Upping Your Leadership Game

If an organization would strive for remarkable results, it needs remarkable leadership.

Sadly, nine times out of ten, the wrong leader is in the wrong role, according to Gallup, with the proof showing up in 90% of well-formulated strategies failing due to poor execution. That’s a widespread failure of leadership.

We learned over 12+ years as “Hollywood Agent” for the best executives in the world at InterimExecs, how nuanced circumstances can dramatically affect results.

It’s why we wrote our new book on leadership style, Right Leader Right Time: Discover Your Leadership Style for a Winning Career and Company, which explores four distinct, winning leadership styles: Fixer, Artist, Builder, and Strategist (FABS for short). Match the right leader in the right role in the right context, and that’s where magic happens.

Learning about Leaders

Let’s say you opened your door and a line of people greeted you stretching back about four miles. That is a picture of the 6,000 executives who showed up on our domain doorstep since the creation of InterimExecs RED team. All seeking new leadership roles.

The vast majority didn’t make the cut. Just the top few percent show a repeat track record of measurable and remarkable results, along with mindset and values we call “E3”: eager, enterprising, and engaging. It took six years to form the initial team, while the E3 mindset came to embody a rich set of necessary qualities, foremost being integrity and humility even in the face of outstanding success.

RED Team proved to be the winning ticket for InterimExecs, but to offer something of enormous value to company owners – not just ok, not just pretty good, but off the charts amazing – we had to become ruthless as decision makers on leadership talent. Pretty good does not count. For business owners, boards and investors to shell out good cash, we needed extraordinary. But too often we saw something more common: track records that moved sideways over time, sometimes showing small gains, but definitely lacking meaningful advances or substance. Nothing to write home about.

Where Many Leaders Get It Wrong

With lots of case studies now in hand, our ringside seat from client and executive observation taught us what successful leaders do well. We’ll get to that, but for starters it’s important to know what successful leaders avoid. We call it the Three Deadly Ds of leadership development: dilution, delusion, and detours. I could throw in a couple more Ds like denial or downfall but that’d just be piling on.

1. Dilution

The majority of people in any leadership or managerial role (defined broadly as having responsibility within an organization for one or more people) present credentials that 1) lack quantified or quantifiable benchmarks or milestones and 2) don’t show any measured, accountable progress. Light on accountability, long on titles. Without measured, accountable and significant proven success, we’d judge their leadership credentials as so-so. Not great. Not something anyone would point out, jump up and say “OMG amazing” or “You are incredible!”

Remarkability comes from, say, a proven revenue credential: “took my division from $100 million to $1 billion in 5 years.” Or a focus on a business saved: “Turned around small 10-person shop with losses of $500k, into $5 million earnings, employing 200.”

Lack of accountability, home runs, and proof goes hand in hand with loss of focus over time. Diffused or isolated roles without a strong theme.

There is no such thing as one-size-fits-all in leadership, yet we see it constantly in job seekers for managerial roles. Jack of all trades may have passed for greatness years ago, but not anymore. If you were to compare management to medicine or law based on recognized focus as career advances, the practice of leadership is still 50 years behind.

2.  Delusion

Dilution in career can lead over time to a kind of self-delusion, a slant that openness to anything is in fact a path or virtue. And for some it could be, especially early on, or at mid-career if life calls for a hard pivot.

Don’t read into this that we’re advocating for early specialization. For most executives, their careers begin as generalists, which is absolutely proper. In medical school everyone starts as a generalist, studying the basics, building a firm foundation.

But that foundation is just that – a necessary base. To further grow and build something glorious it comes as a result of experience, trial and error, and further learning. Becoming confident in knowing where and how to excel. It adds up to something unique and true to one’s own calling.

One size does not fit all.

3.  Detours

Dilution and delusion invariably lead to detours on a career journey. We see executives shift laterally without demonstrable results. If you could pilot a drone camera, flying over the territory of this landscape, these shifts wouldn’t appear to be much other than dead ends. The difference between a dead end and a meaningful experience is what the executive’s next move is. If someone is hard charging and hits a dead-end detour, the successful next move we’ve seen is…to…turn around.

Too many would-be leaders fall into a hole – suffer dilution by presenting a hodge podge of roles and titles. The thread is lost. The pattern (or lack of one) won’t make perfect sense to a client, agent, or employer, and if they intended for their career to stand for something, to have voice, it would be increasingly hard for anyone to figure out exactly what that is.

Jogs in the road can be incredibly meaningful. It just depends what you do with the jog – what your next move is.

How Exceptional Leaders Avoid the Three Deadly Ds

How do you avoid the three deadly Ds? In Right Leader Right Time we explore four unique leadership styles: Fixer, Artist, Builder, and Strategist in detail. Successful leaders embrace their dominant style, and then go further. They double down, again and again, reinforcing the style which fits them best. The opposite of dilution.

Sounds easy, but it requires one of the toughest commitments a leader is called to do to be in command of selfhood: reject that which is not for their highest and best use.

Saying no to situations, supposed opportunities, challenges, or roles is risky. It requires commitment, but not just a once and done decision. It is not a one-time act. It is an ongoing daily challenge, that, when mastered, can lead to exponential results. Think of a doubling cube in Backgammon, going from two to four to sixteen to sixty-four. An act of doubling and redoubling that concentrates and multiplies far more than linear results.

Exceptional leaders don’t fool themselves, or rather, it’s a special kind of reality distortion field wherein the demands they make of themselves are to focus and refocus. It’s a relentless doubling down and rejection of more and more, to get to a highest and best use.

To succeed in this virtuous circle of rejecting what is not for their highest and best use, leaders must collaborate effectively. This act of bringing along complementary skillsets is a second trait that separates the best leaders from the rest.

Psychologist Dr. John Behr describes unique skills and abilities as spikiness, as if you were looking at a graph to see what stands out. The best leaders know how to pull together teams that are “spiky,” (each contributing unique capabilities) and make sure the team is accretive (everyone on the team has unique “spikiness”) – most importantly including the leader. The leader must be accretive to the team.

Your Highest and Best Use

Fixer, Artist, Builder, and Strategist describe four leadership styles that when best applied can lead to remarkable results. Coming to embrace and reinforce your dominant leadership mode is the path to realizing your highest and best use.

There is no magical point of ultimate arrival. Leadership is a practice akin to riding a bicycle: you learn how to balance intuitively so that you can go faster, turn, maneuver as needed. But it doesn’t work when you stop dead. Any veteran leader has experienced a blessed day when everything goes right and they are adored unconditionally; next day they could be reviled by all. It takes time and perspective to avoid dilution and downstream delusion or detours. Understanding and committing to your highest and best use is the successful leader’s journey - and it’s a hero’s journey.