The exploration of the practice of leadership is a broad topic that is further complicated by the vast number of views and opinions expressed on the nature successful leaders and leadership. The goal of this post is to provide an overarching framework that will be used to guide our conversations on the ever evolving practice of leadership. In our conversation on the topic of leadership, we have chosen to place our emphasis on leadership practices, as it’s only when we take action that we are able to influence our world. As Mahatma Gandhi observed, ‘we must be the change we wish to see in the world’. Given this leadership focus, it’s necessary to be clear as to what are the outcomes of effective leadership.

Three Leadership Outcomes

An approach to the development of an integrated practice of leadership is described by Drath, et el. (2008) in their article, “Direction, alignment, commitment: Toward a more integrative ontology of leadership” published in The Leadership Quarterly[1]. In the article the authors propose an integrative leadership framework comprising of the following three key leadership outcomes:

• Direction. This outcome is the facilitation of shared direction and collective agreement on the vision, mission, goals and aims. Direction implies change, a change from the current reality towards some future state.
• Alignment. This outcomes concerns producing the right configuration of organisational structures, skills, processes, performance management systems, governance and technology required to allow the organisation to move towards their desired future direction.
• Commitment. This is outcome is concerned with bringing people to the place where they willingly devote their time and energy in support of the shared direction.

When we approach the topic of leadership in terms of these three outcomes, it changes the leadership conversation. It changes the conversation from one that has historically been focused on leaders, followers and goals, to a conversation focused on the production of direction, alignment and commitment.

The Three Leadership Disciplines

Building upon the leadership framework described above and exploring leadership from a business perspective provides the necessary foundation to develop a business leadership framework. In considering this, we have identified three key organisational disciplines, that when taken together, help to produce the leadership outcomes of direction, alignment and commitment. Historically, each of these disciplines has been researched and described in isolation. However, it’s only when each of these disciplines are integrated in a manner that produces direction, alignment and commitment that leadership occurs. Thus, an integrated approach as illustrated in the diagram below provides a great framework to begin a new leadership conversation.

Adopting an integrative approach, as illustrated above, across the three business disciplines of strategy, execution and culture, provides a framework from which we can start a new conversation about the leadership practices, necessary to produce the outcomes of direction, alignment and commitment. A brief overview of each of the three key disciplines are as follows:

• Strategy. The discipline of strategy is about setting direction. Strategy addresses where we are and where we are going, providing the purpose, vision, mission and goals of the organisation. Strategy is important as is sets the direction, which in turn guides our choices concerning the allocation of scare resources, such as time, attention and assets. Strategy sets the context in which execution, resulting in alignment is generated.
• Execution. The discipline of execution is about aligning the organisations people, processes, information, governance, structures, technology and measurement in support of the strategy. It ensures that our resources are applied effectively and efficiently in support of the strategy. Execution helps to clarify accountability for the achievement of business outcomes and bring about the necessary alignment required to implement the strategy.
• Culture. The culture of an organisation deals with ‘the way we do things around here’. The organisation culture consists of the unseen beliefs, values and assumptions that support the way people work and the practices we adopt to support how work gets done. Culture results in either the commitment of people towards the strategy and vision or alternatively a lack of commitment leading to compliance and mediocrity.

Integrating these three disciplines in a way that produces the outcomes of direction, alignment and commitment produces leadership. Each of the disciplines described above are supported by a set of leadership practices, that in turn supports the production of direction, alignment and commitment. Exploring these leadership practices is the purpose and goal of this new and emerging leadership conversation.

[1] Wilfred H. Drath, Cynthia D. McCauley, Charles J. Palus, Ellen Van Velsor, Patricia M.G. O’Connor, John B. McGuire, (2008) “Direction, alignment, commitment: Toward a more integrative ontology of leadership”, The Leadership Quarterly

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Trust is one of the most critical requirement for effective leadership. Building and sustaining trust in organisations is a critical leadership practice and it’s one the never ends. Dennis and Michelle Reina, founders of the Reina Trust Building Institute and the authors of “Trust and Betrayal in the Workplace”, have developed a model of trust, which provides a roadmap describing how Transaction Trust is built and sustained. The model is named transactional trust, as the authors believe that trust is an exchange, you have to give trust to get trust in return. The Transaction Trust model is discussed in the article titled “Building Sustainable Trust” (pdf), which is illustrated below:

The three components of the Transactional Trust model as illustrated above are as follows…

Contractual Trust

Contractual trust concerns how expectations are managed and how boundaries are set. Dennis and Michelle Reina describe contractual trust as implying

“… a mutual understanding between people; each will do what they say they will do.”

To improve the level of contractual trust you need to:

• Manage expectations
• Establish boundaries
• Delegate appropriately
• Encourage mutually serving intentions
• Keep agreements.
• Be consistent.

Communication trust

Communication trust is about the context and content of communication between people. Dennis and Michelle Reina describe the nature of communication trust as follows.

“Trust influences communication and communication influences trust.”

To improve the level of communication trust you need to improve communication in the following ways:

• Share information
• Tell the truth
• Admit mistakes
• Give and receive constructive feedback
• Maintain confidentiality
• Speak with good purpose

Competence Trust

Competence trust is about ensuring you have the necessary skills and knowledge, that people involved have the competence to make the journey. Dennis and Michelle Reina describe the essence of competence trust reminding us that…

“Those responsible for implementing change need to be involved in designing the change.”

To improve the level of competence trust you need to involve people, to do that you need to:

• Acknowledge people’s skills and abilities
• Allow people to make decisions
• Involve others and seek their input
• Help people learn skills

In Summary

Dennis and Michelle Reina describe how these three components work together…

“Contractual Trust sets the tone for engagement and direction and shapes roles and responsibilities. Communication Trust establishes information flow and how people talk with one another. Competence Trust allows individuals to leverage and further develop skills, abilities, and knowledge.”

Trust is built or destroy by how leaders behave, how they contract, how the communicate and their competence. Reflect on the above and rate your self on each dimension on a scale from 1 to 10 (1 being poor and 5 being excellent):

• The extent to which you have developed contractual trust in your team?
• The extent to which you have developed communication trust in your team?
• The extent to which you have developed competence trust in your team?

What three actions can you take over the next few weeks to improve the area where you have the lowest rating?

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1. Factors That leaders Should Manage To Encourage Trust
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After decades of research and thousands of interviews with great leaders, Gallup research discovered seven factors crucial to leadership success which were identified as follows.

1. Visioning: “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.”
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.“
3. Challenging Experience: “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.”
4. Mentoring: “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.“
5. Building a 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.”
6. Making 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. As one leader put it, ‘There’s so much happening that affects our work. I make sure, at each meeting, that we understand all the important factors and ensure that the next steps are clearly laid out.’”
7. Knowing Self: “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.“

This is a great leadership framework. How do you measure up against these seven demands?

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MIT Sloan Management Review has a great article “In Search of Growth Leaders” by Sean D. Carr, Jeanne M. Liedtka, Robert Rosen and Robert E. Wiltbank discussing the importance of growth leaders. Growth leaders are these managers who can generate organic growth to “find new streams of revenue without always resorting to acquisitions”. After three years of research the authors have identified the following characteristics and strategies that distinguish growth leaders:

• Rich in Experience “All of the growth leaders in our study had unusually varied experience early in their careers. Along the way, they acquired skills that eventually helped them explicitly in their launching of growth initiatives…. Along with diversity of experience, we found in our subjects a deep-seated belief in their own abilities and in their power to change the world around them. For them, life is a journey of learning. They thrived on accepting challenges, taking action and getting immediate results. These positive traits tended to reinforce one another in a virtuous circle…This type of growth mindset prepared them to see and to chase opportunity.”

• Changing the Rules… “Most managers are programmed to think the way the head office does, to seek certainty and to rely on data with which to predict and plan. That approach can work well for an established business that knows its field and where surprises are few. But it is deadly in the world of growth, where what a company doesn’t know is far more important than what it does know. Growth is all about uncertainty and how to work with it. Prediction and analysis have their place, but they can’t be the only tools a business has.”
• …But Managing Risk “Although growth leaders embraced new ventures, they weren’t risk seekers. In fact, they minimized risk wherever possible.… while most managers are taught to approach new projects by calculating expected return on investment, growth leaders are more likely to estimate an acceptable degree of loss to start. This lets them pursue interesting opportunities without investing more than they can afford to lose… The managers in our study tended to place small bets fast, then study how their bets had influenced the market. This, in turn, encouraged them either to double-down or to place new bets elsewhere. It’s an approach that allowed them to be fast, flexible and capable of capitalizing on early success.”
• Preferring People to Data “Success was based more often on thoughtful exploration of customers’ needs than on dry market data. The managers in our study personally sought detailed knowledge about individual customers, instead of just seeing them as data in market-research reports… Direct knowledge about customers also helped the managers see what was most important to the customers in terms of products and services.”
• Pragmatic Idealists “In assembling teams, growth leaders learned to combine two seemingly opposing forces: holding people ruthlessly accountable for results, and engaging their passion to build something great together… Their overall approach was to be tough but fair. But they were adamant about acquiring staff with only the needed skill sets. Team effectiveness often depended on moving people quickly into positions that optimized their strengths, and removing people who did not fit or who lacked the necessary capabilities…. Groups pursuing new ventures were seen as no place for rookies. As one leader commented, growth initiatives should be about testing markets, not people. Yet despite this hard-nosed attitude, employees who worked for such managers invariably described them in terms such as ‘caring,’ ‘motivating’ and ‘inspiring.’”

Grow leader seem to be able to hold people accountable, to inspire passion for the vision and purpose and have a gut feel for making business decisions, informed by their rich experiences, their courage to challenge rules and to make calculated risks.

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Michael Watkins wrote an interesting post “Demystifying Strategy: The What, Who, How, and Why“, he defines business strategy as:

“a set of guiding principles that, when communicated and adopted in the organization, generates a desired pattern of decision making….. A good strategy provides a clear roadmap, consisting of a set of guiding principles or rules, that defines the actions people in the business should take (and not take) and the things they should prioritize (and not prioritize) to achieve desired goals.”

In a nutshell, as illustrated below:

• Mission is about what will be achieved.
• The value network is about with whom value will be created and captured.
• Strategy is about how resources should be allocated to accomplish the mission in the context of the value network.
• Vision and incentives is about why people in the organization should feel motivated to perform at a high level.

Together, the mission, network, strategy, and vision define the strategic direction for a business. They provide the what, who, how, and why necessary to powerfully align action in complex organizations.

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