TL;DR What do we need to do to become great leaders? This post provides an overview and our main leadership framework. Successful leaders are unrelenting about improving the 4Ps: purpose, process, people, and person.
Knowing vs doing
In our last article, we talked about how great leaders understand they must take care of the unspectacular preparation to achieve spectacular results. So what do these great leaders do and how can we adopt their mindset and practices? We already know a lot from books, articles, mentors, peers, own experience, etc. – so why aren’t we doing all of it?
I argue that a key step in between is missing: that of organizing our knowledge in a clear leadership framework. This will help us store it more easily, recall it when the right situation arises, and test it out gradually until it becomes second nature to us.
The problem with retaining knowledge
In Disney’s “Finding Nemo”, Marlin, Nemo’s father, sets out to bring him back after he is captured from their home in the Great Barrier Reef and placed in an aquarium in Sydney, Australia. On his way he meets Dory, a blue tang fish, who offers to help and joins him in his adventure, where they meet vegetarian sharks, surfer dude turtles, hungry seagulls, and other remarkable sea creatures. It was therefore surprising for Marlin that throughout this critical, life-or-death situation, Dory would forget not only what they were doing, but also who Marlin was in the first place. As she explained to him, she “suffered from short-term memory loss”.
This is how I sometimes feel when trying to remember.. well.. anything! My wife will probably hit me with a chair next time I realize halfway through a movie that I watched it already. More critically, I used to feel like all the reading and learning I do is futile: it was challenging for me to recall a recommendation when needed, explain the essence of a book I read to a friend, or critically relate an article to another writing on the same topic. What good is it to read a lot if you cannot remember it, let alone apply it?
An unspectacular trick
Across the spectrum, whether in politics or business, west or east, ancient or recent, male or female, the same pattern applies – leaders are readers (well, they are generally learners – but that doesn’t rhyme as well). Luminaries like Al Ghazali, Avicenna, Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and many, many more are known to not pass a day without reading. So, is this what happens to them as well? Do they have a better memory or smarter processing powers than us mortals? Or is, in our language, their spectacular genius due to do unspectacular preparation?
It turns out that Musk, with his five multibillion USD companies in very distinct fields, already gave us a glimpse behind the scenes. In a response to a question on Reddit AMA, he said
“It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree -- make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e. the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to."
Gates agrees with him. Also known for his avid reading, Gates indicated that knowledge will only stick if you build a mental schematic of the big picture, which will allow you to get a sense of how all the bits of knowledge fit together.
This map, tree, or framework also makes sense from a cognitive perspective, as the associations with previous knowledge provides mental “hooks” for new knowledge to latch on. Once you do this, it is easier to pull it out and apply it when needed.
In fact, frameworks are so powerful they are applied in fields as diverse as software development, social sciences, and management. SWOT, PEST, MECE, 7S, and their 3-4 letter siblings all serve a bigger purpose than helping you pass a consulting interview. These frameworks help us organize ideas, which in turn creates a language to remember, communicate, apply, and benefit from them. In doing so, they eventually simplify and therefore have limitations, but that is the easiest way our funny little brains can handle complex subjects.
So what is the leadership framework we will follow?
Leaders are jugglers
One thing is for certain: as a leader of an organization, company, or team, you juggle an infinite number of areas, tasks, people, and levels of detail. It is exciting, spectacular even, but can also be very draining and overwhelming. So what are the key areas that distinguish successful leaders from unsuccessful ones?
After a couple of years in management consulting, I took on my first executive management role. Despite changing industries, cultures, and continents, I felt comfortable that my educational and professional background prepared me well to excel as a CEO (ha ha!). I carefully studied the market, interviewed clients and suppliers, analyzed all possible internal and external data sources, and developed a beautifully crafted strategy document.
Only problem is it never got implemented! It took me a while to realize that while the strategy is important (Where do we need to be in 3-5 years?), successful leaders realize they need to provide their teams with an ambitious and inspiring purpose (Why are we doing all of this?). This common goal is what transforms the core of organizations.
And how did I think I can turn this purpose, this vision, into reality? Enter organizational and structural design. I cannot recall how many hours my teams and I have poured into job descriptions, org charts, roles and responsibilities etc. – and again, how little the effect this had on our results.
Even if we all agreed on the purpose and strategy, our day to day was detached from it and we fell back easily into old habits. I had to learn the hard way one of the key principles of lean management: work gets done in (and results follow) processes, not structures (“lean” refers to the management philosophy of Toyota that revolutionized businesses globally and whose principles are now standard as far as Silicon Valley). Successful leaders meticulously engineer well-oiled, effective processes that execute the companies’ purpose, like those that set goals and those that help achieve them (How do we make decisions and solve problems? What do we need to do? When will we do it?), linking the company’s day to day with the higher purpose it pursues.
And who will get all of this done? Armed with a naïve understanding of the world and an inflated ego that led me to believe I alone – or a few strong players in the organization – can get everything done, I used to think of our people as nothing more than a cost item in our P&L.
Successful leaders, in contrast, give disproportionate attention to their people (Who will get us there?). They perfect how they staff, align, develop, motivate, engage, and reward their teams. Ultimately, they realize the frontline employees are the ones creating the value, and our role as an organizations’ leaders is to develop and empower them.
As a corollary to the above, lean thinking also pays high attention to the “external people”, a company’s other stakeholders like customers, suppliers, investors, communities etc. Successful leaders realize that they can only win if they can convince them each to become real partners in the company’s success. This is a very different view than the adversarial nature of what we sometimes see in contract negotiations and board meetings, but it is the only way to build sustainable businesses.
Finally, at times I caught myself falling into the trap of taking all credit for our successes and blaming other factors for our failures – even if only to myself. Volatile markets, unreasonable customers, legacy workforce, or simply luck can affect an organizations’ performance, but successful leaders know there is one person they should always start with: themselves. They constantly learn from their mistakes, work on themselves, and develop throughout their journey. Therefore, they end up being role models, have a clear sense of purpose and principles, and walk the talk, which inspires everyone in their organization to do the same.
You might have noticed that the 4Ps are not distinct, self-contained areas, but interrelated. They are, to some degree, hierarchical, with higher levels providing inputs for lower levels (purpose gets implemented through process by people led by person), and lower levels providing the foundation (and, later, feedback) for higher ones. The key here is that all levels are aligned and in sync with each other. Almost everything a leader does will fall under one of these 4Ps, leading eventually to spectacular performance.
Successful leaders realize that financial metrics are their ultimate result: they are easy to see, easy to measure and they persist. But they also know they have to be standing on a strong foundation of enablers that can ensure them they not only hit their numbers once or twice but maintain and sustain them for years. Whether it’s the 4Ps introduced here based on popular lean literature, the 3 key areas of effective execution, or the 4 decision areas for startups and scaleups, it all boils down to one version or another of the above branches of the leadership tree.
As you can imagine from the above, I thankfully continue to have my fair share of unspectacular failures and experiences in all of them (do we ever stop learning?). This will be the focus of this blog, and we will relate the upcoming insights to the corresponding “P” in our framework. Doing so will hopefully help you move from knowing and recalling what is shared here (or anywhere else on leadership, for that matter), to doing and becoming it.
Afterthought...
How much time do you spend on each of the 4Ps? How much time do you think the ideal leader does?
What was the best advice you received in each of the 4Ps?
Have a spectacular weekend,
/M
P.S.: Apparently not all fish are as forgetful as Dory. Had to mention this here to uphold my scientific integrity.
P.P.S.: Finding Nemo was 17 years ago. How old do you feel now?
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