Become a Better Leader

Here is important information that can help you become a better leader of your organization.

First of all, you are not leading a political movement, a professional group, or a religious following. 

You are leading an organization, i.e., a company, division, department, or team. 

So you need a clear operational definition of Organizational Leadership that defines your role as the leader of an organization. 

Otherwise, your organization will be in a constant state of flux, ambiguity, and under-performance. 

Based on over 20 years of university teaching and research, here is my operational definition of Organizational Leadership. 

There are two parts that describe the two important roles you serve as the organization's leader. 

The first is direction.  You are responsible for determining the direction of the organization. 

As the saying goes, if you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there. 

This includes determining the mission, vision, goals, and objectives of the organization. 

This direction should be clearly stated, concise, and compelling. 

The next role addresses how is your organization is going to get to reach its strategic intent to realize its vision, fulfill its mission and achieve its goals and objectives? 

This second part describes your other major role as the organization's leader. 

It is establishing an effective organization.

This includes selecting the right people, implementing the right organizational structure, and building a high-performance organizational culture.

Do this the right way, and you will see your organization's performance soar.

And here is what studies show regarding the effects of the two important roles you play as the organization's leader.

The first role, establishing direction, accounts for about 40% variance in the performance of the organization.

The second role, establishing an effective organization accounts for about 45% variance in the performance of the organization.

So add the two together and you get 85%. What about the remaining 15% variance?

It involves chance events and conditions. It is that over which the leader has no control. It could include both the good and the bad. This is what I call the Serendipitous Factor.

The bad could involve a down turn in the economy, more and more government regulations adversely affecting the business operations, or a catastrophic weather condition such as a hurricane, flooding and the like.

And there are good events and conditions as well that can positively affect the performance of the organization. Events like a competitor going out of business, an uptick in the economy, or an increased demand for a firm's product or service.

And here is what further research shows. Effective leaders minimize the effects of the Serendipitous Factor. In other words, they do not depend on good luck to run the business and they minimize the effects of the bad luck events on the organization.

How do they do this? They do it by effectively carrying out their two major roles as the organization's leader. Study any organization that is floundering / under-performing and you will discover that the leader or leaders failed to successfully perform on one or both of these critical roles.

Much of this information is derived from Leadership in High Performance Organizations, Second Edition

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