Effective leadership requires clarity

Clarity is important for effective leadership. Marcus Buckingham in a Fast Company article talks about the importance of clarity when leading, making the following observations.

• Leaders are Compelled by the Future – A leader’s job is to rally people toward a better future….. They succeed only when they find a way to make people excited by and confident in what comes next….. With leaders, the future calls to them in a voice they can’t drown out. The future is more real than the present; it compels them to act.
• Turn Anxiety into Confidence – For a leader, the challenge is that in every society ever studied, people fear the future. The future is unstable, unknown, and therefore potentially dangerous…. the most effective way to turn fear into confidence is to be clear — to define the future in such vivid terms that we can see where we are headed….. If you do nothing else as a leader, be clear.
• Be Clear about Whom You Serve – Leaders can be wrong. They can’t be confusing. If we are going to follow you into the future, we need to know precisely whom we are trying to please.
• Be Clear About Why You’re Going to Win – As a leader, your job is to make people more confident about the future you’re dragging them into. To that end, you need to tell them why they’re going to win. There are many competitors out there. Why will we beat them? There are many obstacles in our path. Why will we overcome them? The more clearly you can answer these questions, the more confident we will be, and therefore the more resilient, the more persistent, and the more creative… find the edge — one edge — and talk about it all the time. The more you talk about it, the more it becomes true.
• Keep Your Core Score – …the one score that would track their progress toward a better future…. From a leadership standpoint, a score is actionable and unambiguous…. clarity is lost if you end up looking at 15 different metrics…. The job of a leader is to say, “Of all the things we measure, this is the most important.”
• If You Want to be Clear, Act – Of course, a leader must take action — action leads to impact. But actions also possess a separate, equally powerful quality. Actions are unambiguous. If you, the leader, can highlight a few carefully selected actions, then your followers will no longer have to infer the future from theoretical pronouncements about “core values” or your “mission statement.” We will simply look to see what actions you take and found our faith and confidence on these. But be aware that we respond best to two types of action: symbolic action and systemic action. Symbolic action is just that — a representation of what the future can look like. Symbolic action grabs our attention; it gives us something new and vivid on which to focus…… For a leader, it’s important to disrupt routines. Systemic action changes behaviour. It makes people realize that the world is going to be different because they’re doing different things.

A similar concept is discussed by Chip and Dan Heath in their book “Made to Stick” which they call “Concreteness”. The idea is that ideas and concepts which are concrete and tangible have a greater chance of success. They make the point that:

“Abstraction makes it harder to understand an idea and to remember it. It also makes it harder to co-ordinate our activities with others, who may interpret the abstraction in different ways.”

What makes something concrete you may ask?

“If you can examine something with your senses, it’s concrete….. Most of the time, concreteness boils down to specific people doing specific things.”

In my experience too much of strategy remains abstract and conceptual. This leads to unchanged or conflicted behaviour, resulting in a gap between the vision and daily action. Effective change, effective leadership and effective strategy requires clarity and concreteness. Leaders need to be clear about who they serve, why they’re going to win, how progress will be measured and why they’re behaving differently. They need to live as concrete example of the future they’re seeking to create….!

Leaders need to be clear…… clear about their vision, clear about their intent, clear communication and clear in their actions. How clear are the leadership messages you’re sending? How concrete?

Technorati Tags: Leadership, Management, Business, Communication, Vision, Strategy, Change, Clarity, Concreteness

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Tagged as: Clarity, Communication, Vision