and help people feel comfortable communicating across different levels of an organization.

Keys	Notes
Develop Listening skills	Reflective listening is the most important skill for a leader – great listening is an active process. By repeating what you’ve heard back to someone, you allow them to feel heard and tell you where you’re wrong. This motivates the employee and helps you check any bias you might have that could prevent you from understanding what your employee is trying to communicate.
Develop Storytelling skills	Develop storytelling skills to communicate more effectively – most communication that occurs in 1:1s and day-to-day meetings involves storytelling. Leaders who hone their storytelling skills can make countless interactions more productive. People are 22x more likely to remember something they learn in a story vs through a list of facts. Stories draw on emotion, and since people make decisions through emotions, storytelling is a powerful way to inspire others.
Build a culture of feedback	Build a culture that encourages feedback – leaders should consistently ask for feedback and be clear about how that feedback is used. By being transparent and humble about the process of giving and receiving feedback, managers can lead by example and make exchanging feedback a more approachable process.  Give contextualized feedback – feedback should focus on specific actions (or inactions), not an individual. Use examples and discuss results, strategies, and specific behaviors.

What are the pillars of strong storytelling?

Effective stories have four pillars:

• A clear message – the core takeaway. This is the reason you’re telling the story. 
• Relevant tension – the stakes or cost of inaction. This can create urgency and help show your audience why the story you’re telling matters. Relevant tension is what gets people to support your ideas. 
• Emotional impact and engagement – emotions influence actions, so your story should inspire the actions that you want your audience to take after you’ve told the story. Stories can evoke two main emotional responses—you might use one or both to drive impact:
• “Devil’s cocktail” – if you want to drive action, you can tap into the “fight or flight” instinct to cause people to feel stressed or uncomfortable.  
• “Angel’s cocktail” – if you want to make people feel good, you can play into feel-good endorphins (like dopamine) to generate goodwill and affection. 
• Authenticity – a story only works if it sounds like something the speaker would naturally say. The same story shouldn’t sound the same coming from different people. This genuine approach to storytelling helps build trust in the leader. 

Business Acumen

How can you democratize ownership of decisions across your organization?

Provide exposure training for leaders – many leaders don’t understand how other parts of the business work. Leaders need to be aware of how their decisions impact others and how internal processes can either create friction or synergy.  

Allow people lower in the organization to own decisions – many organizations struggle to let people deeper into the organization’s own decisions, even though they want to. Exposure training will also help leaders delegate ownership of some decisions. 

Help leaders and employees understand how their work directly impacts the company strategy – tie individual-level priorities to the company’s short term strategy to help people feel a sense of ownership around driving the company forward.

How can you get managers and leaders familiar with and acting on the metrics that matter most to your business?

Onboarding processes should include KPIs and important aspects of the business –leaders should be exposed to the tools they need to make important business decisions from day 1. New hires should understand the company strategy and important cross-functional processes. 

Tangible training in business acumen – have leaders work through cross-functional case studies or run through simulations as a team. The collaborative nature of these sessions helps leaders see problems and opportunities from other points of view.

Upskill financial acumen – leaders at all levels should know the key drivers of the levers of your value creation model. Eventually, leaders will need to make decisions with financial implications. They can make better decisions and lead with more confidence if they’ve developed their financial skills. 

A customer lifecycle map can give employees exposure to and understanding of the customer’s journey – it helps show employees the roles of different functions and teams at each stage of the customer lifecycle and where they intersect. This helps build business acumen and understanding across teams.

Overall

What are the most important things to get right for a manager?

For managers:

• Managers must take ownership of their own development – change is planned at the global level, but an individual can only develop if they have some amount of internal motivation. You can’t force people to do anything.
• Prioritize both short-term goals and long-term aspirations for managers – leaders should always be thinking about their long-term aspirations and calibrating those against the company’s immediate needs. Leaders need to develop the skills that are necessary in the short term without neglecting to build skills that they will use in the future.

For a leadership development program:

• Build programs around the skills that matter most for your business – profile the great leaders in your organization and identify the things they do very well. Your program should develop others to excel in those areas. 
• Help leaders understand their communication styles and strengths – this exercise can help build empathy while ensuring that leaders know what they need to do to set themselves up for future growth. 
• Design your program for a variety of learning styles – development programs should fit the needs of all types of learners. Including a variety of formats will also improve engagement. 
• Think of leadership development as a marathon, not a sprint – this process is a journey that requires support for an extended period of time. Beyond program sessions, managers should help leaders continue to build on the skills they’re learning.

What are common pitfalls?

Companies can undermine their leadership development programs by failing to prioritize them when other aspects of the business become stressful – if you don’t consistently prioritize leadership development, then the organization won’t prioritize it, either. These programs are the most effective if they are consistently prioritized by the entire organization.  

Outdated training approaches can prevent you from getting the most out of the program – the way we approach leadership development has evolved over the past 20 years. Even if your company’s traditional leadership development program has worked in the past, it can be helpful to keep the material fresh and relevant.