Introduction
Nobody can hope to succeed without a clear strategy, an effective leadership team, and a well-defined culture.
We are not fans of cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all approaches to leadership.
The simplest questions of leadership — What is your strategy? What does success look like for your leadership team? — are often the most difficult to answer.
We’ll focus on how to lead effectively.
1. Can You Develop a Simple Plan for Your Strategy?
Simplifying complexity is a leader’s superpower.
The ability to simplify complexity is a necessary time-management tool.
Can your leaders stand up in front of their employees and, in a simple and memorable way, explain where the company is headed and why, along with a plan, timetable, and ways to measure progress along the route? This is the cornerstone of any organization.
The leader’s job is to simplify complexity, and be right.
You have to have a relevant point of difference for the consumer.
The role of the simple plan is to help address two questions that every employee deserves an answer to: What should I be working on? Why is it important?
You have to convey your priorities clearly and repeatedly. “This is where we want to be. This is how we’re going to get there.”
Intel created an approach called OKRs. Salesforce’s Marc Benioff created his V2MOM framework.
We have found the most useful framework is an approach that Dinesh Paliwal, the former CEO of Harman International, developed. What is the goal, the core message, in one line? What are the three key actions we’re taking? What are the three key challenges? And how do we measure success in twelve months?
One of the most important questions is whether the best people are working on the most critical projects.
Ensuring that top talent is working on key organizational priorities is essential, and most companies simply overlook this fundamental fact.
Finally, you need a way to measure progress. What’s the scoreboard?
1.1. Focus on Outcomes, Rather Than Priorities
What are the three or four things that, if we accomplish them over the next twelve months, will make this a good year?
Priorities have to be geared to a specific outcome in mind. And they have to be measurable, but they don’t always have to be quantitative.
Your strategy is a bridge to the future.
The vision you have painted is vivid and clear.
When you create a very structured alignment, then you can get this whole ship moving through the water at a very good speed.
1.2. Edit Ruthlessly
Can you create a vision that the frontline person can understand, and see how they fit into it?
The strategy and the business can be complex, but you have to explain them in a way that’s really easy to understand.
1.3. Make Yourself Uncomfortable
The simple plan should be ambitious enough to prompt a collective “can we really get there?” gulp by the team.
1.4. Beware of “Expert-itis”
Another reason people can get lost in expert-itis is that there is a sense of job security in complexity.
What is your one-page plan?
1.5. Test It
Pressure-test the plan with key focus groups, including employees and, if you’re the CEO, perhaps key directors.
Now you need to live a key principle of leadership: there is no such thing as overcommunication.
You have to repeat the simple plan relentlessly, no matter how redundant the messaging may feel to you.
“If you don’t communicate, people will make up narratives themselves, and they may be negative.”
Prepare to be teased for endlessly repeating the strategy.
2. Can You Make the Culture Real—and Matter?
It’s about walking the talk.
Building a strong culture is a leadership imperative, another crucial test that will determine whether they succeed.
The top leaders must own and model the values, so that there is no gap between what they say and what they do.
You can’t force a culture.
It is the CEO’s job. You can’t outsource it to HR or do a companywide poll. It’s your job to own the process.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has long evangelized the idea of “Day 1” thinking to remind employees to approach their work every day as if they were building a startup.
At Microsoft, Satya Nadella has challenged the company to move from a culture of “know it alls” to a culture of “learn it alls,” crystallizing the ideas of fixed-versus-growth mindsets.
Lars Kolind, a Danish entrepreneur and author who wrote Unboss. Its simple point is that teams are best positioned to come up with solutions, so the leader’s job is to support them rather than telling them what to do.
SendGrid had its own four values of hungry, happy, honest, and humble.
2.1. Twilio came up with a refreshed list of ten values:
Be an owner.
Empower others.
No shenanigans.
Wear the customer’s shoes.
Write it down.
Ruthlessly prioritize.
Be bold.
Be inclusive.
Draw the owl.
Don’t settle.
The actual words are less important than whether top leaders model them and continually reinforce and bring them to life
Twilio hands out “Superb Owl” awards to employees who have been role models for the values.
Culture is the responsibility of the CEO and senior leaders
Perceptions of the culture among employees must be measured through periodic all-staff anonymous surveys.
3. Can You Build Teams That Are True Teams?
They are the key to driving the strategy.
3.1. What Is the Purpose of the Team?
To work together on tasks and setting priorities that are best executed as a team.
Prioritization is notoriously hard for teams.
You simply can’t do everything.
3.2. Who Should Be on the Team?
Even in really good companies, you’ll find you only have 75 percent of the right people. In really bad ones, it’s probably only 25 percent.
The team itself can work together to decide what good looks like by developing a shared set of criteria to evaluate the performance of every member on the team.
3.3. How Will the Team Work Together?
Corporations are a team sport.
At Harman International, Dinesh Paliwal used pay structures to send a clear signal that collaboration matters. At the highest levels of the company, executives’ bonuses were tied 100 percent to the overall performance of Harman.
The key to a high-performance team is having high-trust-based relationships, having a series of operating principles or a social contract, and then a commitment to each other to keep those up.
There are really only two kinds of days—ones when your team gets better and ones when your team gets worse.
3.4. What Is the Leader’s Role on the Team?
Here are some of the key responsibilities that come up time and again across conversations with hundreds of CEOs.
Psychological Safety
Clear Agendas
Clear Rules of Debate
Inclusive Conversations
Coaching
Talent Scout
Grooming a Successor
The top three keys to success are the team you build, the team you build, and the team you build.
4. Can You Lead Transformation?
The status quo is enormously powerful, and it is the enemy of change.
Transformation is now a fixture of every leader’s job description.
Employees tend to prefer sameness over uncertainty.
No single playbook can address the unique challenges that each company faces.
Enlist allies to build an unassailable case for the need to change.
Clarify what is not going to change, particularly mission and purpose.
Engage your team.
Be transparent and communicate relentlessly.
Ensure commitment is shared by the CEO and the top leadership team.
Acknowledge the uncertainty but reinforce the certainty of the need to change.
4.1. The New York Times Company
You are not going to succeed as a CEO if you try to impose a set of ideas or a new culture on Day 1.
A key lesson for any company attempting its own state of the union report is that it should include only unassailable facts.
Communication is often the last item on the checklist but it’s always the most important.
Mission should never be tinkered with. You mess with mission at your own risk. Tradition needs to be constantly interrogated.
Leaders need to be crystal clear about their company’s reason for being.
Once you’re able to articulate your reason for being and what’s not going to change, that needs to be communicated really aggressively throughout the company.
Uncertainty has to be acknowledged and addressed head-on.
We are going to try some things that will work, and we will try some things that won’t work.
4.2. Amgen
Pressing for change is always harder when things are going well,
Transformations can be serial events, but if done right, they turn into long-term continuous improvement.
4.3. BetterCloud
What if your entire business model suddenly comes into question? Such existential threats require wholesale transformation, magnifying the challenges and accelerating the timetables for change.
Startup CEOs should share the dark moments they face so that they can all learn from each other.
“I think it’s important as an entrepreneur to be open about the challenges, and not trying to live the Instagram life of only the really, really good things.”
It was a clarifying moment to realize who was willing to sign up for what turned out to be a two-year challenge, with no certainty that the plan would work.
“The only people who were willing to stay on were people who wanted that challenge and that risk.
To keep people feeling as if they were making progress, even if the ultimate goal seemed far off, he adopted a strategy of celebrating small wins.
We told everyone that we have to cut out anything that is not targeted at getting this platform out or selling the existing platform so that we continue to grow revenue.
Rally everyone around: to sign up a hundred customers for the new platform.
Enlist allies to build the case for change.
Be clear about what is not going to change.
Be transparent and communicate relentlessly.
Ensure commitment is shared by top leaders to implement the plan,
Acknowledge the uncertainty while balancing it with the confidence in the team,
5. Can You Really Listen?
Danger signals can be faint, and bad news travels slowly.
The art of listening for leaders is one part mindset—the discipline of pushing aside all distractions and judgments in the moment to listen purely for comprehension—and one part commitment to create systems and processes on all fronts to elevate the idea of “active listening” to one of hypervigilance.
When the leader asks questions, the default response is often a two thumbs-up, “Everything’s great, boss!”
Leaders often trap themselves in information bubbles, a result of their confidence and outdated ideas about leadership.
The single defining characteristic of every underperforming company we went after was that the CEO had walled himself off from any kind of skepticism.
As you get higher in the organization, it gets tougher to get people to be honest with you.
So how do leaders break through the bubble?
Tell your team: “You have a responsibility to help me actively work the blind spot. You’ve got to bring the truth forward. You’ve got to speak with candor. We have to have that level of trust.”
If you get bad news early, you can react faster, and that reaction time is precious.
If you really want to know what’s going on, you get out there and you listen to folks on the front lines.
Listening for danger signals is crucial, but it’s just as important to listen for signals about opportunities.
Do regular surveys of the leadership team about what they think of your performance.
6. Can You Handle a Crisis?
Avoid the predictable mistakes that trip up so many leaders.
it’s a safe bet that some other crisis is going to turn the world upside down over the next decade or so.
Leading through a crisis is a kind of final exam of all the tests.
If you’ve established a simple plan, fostered a strong culture, developed a cohesive team, and built an ecosystem to ensure you’re hearing important signals, you’re much more likely to better weather the next crisis.
Your team will be looking to you, as the leader, to be calm, confident, and credible,
6.1. Show Up and Be Human
In these moments, it’s important for leaders to show their human side.
Leaders need to be more visible than usual during times of crisis, because they need to set the tone through their words, deeds, and body language.
Employees want a confident leader, but they also want to see their human side.
6.2. Capitalize on the Urgency
Many of the core business skills that companies typically struggle with—prioritization, speed of decision making, and innovation—become much easier in a crisis.
6.3. Embrace the Ambiguity
Employees have to know that you’re giving them accurate information, including what you know and don’t know.
Barbara Khouri, a veteran of six turnarounds:
“You have to know when to laugh and when to take things seriously. In turnarounds, you need more prioritizing, more connection with others, more humanity, more trust, more communication, more clarity, more transparency, and more willingness to be there for people. But there is also less of a need for perfection and for having all the data before you make a decision.”
6.4. Reimagine Your Organization
If we were building the company today from scratch, what would we do differently?
Our job as managers and leaders is to create that belief around what’s possible, so everyone stays focused.
Five critical pieces of advice:
Act fast.
Communicate widely.
Fix the root cause of the problem.
Stay calm and project confidence.
Crises are a brutal test of leadership, and many executives don’t survive them.
7. Can You Master the Inner Game of Leadership?
The conflicting demands and challenges must be managed.
It’s possible to balance compassion and accountability.
You have to be who you are.
Leadership is a series of contradictions.
Here are seven other paradoxes that are hallmarks of a leader’s life
7.1. Be Confident and Humble
7.2. Be Urgent and Patient
7.3. Be Compassionate and Demanding
People do their best work when they are treated more like volunteers than mercenaries.
7.4. Be Optimistic and Realistic
The best approach is to let people know about the big challenges (ideally paired with a plan for addressing them) while not overwhelming them.
7.5. Read the Weather and Set the Weather
Read the room but also set the tone.
7.6. Create Freedom and Structure
You’re not going to get a big, game-changing idea from trying to do what you’re doing now,
7.7. The very best leaders are selfless
7.8 Acknowledge the Pressures
The amount of responsibility you carry around on your back is unbelievable.
7.9. Keep Your Ego in Check
For those who tend to take themselves too seriously, all those signals can conspire to inflate their egos.
7.10. Focus on a Few Achievable Goals
The best time-management strategy I have,” said Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach For America, “is to reflect an hour a week on the overall strategic plan for myself.”
7.11. Try to Make Yourself Dispensable
Work on making yourself obsolete rather than being considered as essential.
Try to set the priorities and assemble a team so you wake up in the morning and actually have nothing to do.
7.12. Recharge Yourself
You must build time into your schedule to stay physically fit.