Success Playbook of the Strong Leader
Although we like to create neat definitions for different leadership approaches, every individual has a different style.
Your leadership style is unique. It’s a product of your personality, your upbringing, your level of resilience, your belief system, your confidence, your education… I could go on!
Any style can be effective, but there are some principles that are not negotiable, if you are serious about leading for performance.
This is such a critical topic, but many leaders find it… philosophically inconvenient. So they’ll build a plausible storyline instead…
They’ll tell you that they’re radically improving their team’s performance… changing their team’s culture for the better…
And because there’s no conflict in the team, they call it a high performing team.
Bullsh!t!
If you were to put them under the microscope, you’d discover that they’ve fallen into a comfortable style of leadership where they don’t really ask anything of their team.
Instead, they let their people choose the standard – which inevitably gravitates to the lowest common denominator – and they don’t hold people to account for their choices.
Several times during my career, I arrived in roles where I witnessed, first-hand, what happens as a result of many years of leadership neglect
Performance, productivity, and value were in the toilet. Unfortunately, there’s no other way to describe it…
But somehow, everyone had managed to normalize this, and had convinced themselves that they were doing a bang-up job!
And the leaders who subscribe to this lax, permissive style of leadership keep up the front.
They call themselves collaborative, or consultative, or people-focused…
But in the vast majority of cases, this is nothing more than a convenient delusion.
Their team performance is appalling, so in order to perpetuate the ruse, they have to remain completely insular, and avoid any performance measurement or comparison!
Over time, they come to believe their own bullsh!t… and it’s only when a fresh set of eyes comes in and can see what’s really going on, that change is possible.
Regardless of your personal style, if you really want to lead for performance, you need to do a few things consistently.
This starts with the choice to leave weak, permissive leadership behind, and lean into the principles of strong leadership that make all the difference to performance.
Your success playbook starts with a few key things:
- Taking the time to clearly communicate the strategy and objectives
- Stretching people beyond what they would otherwise choose to do themselves
- Having difficult 1:1 performance conversations with your people
- Dealing decisively with sub-standard performance and behavior
- Adopting a “no passengers” philosophy
- Having the courage to make tough decisions, quickly
- Maintaining strong, single points of accountability
- Having the empathy to see the world through your people’s eyes, without letting it affect your ability to make the right decisions for the right reasons
The good news about being a leader is that you get to choose how you want to approach this dilemma.
You don’t have to do any of this… you can choose to sit in your seat, overcompensate for your people when they don’t deliver, and hope that sucking up to your boss is enough to help you get by.
But if you want performance and results, you can’t avoid the work that it requires. Adopting the strong leaders’ success playbook will bring incalculable benefits to you and your team in the years ahead.