Peak Potential Article

Leaders are responsible for getting results through others. This involves moving beyond accepting responsibility for your own actions, to take responsibility for the behaviours and attitudes of your staff. Leaders should be judged not by what they do, but rather by what those around them are doing and achieving. In fact a meta-review of leadership shows that the quality of leadership consistently accounted for between 20-45% of difference in organisational performance levels.

In this light it is very clear that leadership is people work, with a focus on achieving results. The Australian Leadership Development Centre defines leadership as the process of influencing the attitudes, beliefs and behaviours of others, to bring about desired ends.

This is consistent with early US research on leadership indicated that effective leaders balance their concern for the task at hand with a concern for the people responsible for achieving those results. More recently, Scandinavian researcher’s added a third dimension, development of staff, to the role of leader. So leaders:

1. Are clear about the results that matter within their organisation and what needs to be done in order to achieve those results.
2. Use an understanding of people and the value of relationships to better achieve those results.
3. Develop capacity in staff to enable them to be even more effective in the future.

These three dimensions continue to play a pivotal role in our contemporary understanding of what effective leaders do. Contemporary literature on leading change is really about leading people in times of change. As General Eric Shinseki said: “Institutions don’t change, people do.” The Conference Board, best known for its Consumer Confidence Index, recently reported that relationship building, talent development and change management will be three of the four key roles leaders will need to play in the future. These notions are echoed in the global research project conducted by Andre Martin, which found that the importance of soft skills such as building relationships, collaboration and change management will be even more important in the future. The common theme here is that leadership is people work. If you are achieve results through others you must understand and harness your knowledge of what makes people tick.

Accepting responsibility for the actions and attitudes of those you lead is a daunting yet critical step if you are to truly realise your leadership potential. It is the first step in actually knowing what to do as a leader. You can use the following prompts to evaluate how you currently spend your time and identify areas where you may need to reprioritise your day as a leader:

• What are the results that truly matter in my organisation or section of the organisation?
• With this in mind, what needs to be done at moment within my immediate work context to achieve these results?
• Who are my followers who need to do this?
• What do my followers need and want from me as a leader that will help them achieve these results?