Nov

4

The Seven Demands of Leadership

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The Gallup Organization has conducted extensive research to discover the demands that leaders must meet to be successful and have boiled down their findings into The Seven Demands of Leadership as follows:

 

1. Vision

"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."

  • Who contributes to, controls, or communicates the "big picture"?
  • Are leaders encouraged to "paint pictures" of the future?
  • What opportunities do leaders have to talk about and shape the future?

    • 2. Maximizing Values

    "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."

  • How do corporate values align with individual values?
  • Are leaders encouraged to lead with their values?
  • Are leaders asked to describe the values that are important to them?

    • 3. Challenging Experiences

    "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."

  • Are leaders free to think outside of conventional approaches?
  • How much latitude are leaders afforded in decision making?
  • Are leaders given significant responsibilities with wide-ranging delegation?

    • 4. Mentoring

    "….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."

  • Is value attached to mentoring outside of the organization?
  • Are leaders expected to accelerate highly talented individuals through the organization to their optimum levels of performance?

    • 5. Building a Constituency

    "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."

  • Are leaders expected to grow networks beyond their immediate work relationships?
  • Does your organization promote the growth of networks through measuring their business impact?

    • 6. Making Sense of Experience

    "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."

  • Are leaders able to meet with peers to share understanding and learning of new issues?
  • Is there a clear leadership focus on "lean" communication?

    • 7. They Know Who They Are

    "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."

  • Is every leader clear about his or her strengths and weaknesses?
  • Does your organization sponsor individualism in leadership through role models?

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    One Response to “The Seven Demands of Leadership”

    1. Was zeichnet erfolgreiche Leader aus? « Kulturmanagement on November 9th, 2007 9:52

      [...] via The Practice of Leadership [...]

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