To become a credible leader, you first have to comprehend fully the deeply held beliefs—the values, standards, ethics, and ideals— that drive you. You have to freely and honestly choose the principles you will use to guide your decisions and actions. Then you have to genuinely express yourself. You have to authentically communicate your beliefs in ways that uniquely represent who you are.
However, leaders aren’t just speaking for themselves when they talk about the values that should guide decisions and actions. When leaders passionately express a commitment to quality or innovation or service or some other core value, those leaders aren’t just saying, “I believe in this.” They’re also making a commitment for an entire organization. They’re saying, “We all believe in this.” Therefore, leaders must not only be clear about their personal guiding principles but also make sure that there’s agreement on a set of shared values among everyone they lead. And they must hold others accountable to those values and standards.
FIND YOUR VOICE
“What is your leadership philosophy?” What would you say if someone asked you this question? Are you prepared right now to say what it is? If you aren’t, you should be. And if you are, you need to reflect on it daily.
Before you can become a credible leader—one who connects what you say with what you do—you first have to find your voice. If you can’t find your voice, you’ll end up with a vocabulary that belongs to someone else, mouthing words that were written by some
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G E speechwriter or mimicking the language of some other leader who’s
nothing like you at all. If the words you speak are not your words but someone else’s, you will not, in the long term, be able to be consistent in word and deed. You will not have the integrity to lead.
To find your voice, you have to explore your inner self. You have to discover what you care about, what defines you, and what makes you who you are. You can be authentic only when you lead according to the principles that matter most to you. Otherwise you’re just putting on an act. Consider Casey Mork’s experience with an inter- nal start-up business that never got off the ground:
First, our manager never had a true voice, as he never had the courage to pronounce solutions or suggestions beyond what our three (never agreeing) directors input into each decision. Oftentimes it felt like he acted as a simple conduit for mixed messages from above . . . without his own personal voice defining a clear road for us to travel. This made it very difficult for the group to focus on a defined set of tasks connected to goals.
Second, an outcome of the above was that we had no specific organizational values to live by. Sure we all knew the company mission, and transferred in corporate values from our previous groups (inside the same company), but he never went beyond the ordinary in defining values for our business. Our customers were different, and so how should we treat them differently than the rest of the company? We spent a lot of money pampering our customers; how would this apply to managing our expense accounts? Seemingly simple values went undefined and as a result were exploited by some team members.
As could have been predicted, Casey says, this lack of clarity and consistency in values at the top resulted in little internal cohesion
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and focus, and the company failed to generate a favorable customer experience or positive business results. In contrast, Josh Fradenburg, founder of Mindful Measures says that it was his values that drove the products that he brought to market. “It was really the values that formed the organization, rather than the organization forming the values,” he recounts.
When we ask leaders how clear they are about their leadership philosophy, those who fall into the top 10 percent on this leader- ship behavior have quite different work attitudes than their coun- terparts in the bottom 10 percent. Their overall attitudes toward the workplace are significantly more positive. When asked to rate their own effectiveness as a leader, the scores of those who are clear about their leadership philosophy are 25 percent higher than those who report being not very clear about their leadership philosophy.
The impact that the leader’s clarity of leadership philosophy has on his or her constituents is even more dramatic, as shown in Figure 2.1. When asked how effective the leader is, the scores from those working with leaders who are seen as being clear about their leader- ship philosophy are more than 40 percent higher than those scores received from constituents who view leaders as not very clear about their leadership philosophy. There are statistically significant differences between these two groups of constituents on a variety of important dimensions. For example, feeling a sense of team spirit, feeling proud about the organization, feeling committed to the organization’s success, being willing to work extra hard to meet organizational objectives, and levels of trust all differ significantly. Leaders who have a clear leadership philosophy are nearly 30 percent more likely to be trusted by their constituents than those unclear about their leadership philosophy.
The evidence is clear: to be the most effective, every leader must learn to find the voice that represents who he or she is. When you have clarified your values and found your voice, you will also find
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