Executive coaching blog
Leadership Values – The most common failures of leadership occur for a few simple reasons:
- Leadership Failure #1: They are more focused on activity than outcomes – common sense holds that the value of outcomes and results is always significantly greater than the value of activities. However, too many leaders fail to establish high leadership values with meaningful outcomes for their people to focus on, and substitute doing a lot of activities.
- Leadership Failure #2: They are not clear about what is most important to focus on – As the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland said to Alice: “If you don’t know where you are going, then any path will do.” This is the kiss of death for effectiveness, focus, and high productivity in an organization, and directly ties to leadership’s failure to clarify what is most important and valuable for their people to focus on. This often reinforces and results in below average leadership values and Leadership Failure #1.
- Leadership Failure #3: They are not aligned as a leadership team – When the leaders of an organization have no agreement and alignment as a team, the rest of the organization is multiples more confused and in disarray as their leaders. The axiom in manufacturing is that correcting a problem after it leaves the assembly line is 10 times as expensive as correcting it before it is sent to consumers. The same ratio is applicable to unclear and misaligned leadership values and leadership teams: If the leaders are unclear, their managers are 10 times as unclear. If the managers are unclear, their people are 10 times as unclear. Unclear leaders produce magnitudes of confusion, lack of focus, waste of time, and other terribly unproductive syndromes in their organizations.
- Leadership Failure #4: Common sense does not match common practice – OPTIMIZE International’s trademarked ‘New 80 – 20 Rule’ goes like this: “80% of success is common sense. Less than 20% of the people are using it!” While that is both funny and quite true in our experience, it is not how most leaders function. When common sense is different than their common practice, leaders are doomed to ineffectiveness, excessive activity without commensurate results, and a failure to harness the best talents and capabilities of their people and organization.
- Leadership Failure #5: They lack ‘Strategic Alignment’™ – Clear leadership values would have the goals of an organization always be driven by and aligned with the vision of the future and their mission. Their strategies should always be driven by and serve achieving the goals. That means the vision and mission drive the goals, and the goals drive the strategies – this is what I mean by Strategic Alignment™. Lacking a clear, compelling, well-communicated vision and mission for their organization, many leaders settle for making up goals and focusing on strategies, devoid of alignment with a vision and mission. This is always inadequate for providing clarity of decision making – at any level of the organization. It means leaders will always be ‘in the weeds’ trying to direct small scale decisions, and their people lack the capacity to make meaningful decisions and align their actions with what is most important – because they don’t know what it is. This kind of leader and company will always under-perform any Strategically Aligned™ organization.
Strong executive coaching and development positions you to succeed personally and interpersonally in your organization. Develop your unique leadership style – and you’ll leap forward into success. Learn more about leadership values and strengthen your leadership strategy in your organization today.
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Steve Lishansky is the founder and President of Optimize International. He is recognized as a leader in the fields of building high-value relationship skills, executive coaching and development, and improving organizational alignment and performance.
My insights and effectiveness on leadership and leadership team effectiveness comes from years of studying those who are highly successful, why they are successful, and those who never realize their potential. The most effective leaders have one thing in common, which I have named “Three Dimensional Effectiveness.”
Personally – The driving force of personal effectiveness is the quality of an individual’s fulfillment. That is driven by how clear and congruent they are about who they are, why they are doing what they are doing, and what is most important to them.
The most fulfilled people are usually the most effective people.
Inter-Personally – The driving force of inter-personal effectiveness, contrary to what most people think, is not communications or listening. Rather, the most significant driving force is the value that you create in your relationships. The more value in a relationship, the more effective it is. This frame of reference shifts the understanding of what really matters inter-personally, and creates the most valuable and effective relationships.
Organizationally – The driving force of organizational effectiveness is leadership. Nothing else affects the success or failure of any group more than the quality of its leadership. I am not speaking about a position or title of leadership – I am speaking about the practice of leadership, which can be done by anyone. The power of leadership is to articulate a clear and powerful mission and vision of the future that is compelling in the present, and which people eagerly enroll in and support accomplishing.
The best organizations always have highly effective leaders.
In order to be the best leader you can be, try working on whichever area you feel weakest. Nothing is going to change until you do something about it. If you are looking to motivate leaders in your own company into being the best they can be, I would be happy to set up a time to talk with them! Contact The Optimizer and let’s set something up!
Steve Lishansky is the founder and President of Optimize International. He is recognized as a leader in the fields of building high-value relationship skills, executive coaching and development, and improving organizational alignment and performance.
Executive Coaching
One of the most amazing things about organizations is how little most executive teams and organizations produce relative to the quality, intelligence, effort, and experience of their leadership. That causes caring, hard-working, well-intentioned executives to produce a fraction of what we – and they – know they are capable of producing.
The keys are usually the following:
- Leadership – This is the most powerful and profound predictor of the success of a team or organization – yet the least well defined, understood or developed critical skill in our organizations todayCheck it out: Get your key executives to define leadership – without dropping into descriptions of competencies or other corporate speak. My experience is that 90% of the high quality executives I have worked with cannot do this in a compelling way that can be communicated easily throughout their own organizations. What does that say about the practice of leadership?
- Lack of Alignment – The lack of executive team alignment and focus is another key deficit among most executive teams.Check it out: Ask your top five officers what the primary mission(s) and the three most critical objectives of their organization is. I will bet money that if you did this with the top five executives of 1000 companies – large and small – 90% of them would fail this focus and alignment test.
- Focused Productivity – The substitution of activity for outcomes in most organizations. Too many people are doing too much that adds up to very little.
Check it out: How many times have you heard some executive say: “We need to do more with less.” How insane is that when you consider the quality of results being produced by people doing a lot of activity, yet producing far less results than we would expect?
My suggestion to the most intelligent and open leaders: “Do less that means more.” i’ll let you judge which makes more sense…
My passion is getting leaders and their executive teams clear and focused on what is most important and able to produce a profound impact on what matters most for their organizations. This blog is going to be about what works, and what to avoid. I’ll be posting executive coaching tips frequently, so be sure to check back regularly.
I want to connect with you! If you have any executive training questions, comments of blog suggestions, let me know http://www.optimizeintl.com/contact.html and I’ll try to get back to you as quickly as possible.
Steve Lishansky is the founder and President of Optimize International. He is recognized as a leader in the fields of building high-value relationship skills, executive coaching and development, and improving organizational alignment and performance.
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