The Secret of Leadership Success

Business leaders have not enjoyed good press recently. The economic recession has hit people hard and many have lost trust in leaders. Those within the banking sector may have been most in the spotlight but, rightly or wrongly, other leaders have also been found guilty by association. Yet this is the same group of leaders that seemed OK when the financial results were going in the right direction. Perceptions have changed.

Researchers into leadership tend to focus on leaders who are, or have been, successful. But what does ‘successful’ mean? Is it a strong balance sheet, a high share price or rising to the top of the tree? The balance sheet and share price are subject to external forces often beyond a leader’s control, and whatever got someone to the top of the tree yesterday may not get someone there tomorrow. Organisations change and so does the context within which they operate.

Leaders’ more tangible achievements involve many variables, including the product or service, the market, and star performers in the team. The best leaders may not win all the prizes. Is the better leader the one whose team lifts the cup, or might it be the leader of the losing finalists, whose entire team cost less than the winning team’s substitutes?

We can be tempted into the trap of assuming a high and positive correlation between great leadership and the highest profile metrics. Why? I suggest it is because they are easier to measure and have high face validity. In other words, objective achievements are easier to associate with successful leadership than the behaviours that, subject to external factors, create them.

Whenever we ask participants in Oakridge’s leadership programmes to describe the leader who has been most successful in getting the best from them, they don’t refer to factors that are the easiest to measure i.e. the outputs; they invariably refer to more intrinsic factors, such as their ability to communicate a vision and inspire, their integrity, trust, and their competence. These are the factors that have encouraged them to give of their best, that have created committed followers, and as we know without committed followers there is no leadership.

Many organisations have identified leadership competencies, or capabilities, that embrace these factors but few organisations measure them in a systematic way. Fewer still actively develop them as part of their leadership programmes. Yet effective leadership planning surely requires the identification of the factors that create enthusiastic followers, some attempt to measure them in existing and aspiring leaders, and a strategy to develop them.

Leaders that inspire followers create a climate in which teams and the individuals within them can thrive. This climate needs to be understood and aspired to. It can then be measured in the terms described above. Organisational and individual development plans can be established and implemented, and the climate can be measured again with some regularity, to assess progress. Once the organisation has this clarity, leadership planning and succession planning becomes more straightforward and more rigorous.

Of course, measurement of climate is one thing but what about measurement of the behaviours that create that climate? An approach that Oakridge has adopted with some considerable success is the use of the EQi emotional intelligence questionnaire. The questionnaire gives individual leaders a valuable and confidential insight into the aspects of their emotional intelligence that impact their behaviours that, in turn, affect the climate they create for their teams.

After conveying an understanding of the instrument, the realms it measures and the implications of high and low scores, one-to-one coaching is used, often by telephone to identify actions that can be taken to develop the particular aspects of emotional intelligence that are likely to yield the best returns. Sometimes the initial understanding can be conveyed remotely too, or face-to-face according to logistical requirements. It is the combination of understanding what to measure, measuring it, and developing it that is at the very heart of leadership planning.

To be successful, organisations must clarify what they mean by `leadership success’, because without such clarity, leadership planning will always be hit and miss. We need to understand what succeeds before we can decide who should succeed.