Personal Leadership Effectiveness is about POWER. By power, I mean the rate at which one’s word (what one says) is made real in the world.
It is possible to improve our personal leadership effectiveness and close the gap between what we say can be accomplished and what actually is accomplished. This gap, which I call the accomplishment gap, is evident at all levels in an organization: strategic, operational, project, and individual. Although frequently blamed on a variety of factors, such as the characteristics and qualities of other people or conditions and circumstances at work, the gap is often the result of our own personal leadership effectiveness. Unfortunately, because most of us don’t want to admit that our personal leadership may be ineffective, our efforts to close the accomplishment gap are misdirected and the gap persists.
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
—Philip K. Dick
Accomplishment is the result of what we bring to the party and how effective our interactions are with others – that is, our personal leadership effectiveness. After years of research, teaching, and working with people at all levels and in all types of organizations, I have come to the determination that personal leadership effectiveness and the closing of the accomplishment gap rest on five foundations: (1) focusing on the intended outcome, (2) operating with integrity, (3) being personally accountable, (4) managing existence and infrastructure, and (5) communicating productively. When these five foundations work together in what I call the POWER Star*, personal leadership effectiveness expands and people accomplish way more of what they set out to accomplish.
THE POWER STAR
The Five Foundations of Personal Leadership Effectiveness
1. Focus on Deliverables and Agreements for Deliverables. Deliverables are the products, services, and communications that are delivered or handed over to another person, team, or organization. It is the successful delivery of these products, services, and communications that constitutes accomplishment. That is why we say “everyone is in the delivery business”. Ideally what is to be delivered and the conditions which constitute successful delivery are created in and through agreements. These agreements establish the conditions of satisfaction that must be fulfilled if the delivery is to be considered successful. Accomplishment, therefore, involves keeping an eye on the deliverables we owe (and are owed us) as well as the agreements related to those deliverables. The focus of personal leadership effectiveness is the successful delivery of deliverables consistent with the agreements regarding those deliverables.
2. Establish Integrity reminds us that honoring our word is the basis of all successful operations. It is our commitment to: (a) keep our word and do what we say we will do by when we say we will, and (b) let all the people affected by our work know promptly whenever we realize that we will not be keeping our word. Establishing Integrity is a choice we make and means that we recognize a failure to keep our word has consequences for others and that we commit to cleaning up any mess that occurs as a result of that failure.
3. Generate Accountability reminds us to “own” what happens while trying to accomplish something and to avoid the pitfall of being a victim of circumstances. Samuel and Chiche (authors of “The Power of Personal Accountability”) propose that the way people respond to the many unexpected things that happen (good and bad) in the pursuit of accomplishing a future depends on the context they choose for responding to those events. Generating Accountability is a call to engage and interact with people so as to bring accountability present in the interaction and to break the victim cycle. Rather than seeing accountability as a personal trait, characteristic, or attribute, Generating Accountability holds that accountability is created and generated between people in the myriad interactions they have with each other.
4. Communicate Productively. There are only two sets of tools available to help us deliver what we have promised. The first is the set of tools for productive communication. Productive communication is the kind that actually moves people and actions forward toward the accomplishment of intended outcomes. Four types of conversations are productive: initiative, understanding, performance, and closure conversations (see my book, “The Four Conversations: Daily Communication that Gets Results”). Initiative, Understanding, and Performance Conversations are key to creating agreements for deliverables and the actions that produce them, whereas, Closure Conversations are central to keeping and completing those agreements and setting the stage for future agreements.
5. Develop Existence and Infrastructure. The second set of tools for accomplishing intended outcomes is developing the necessary and appropriate existence and infrastructure.
• Existence tools are the ways we keep something around so that we can work on it. For example, writing down a grocery list keeps the items we want to purchase in existence. Without that list, we have to rely on our memory, which is likely to have the list go out of existence – what we call forgetting (that’s happened to you, right?). We can use an “existence tool” – a shopping list – so we can remember what to buy when we get to the store. Existence tools let us know the agreements we have made, the state of those agreements, and what needs to be done to produce and deliver the products, services, and communicated we have agreed to deliver.
• Infrastructure tools include all of equipment, systems, and procedures that we use to get things done. “Infrastructure” means “underlying foundation”, so it includes all of those things – computers, offices, email, databases, project teams, meetings, schedules, scoreboard, clock, and players map – that support us in getting our work done.
Depending on the deliverables we have committed to delivering, there may be lots of things (information, records, etc) that have to be kept in existence so that we know what has been done and what yet needs to be done. Managing the existence of a complex project can take many hours of work on the part of many people. Similarly, our ability to keep our agreements will depend in large part on the availability and appropriateness of the infrastructure we use. Both of these tool sets must be planned, implemented, and maintained appropriately throughout in order to for us to be reliable and consistent in delivering what we have agreed to.
The POWER Star indicates that the five foundations are interrelated. Reliable quality performance begins when people establish the integrity of their word and interact accountably regarding what they say and do (as well as don’t say and don’t do). When this happens, they are clear that they have made an agreement and a commitment to deliver a future and that it is now up to them to deliver that future. Accordingly, they will want to put in place the existence and infrastructure that is needed to fulfill on their commitments and to communicate productively. Doing so does not mean they will always succeed, but they will be much more effective if they do than if they assume what currently is in place is sufficient. The end result is a significant increase in reliable personal leadership effectiveness
I teach MBA courses to working professionals on Leading and Managing Change, Mastery in Execution, and Advanced Organizational Behavior and Teamwork. Although the specific focus of each course is different, I have found that the five foundations of Personal Leadership Effectiveness identified here apply in each of these areas.
*POWER = People Obtaining Worthwhile and Extraordinary Results
