Marcus Buckingham outlines the core concepts of superior leadership

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An article "The Clear Leader" from Fast Company discusses research conducted by Marcus Buckingham, author of First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths, on the heart of leadership. Based upon his research Marcus Buckingham, maps out the core concepts that mark superior leadership as follows:

• Leaders are Compelled by the Future – "There’s something unique and different that makes a leader, and it’s not about creativity or courage or integrity. As important as they are, you can have those attributes and still fail to be a great leader. A leader’s job is to rally people toward a better future. Leaders can’t help but change the present, because the present isn’t good enough. 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. So in order to succeed, leaders must engage our fear of the unknown and turn it into spiritedness. By far 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. Clarity is the antidote to anxiety, and therefore clarity is the preoccupation of the effective leader. 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. It’s a scary thing to please all of the people all of the time. So to calm our fear, we need you to narrow our focus. Tell us who will be judging our success. When you do this with clarity, you give us confidence — confidence in our judgment, in our decisions, and ultimately in our ability to know where to look to determine if we have fulfilled our mission."
• 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…. Even if it doesn’t incorporate all the reality of the world, find the edge — one edge — and talk about it all the time…."
• Keep Your Core Score – "…clarity is lost if you end up looking at 15 different metrics. It’s a terrible leadership failure to tell your employees that all of these measurements are important. When followers are presented with numerous scores, they get confused. 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."

I have previously posted on the importance of clarity for successful leadership (here, here, here and here). Have you acted yet? Are you clear on why you’re doing what you’re doing? Is your team clear?

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Tagged as: Clarity, Meaning, Vision