Most people are certain that leadership is about direction, about
giving people a sense of purpose that inspires and motivates them to
commit and achieve. Leadership is also about a relationship between
people -- leaders and followers -- that is built on firm ground;
enduring values build trust. Few would disagree with these views.
Not everyone, however, offers the same answer to this question:
What's the best way to develop talented leaders to achieve sustained
high performance? Indeed, Gallup Organization researchers have long
been intrigued with this question. Having studied leadership talent for
more than 40 years, Gallup set out to discover the demands that leaders
must meet to be successful. We also wanted to uncover the developmental
framework that would enhance leadership performance.
Our research confirmed the importance of two rather obvious demands
-- visioning and maximizing values. What was surprising was the
presence of five other important demands that are essential to the
development of all great leaders.
The research
First, a few words about how we arrived at these demands. Our study
drew from a wide cross section of leaders who had a proven track record
of success; we had evidence that they all delivered the goods. They
were measurably the best when compared to others in similar roles.
Their performance could be tracked to significant improvements to the
bottom line. They enjoyed the endorsement of their bosses, peers, and
direct reports. And they sustained high performance, often through
adverse times.
For our initial leadership-development research, we identified and
studied 100 leaders. They were drawn from general management, human
resources, marketing, sales, manufacturing, research and development,
and finance. They represented distinct levels of hierarchy, from
managers to directors to vice presidents and senior executives. They
had all faced significant demands that built and developed their
leadership talent. Indeed, it was in researching this group that we
uncovered the seven key demands that every leader must meet to achieve
high performance.
We then expanded our study to include an additional 5,019 leaders
from a wide range of industries and sectors, including education,
healthcare, the military, government, finance, insurance, and retail.
Our analysis directly linked those leaders who developed their talents
by encountering the seven demands to significant improvements in their
overall leadership performance. Their companies achieved specific
business outcomes such as financial growth, customer and employee
engagement, employee retention, and safety. Our continued tracking of
more than 40,000 leaders continues to affirm these findings.
The demands
It's no great surprise that visioning is
one of the seven demands. Successful leaders are able to look out,
across, and beyond the organization. They have a talent for seeing and
creating the future. They use highly visual language that paints
pictures of the future for those they lead. As a result, they seem to
attain bigger goals because they create a collective mindset that
propels people to help them make their vision a reality.
These leaders also recognize that through visioning, they showcase their values
and core beliefs. By highlighting what is important about work, great
leaders make clear what is important to them in life. They clarify how
their own values -- particularly a concern for people -- relate to
their work. They also communicate a sense of personal integrity and a
commitment to act based on their values.
As a result, employees know where they stand with these leaders.
Their values -- consistent and unchanging through time -- operate like
a buoy anchored in the ocean, holding firm against the elements while
indicating the way.
By galvanizing people with a clear vision and strong values, the
leaders we studied were able to challenge their teams to achieve
significant work goals. In fact, those leaders themselves had been
assigned significant challenging experiences at key points in their careers while being given the freedom to determine how they would achieve outcomes.
Confronting challenges produces beneficial effects for leaders. It
accelerates their learning curve, stretches their capacity for high
performance, and broadens their horizons about what is possible for an
organization to achieve. As one of the leaders we studied said, "Our
company had experienced three cycles of negative revenue growth, but I
knew that our next cycle would give us the opportunity to turn in our
best figures ever. Everyone thought I was crazy, but we did it, then
did it again."
But great leaders aren't simply hard charging and highly driven.
They also understand the importance of personal relationships. Indeed,
the leaders we studied consistently had a close relationship either
with their manager or someone in the best position to advise them. This
is often someone from outside their organization who serves as their mentor
. These mentoring relationships are not the product of formal
company-wide mentoring programs -- not that these aren't helpful.
Instead, these informal, yet successful, mentoring relationships enable
each individual leader's needs and differences to be taken into account.
Inspired by their positive experiences with mentors, the leaders we
studied have become intentional mentors themselves. They selectively
pick one, two, or three highly talented individuals and invest greatly
in their growth and development over a significant period of time. They
see the success of these "mentees" as a reflection of their own
success. These leaders practice a form of succession planning that
cultivates the next generation of leaders.
Beyond close one-to-one relationships, leaders also create rapport
at many levels across their organization and beyond. They know the
benefits of building a wide constituency .
One leader said, "My work forces me to have a relationship with certain
people. I just think about those I don't yet work with and figure out
who might be useful to know. I nearly always find that relationships
built this way bring dividends." These leaders understand networks and
the importance of networking.
In all their relationships, effective leaders enlighten others because they can make sense of experience
. They also learn from their mistakes and their successes, and -- as
they seek out a range of experts across their wide constituency -- they
ask questions and listen.
What's more, these leaders are able to deal with the complexity of
business life and help those around them make sense of it. They do this
by keeping things simple and making information accessible. This way,
these leaders help individuals understand what's going on so that they
are better able to achieve success. As one leader put it, "There's so
much happening that affects our work. I make sure, at each meeting,
that we understand all the important factors and ensure that the next
steps are clearly laid out."
The most revealing discovery was that effective leaders have an acute sense of their own strengths and weaknesses. They know who they are -- and who they are not.
They don't try to be all things to all people. Their personalities and
behaviors are indistinguishable between work and home. They are
genuine. It is this absence of pretense that helps them connect to
others so well.
Organizations are struggling to build and grow their leadership
capacity. Our research suggests that talented leaders require the very
best development experiences to realize their potential. And for this
potential to be converted into sustained, high organizational
performance, these experiences must be framed around the seven key
demands of leadership.
