During my 18 years in the executive hot seat answering to a Board of Directors, I received a lot of great advice from my professional colleagues, from my Board members — many of whom held similar leadership roles in industry and academia — and from published experts in the field. Here, I’ve listed the five pieces of advice that I think were most critical to my longevity and success.
1. The Buck Stops Here
President Harry Truman was famous for his leadership style of personal responsibility and accountability, epitomized by the sign “The Buck Stops Here” that he kept on the presidential desk. Being a leader is ultimately about taking responsibility. Take ownership of your team, their performance, and the problems that will inevitably arise from time to time, often for reasons beyond your control.
Don’t redirect criticisms to your staff or try to shift blame to others. As the leader, you are responsible for the problem — and for fixing it. Explaining why things went wrong is not going to help diffuse the situation, because the people you answer to only want to know that you’re on top of it and the problem will be fixed. Leading by example and owning your leadership role builds respect for your leadership, and loyalty within your team.
2. Measure It and It Will Improve, But Be Careful What You Measure
“Measure it and it will improve” is Peter Drucker’s fundamental management theorem, based on the premise that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” While adopting that basic philosophy, it quickly became obvious to me that I had to be very careful about what I measured.
Drucker emphasizes using goals that are quantifiable, while acknowledging that certain aspects of leadership can’t be easily measured. In my learned experience, meaningful goals focus on specific program or business outcomes that are tangible and measurable, but it is critical that they are aligned with the strategic goals and vision of the program or business. Finally, they must be time-bound to ensure accountability and enable performance monitoring.
The “be careful what you measure” addition to Drucker’s advice is about ensuring the performance goals you set will drive the business results and strategic outcomes you’re looking for. It’s very easy to set performance goals that don’t really drive the desired business outcomes. You can meet or beat a revenue target, but still lose money if you’re not controlling your expenses. If controlling expenses is your priority goal, then you can disincentivize initiatives that can improve overall outcomes with incremental expenditures (i.e. the costs of doing business). Setting a goal or target to do “X” rarely incentivizes 2xX or 3xX results. But if you set the bar too high, your performers may conclude that the goal is unrealistic and underperform their potential. You can also confuse your priorities by setting too many goals or not weighting them properly.
3. Focus on the Issue, Not the Person
Focus on the issue, not the person is one of Steven Covey’s famous Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which is usually expanded to include “focus on the issue, situation or behavior.” It applies to inter-personnel relationships and your role as a leader in dealing with occasionally challenging problems, ideas, feedback or performance issues. The point of the advice is to prioritize maintaining constructive personal relationships with your team and employees, and to encourage initiative, idea-sharing and positive change.
The “how-to” advice starts with avoiding assigning blame or making personal attacks, and instead focusing on finding solutions. One technique is to use “I“ statements to express your feelings and beliefs when making responses, while avoiding the use of “you” entirely. Using the first-person pronoun “I” allows you to express yourself and communicate your needs without blaming or criticizing others. Communicating with “you” creates defensiveness and hinders a productive outcome to the conversation.
Another critical aspect of effective leadership is the importance of listening. People seldom listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply. It is obvious when this is happening, which leads the speaker to feel disrespected and unheard. This can also result in mishearing and misunderstanding, if you tune out important inputs as your brain is working on the reply.
By approaching a difficult situation with a problem-solving mindset, listening, staying objective and focusing on facts, you can ensure clear and constructive communication, and foster the trust and respect that is required to resolve this issue and the future issues that will inevitably occur.
4. Don’t Miss the Forest for the Trees
Being a leader responsible for driving a mission or vision requires strategic vision and awareness. Under the pressure of daily demands, it is very easy to get lost in the tactical minutiae of the job as you focus on today’s problems and deadlines and lose track of that strategic vision.
The Forest and Trees metaphor has two important contexts. The first relates to problem solving and systems thinking. If you are focused on solving a particular problem without understanding the broader strategic and operational implications of your solution, you risk creating a solution that doesn’t drive strategic business outcomes, or that can actually create more problems in other parts of the operation.
The other context is about situational awareness and understanding the competitive landscape. If you don’t disengage from the day-to-day focus on tactical operations and look at the overall health and positioning of the business, you can miss existential threats and rob yourself of the opportunity to survey the competitive landscape to ensure you’re still heading in the right direction. New technology, new public policy, new consumer trends, new competitors, and new opportunities are always just around the corner. And it behooves you to see them coming before you crash into them.
5. Take Time to Sharpen the Saw
The metaphor of “sharpening the saw ” is another Covey classic, which emphasizes the importance of self-care and renewal. The idea is you are maintaining and improving your most important tool — yourself. If you don’t take time to focus on your needs, you risk burnout and inefficiency.
It starts with keeping yourself physically health and mentally fresh. It’s not just about your morning workout or using your vacation allowance (you should), but also about managing workload and living a healthy lifestyle that keeps you energized and in balance.
It is also about making time to have meaningful social connections with others and to invest time into learning, reading, writing and sharing your newly acquired knowledge. Covey also emphasizes a spiritual component, which he describes broadly as spending time in nature, expanding spiritual self through meditation, music, art, prayer, or service.
How much time you need to invest in sharpening the saw will depend on your own particular circumstances. As I got older, I found it more difficult to sustain the high levels of energy required by the business cycle, and found that pacing myself and reserving blocks of time in my schedule for “sharpening the saw” was important to sustain output and retain a capacity for burst productivity when needed.
Concluding Notes
This list could easily be expanded to 10, 20 or more pieces of advice that have helped me at various points in my career. These five, however, I found to be universal and applicable on almost a daily basis. Master these basics and you will have built a foundation for personal leadership success.
