14th August 2024
What Are Your Leadership Priorities? – A Foundation For Strategic Leadership Development
In today’s complex, competitive and often overwhelming world of work, clarifying exactly what you need from your leaders, and why, is essential for aligning your people, teams and the work you do to the outcomes that matter.
This article draws on my practical experience and first-hand observations from more than 15 years working in the field of leadership development. It explores the critical link between leadership and strategy, and the importance of anchoring leadership development efforts to your company’s strategic plan and aspirations.
Why Connecting Leadership & Strategy is Crucial
Research has consistently shown that effective leadership is directly correlated with higher performing companies. A study by the Harvard Business Review found that companies with strong leadership are almost 14x more likely to outperform their peers financially. Separately, Gallup research indicates that managers alone can account for up to 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units.
This underscores the importance of thinking about leadership strategically and ensuring there is a strong link between leadership development and what the company needs from its leaders. Whether competing in new markets, innovating products and services, delivering great customer experiences or creating a great place to work, your leaders play a significant role in aligning and executing the right work and creating the environment for people to do their best work.
With the right focus, leadership development can be used as a strategic capability for driving execution, change, and uplifting engagement within your organisation; but so often, leadership is treated as an activity separate from the strategy of the business, instead of recognising it as a capability that can differentiate companies from the competition. In my experience, many of the companies investing in leadership development today are spending a great deal of money and effort rolling out leadership programs and initiatives focused on helping leaders develop awareness and some valuable skills, but without understanding or connecting this work to the broader context of where the organisation is going and specifically what the organisation needs from its leadership to get there.
To be clear, I’m a big advocate for leadership development programs, however the piece that is often missing is clarity on the specific things we need leaders to be thinking, feeling and doing which connect directly to the organisation’s goals. Without this, leaders are often disconnected from how their role aligns to strategy, the tangible value that leadership enables, and how this translates to their day-to-day work and the teams they lead.
Leadership As A Strategic Capability
To align leadership development with strategy, you must first get clear on the current role leadership plays in your company and what role you need it to play. This means making an intentional decision to invest and develop leadership as a strategic capability, instead of an activity that you ‘do’ as part of your broader L&D program. It also helps to understand and distinguish the things that already make your organisation successful, and what needs to change about its performance and culture. By conducting a thorough discovery approach i.e. gathering data and speaking to people, you can very quickly ascertain the specific qualities of leadership which are already working well within your organisation and exactly what shifts are required.
From there, it’s a process of defining how leaders help to steer the organisation forward and what this looks like in practice. Whether its commercial, cultural, customer or operational aspirations the business is focused on, elevating the role and impact of leadership starts with getting clear on the specific activities and mindsets you want leaders to be approaching differently and/or consistently, to make an impact day to day. Below, I outline an approach I’ve used multiple times to help companies clarify the role of leadership within their organisation, tell a better story around what great leadership looks like, and connect their leadership development efforts to the mindsets and behaviours that will drive strategic outcomes.
The Leadership Discovery Process
A thorough discovery process is essential for understanding the current narrative of leadership within your organisation – and beginning to shape a new one. This might include interviews or focus groups with leaders and team members, reviewing feedback from engagement surveys, exit interviews and onboarding programs, along with considering both the internal and external factors that are influencing leadership mindsets and behaviours e.g. reward systems, politics, ways of working, competitive landscape, engagement.
What’s important here is to develop a holistic view of the current leadership experience and how this needs to shift through the lens of both team members and leaders themselves (not just the top team or the board). By engaging with a wide range of stakeholders and looking for patterns and themes in the data, you can quickly form a view of where the areas of strength and development are. This informs the next step which involves distilling the research down into a set of prioritised and actionable insights that will guide the design of your leadership priorities.
Defining Leadership Priorities – Keeping It Simple, Sticky, and Relevant
The task now is to translate your insights into priorities (another commonly used term is leadership principles) which will contextualise what great leadership looks like within your organisation. But first, I invite you to consider this question: If you were to ask 10 different leaders what the role of a leader is within your organisation, what do you think you might hear? Are you likely to get 10 completely different answers, or strong alignment and consistent themes in what those leaders think and feel their role is? How might the answers vary depending on the seniority, business unit or function of the leader you’re speaking to?
If your internal leadership reality leans more towards one of inconsistency or confusion, then you’re not alone. I’ve seen that many organisations aren’t on the same page with their leaders about exactly what is needed from them. This creates ambiguity, misalignment, and contradiction in what leaders focus on and prioritise, which ultimately flows through to the experience and engagement of the teams they lead. As Brené Brown articulates so beautifully and simply, “clear is kind, unclear is unkind”, when it comes to communicating our needs and expectations of others.
“Clear is kind, unclear is unkind”– Brené Brown. Image source WSJ. 2019
Elevating the strategic value of your leadership development efforts (and $ investment) begins with understanding the core aspects of a leader’s role and how this aligns to your business strategy, i.e. what do leaders need to be focussed on day to day, which drives the highest priority outcomes for the organisation, regardless of level or hierarchy? Again, this might be a mix of people, product, commercial, or customer priorities – your strategy should provide the compass and waypoints here. To clarify, this goes beyond what an individual’s title says they do, it creates a broader and more powerful context across your organisation for the purpose, value and focus of those in leadership roles. In other words, it’s about getting leaders aligned and all rowing in the same direction.
The challenge with introducing leadership priorities, however, can be in setting clear expectations, balanced with enough autonomy and scope for leaders to flex their own style and natural gifts. The sweet spot lies in communicating the message in a way that connects, aligns and inspires, but positioning things in a way that lets individuals decide and lead in the best way they know how, and for their specific role. After all, isn’t this why you hired or promoted them in the first place? The aim isn’t to be autocratic or create an army of leader robots, but it is about creating clarity, alignment and accountability (more about fostering leadership accountability in a future article).
I believe it’s best to be transparent about your intentions for this work from the outset. Ultimately what we’re aiming for here is to distil your discovery insights down into a very short list of principles or priorities that leaders should follow, that are relevant and both easy to understand, apply across all leadership roles and are conveyed in language that is compelling, i.e. the words are intentional and actually mean something. What you’re looking for here is that it resonates, it speaks to people, they feel moved by it when they see and hear it.
According to research by Dr. David Rock and the Neuro-leadership Institute, communicating expectations in a way that is ‘simple, sticky and relevant’ is a huge enabler towards any change we are trying to drive with leaders, particularly in a world where many leaders are already ‘cognitively taxed’ and constantly being bombarded with messages competing for their time and attention. It’s an opportunity to cut through the noise, create clarity and elevate the things that really matter.
One of the best examples of this work that is often referenced are Microsoft’s Leadership Principles. Their leaders Create Clarity, Generate Energy and Deliver Success. From the outset when Satya Nadella stepped into the role of CEO, he made it his mission to very clearly define the culture that would make Microsoft successful over the long term, this included getting very specific about the role that leaders play in delivering on the organisation’s vision and exactly what leaders ‘do’ to help the company get there.
This then formed the core of Microsoft’s leadership framework, and the foundation for all of their leadership development work, informing how they hire, develop, onboard, encourage and hold leaders accountable to being their best (you can read more about how Microsoft leverage their leadership principles here). The results of their culture change efforts and the commercial success they’ve had over the last 10 years speaks for itself. Elevating how they think about leadership and develop it has been a big part of their success story.
Creating A New Leadership Narrative and Making It Happen
One of the first big tests for leadership priorities is in how they land with your leadership community and teams. With your priorities defined, you have the basis of a new leadership narrative for your organisation, in other words, you now have a clear and compelling story to tell which bridges the gap between where your organisation is headed, what it’s focussed on, and the specific role leadership plays in getting you there – including tangible examples of actions and behaviours that leaders should demonstrate.
[Side note – If you are going down this path and you want this work to land well, I strongly recommend that you test and iterate the outputs as you move though the discovery and design process. This demonstrates your willingness to engage with and listen to your audience, can help build the case for change along with dampening any potential resistance, and ensure that when you go to launch your leadership priorities they are more likely to be well received].
If you could rewrite the leadership narrative within your organisation, what would it say?
Nailing your leadership priorities is a great start, however, this is just the beginning. The task now is to leverage this foundational work towards elevating the impact of leadership within the company. This might include deciding how your leadership priorities inform how you identify, recruit and promote the right leaders, assess leadership development needs or capability gaps, and guide how performance is measured for leadership roles; ultimately providing the foundation for your leadership development strategy moving forward, underpinned by clear drivers for success. It’s in this deeper planning and implementation work that the rubber really hits the road [Another note – this is a huge topic and important aspect of doing strategic leadership development work, depending on the level of interest it may be something I dive deeper on in a future article].
A final point I want to make here is that it’s important to acknowledge that organisational needs are always evolving, and strategic priorities can shift from time to time. As your organisation evolves, so too may the required leadership priorities and where your leaders need to be focussed. When done right, it’s rare that leadership priorities will change often or significantly (think about how often your company values change?). However, it’s important to regularly review this work to ensure its in-sync with the most current organisational needs.
In The End, Clarity Matters
As we’ve explored, clear communication of leadership expectations is vital in setting your leaders up for success and focussing your leadership development efforts. Leaders need to know what is expected of them and why. Leadership priorities help leaders better understand their role, what success looks like and the core behaviours you want them to be focused on. They can also form a powerful foundation to anchor all of your leadership development work.
Strategic leadership development is more than just running great development programs that focus on building individual skills – it starts with connecting the role of leaders to the strategic goals and needs of the organisation and using this to align, engage, recruit, develop and inspire better leaders through a holistic approach. After all, if we aren’t clear on what success looks like, then how can we help our leaders get there?
I hope you found this article valuable. I invite your comments and questions or please reach out if you would benefit from a conversation about how to explore this approach for your own organisation.
Gonzalo Cardozo
Categories: Uncategorised
