According to Dr. Lawrence King, legendary T.E.C. Canada speaker, the role of the CEO encompasses six essential functions:
- Strategist. This function sets the future direction
of your company. The process for creating effective strategy involves a
team-centered strategic planning retreat, whereby you go off-site with
your management team, look three years out into the future, and ask the
most important strategic question: where will our future profit margins
come from? Chances are they will not come from the same place as today.
- Ambassador. Meet with your important customers and
clients once or twice a year, not for a sales call but for an informal
lunch or dinner. The idea is to get to know the customer and let them
get to know you, so that you can increase their trust in you and
establish your credibility.
- Inventor. Success in business requires finding your
customer’s pain and developing new products and services to relieve it.
The inventor function ensures that the strategic direction of the
company aligns around the customer’s pain.
- Coach. Become a teacher, coach and mentor to your
direct reports. Instill a culture of learning throughout all levels of
the organization. Your direct reports do not have your big picture
perspective, so find ways to teach it to them.
- Investor. Treat your company as an investment. Know
the market value of your business and strive to grow it. Improving
market value should direct all decisions for the business and reward the
clear focus and direction of the CEO.
- Student. Stay active in some form of continued
professional development — not just in your area of functional expertise
but as a student of leadership.
Your strategy, culture, team, stage of company and personal strengths
and weaknesses will factor in to how you divide your energy among these
roles and projects you lead. Our members have found that by being more
intentional about their roles and the time and energy they devote to
them, they are more focused and effective. They also find that these
six roles give them a useful framework to continuously and consciously
learn and adapt to their roles as their business and influences change.
by Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries
Although the ghost of the Great Man still haunts leadership
studies, most of us have recognized by now that successful organizations
are the product of distributive, collective, and complementary
leadership. The first step in putting together such a team is to
identify each member of the team’s personality makeup and leadership
style, so that strengths and competences can be matched to particular
roles and challenges. Getting this match wrong can bring misery to all
concerned and cause considerable damage.
I was once asked to facilitate in a group coaching intervention for
the leadership team at the subsidiary of a large chemical company. A
year before Kate (not her real name, the head of the subsidiary) had
been moved from head office to take charge. At head office she had
always been viewed as a person extremely insightful about personnel
decisions. Given her talents in HR, she was seen a good candidate to
sort out the mess in that particular subsidiary. It was a big leap in
terms of promotion but Kate was given a chance.
Unfortunately, I quickly realized that her tenure had been a
disaster. She may have been a good coach but didn’t have what it takes
to create greater strategic focus and execute a turnaround. A great
amount of money had been spent on consultants and on training a
workforce that had no clearer idea at the end of 12 months what they
were doing or why. What had dazzled the people at head office had been
Kate’s coaching and communication skills. She was at sea, however, in a
more operational role.
What can be done to prevent a situation like the one with Kate? There
are a number of serious leadership questionnaires that are worlds away
from the enneagrams and compatibility tests that litter the coaching
circuit. Some of these try to identify certain recurring behavior
patterns considered more or less effective in a leadership context. We
have also tests to discover whether executives are people or task
oriented, autocratic or democratic, transactional or transformational,
and variations on all of these. These sorts of questionnaire may be a
bit simplistic, but they can help point someone in the right direction
on a career or organizational path.
My own approach to leadership assessment is based on observational
studies of real leaders, mostly at the strategic apex of their
organizations. My aim is to help them see and understand that their
attitudes and interactions with people are the result of a complex
confluence of their inner theater (including relationships with
authority figures early in life), significant life experiences, examples
set by other executives, and formal leadership training.
As these influences play out over time, one typically sees a number
of recurring patterns of behavior that influence an individual’s
effectiveness within an organization. I think of these patterns as
leadership “archetypes,” reflecting the various roles executives can
play in organizations and it is a lack of fit between a leader’s
archetype and the context in which he or she operates is a main cause of
team and organizational dysfunctionality and executive failure. The
eight archetypes I have found to be most prominent are:
- The strategist: leadership as a game of chess. These people
are good at dealing with developments in the organization’s environment.
They provide vision, strategic direction and outside-the-box thinking
to create new organizational forms and generate future growth.
- The change-catalyst: leadership as a turnaround activity. These executives love messy situations. They are masters at re-engineering and creating new organizational ‘‘blueprints.’’
- The transactor: leadership as deal making. These executives are great dealmakers. Skilled at identifying and tackling new opportunities, they thrive on negotiations.
- The builder: leadership as an entrepreneurial activity. These executives dream of creating something and have the talent and determination to make their dream come true.
- The innovator: leadership as creative idea generation. These people are focused on the new. They possess a great capacity to solve extremely difficult problems.
- The processor: leadership as an exercise in efficiency. These
executives like organizations to be smoothly running, well-oiled
machines. They are very effective at setting up the structures and
systems needed to support an organization’s objectives.
- The coach: leadership as a form of people development. These executives know how to get the best out of people, thus creating high performance cultures.
- The communicator: leadership as stage management. These executives are great influencers, and have a considerable impact on their surroundings.
Working out which types of leaders you have on your team can work
wonders for your effectiveness as a group. It helps you to recognize
how you and your colleagues can individually make their best
contributions. This will in turn create a culture of mutual support and
trust, reduce team stress and conflict, and make for more creative
problem solving. It also informs your search for new additions to the
team: what kinds of personality and skills are you missing?
Kate’s story had a happy ending. The group coaching session made it
clear that the problem was not so much Kate’s lack of ability but rather
that team lacked specific leadership qualities. If the team
incorporated an executive with a strategic outlook and who had
turnaround skills and experience then Kate’s skills as a communicator
and coach would be more effectively leveraged to resolve the
subsidiary’s crisis. After talking to the head of talent management at
head office we were able to identify exactly such a person, creating a
more rounded team and helping Kate to fulfill her mandate.
At its essence, strategy is a guide to behavior. And, when
communicating your strategic intent, the most important goal is
conveying your unique aspects and advantages with specific and engaging
words.
This is hard. But, if you’re not being challenged at coming up with
an effective strategy statement, you’re not trying hard enough. Because
It is a real challenge to translate strategy into execution, this is something we must continually work at, that is, communicating strategy. Research has found that only %14 of employees understand their company’s strategy and direction.
The strategy might be flawed, but even if it’s flawed communication
will not fix the problem. That is why you have to be clear and specific.
For example, one of the most clear specific strategy statements I’ve
ever heard is from Southwest Airlines (not surprise here huh?): To be
the low-cost airline.
Everything flows from that statement. It helps clarify decision
making at every level of the organization to the point where there is no
doubt in anyone’s mind of what they have to do. To get to that point,
Southwest Airlines also had to come up with a very clear and specific
strategy.
With that said, before writing an effective strategy statement, we must get the strategy right.
Here are 6 key attributes of an effective strategy, from the book The Strategist: Be the Leader your business needs:
The 6 Hallmarks of Great Strategies
- Anchored by a clear and compelling purpose. It is
said that “if you don’t know where you’re going, there isn’t a road that
can get you there.” Organizations should exist for a reason. What’s
yours?
- Add real value. Organizations that have a
difference that matters add value. If any of them were to go away, they
would be missed. Would yours?
- Clear choices. Excellence comes
from well-defined effort. Attempting to do too many things makes it
difficult to do any of them well. What has your business decided to do?
To not do?
- Tailored system of value creation. The first step
in great execution is translating an idea into a system of action, where
efforts are aligned and mutually reinforcing. Does this describe your
business? In most companies, the true answer is no.
- Meaningful metrics. Global outcome measures like
ROI indicate whether a strategy is working, but key performance drivers,
tailored to your own strategy, are a better indication. They break big
aspirations into specific, measurable goals, and guide behavior toward
what matters.
- Passion. It’s a soft concept, but it’s at the heart
of every great strategy. Even in the most mundane industries, companies
that stand out care deeply about what they do.
