At leadership offsites, I facilitate an exercise to determine how the group defines leadership. Each person has one minute to write as many words as they can that they associate with leadership. The results are astounding and often confounding.

This Week’s Edition

What is the Silver Bullet definition of leadership? How does your definition of leadership compare?

Clarify Your Thinking

After compiling their individual lists, I ask the leaders to estimate how many words from their list they think they will have in common with the others at their table. “We’ll have a lot. Probably half our list. At least 10,” they all offer confidently.

After this bravado, they compare their lists and often find no words in common. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Nada. This theme continues across the tables. 

The leaders are baffled, “Robin, what’s the trick? We feel like we are generally a solid team, but how can we be so off?”

The short answer is that the concept of leadership is personal. Each of us has had different experiences with leaders. These experiences inform a slightly different personal definition of leadership. As a result each of us holds as valuable slightly different aspects of leadership. 

This becomes challenging when leaders work together as their different beliefs about leadership sometimes clash. This lack of definitional harmony can result in leaders having widely varying expectations about effective leadership behavior. Sometimes the expectations of each leader aren’t met.  

This lack of alignment can cause leaders to doubt themselves, the team’s unity and the organization’s potential for success. 70% of employees say alignment is the greatest hurdle to achieving company strategy.

Old Thinking: How come no one else is leading like me? They are failing to put forth effective leadership which is torpedoing us and our future potential.

New Thinking: Wow. It seems like we leaders aren’t connecting on the fundamentals of leadership. I think my perspective is right, but I am curious to learn more about why they think they are right. 

Thoughts Lead to Actions

Leaders who don’t share the same definition of leadership are prone to making assumptions and end up talking past one another when executing the team’s vision or strategies. This lack of alignment can torpedo the most well intended efforts. 

Here are some clues your leadership team may not be in full alignment:

• Inconsistent instructions based on different interpretations of a strategy

• Conflicting priorities across departments

• Performance expectations that reward individual achievement over organization-wide results and customer satisfaction

• Vastly different messages from meetings

Take these three steps to create your team’s definition of leadership which will lead to greater alignment:

Step 1: Have each person make a list of all the words they associate with leadership.

Step 2: After making their own list, ask them to compare their list with the other leaders determining how many exact words everyone has in common.

Step 3: Talk through which words are most valuable to the group in an effort to create a collective definition of leadership for the team.

A leadership team that is 100% clear on what they mean when they say “leadership” will form clarity of expectations about effective leadership behavior. As leaders operate from this shared definition, their efforts will be more aligned and results more consistent.  

The Silver Bullet definition of leadership is the one your team defines together and leads from each day in creating a culture that generates consistent elite performance results.

Boost Your Performance

Competitive leaders are desperate for their lists to match, so much so that they attempt to bend the rules of the exercise to meet their results. Once they accept the reality of their inadvertent definitional disharmony they are thrust in to a deeper discussion about leadership and their team.Many often build on their collective definition of leadership by further defining their core leadership tenets. Find out more in this week’s video.

What’s Your Opinion?

What’s your definition of leadership? Let me know at robin.pou@robinpou.com.

If you are going to be a leader, you might as well be a good one. Don’t let doubt count you out. Have a confident week!

Robin Pou, Chief Advisor and Strategist

We live to make bad leadership extinct so forward this newsletter to others who strive to be confident leaders. 

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What is “The Confident Leader”?

During the Covid-19 Pandemic, I began a video series called “Panic or Plan?” It was designed to equip leaders to navigate the doubt they experienced and to rise in the confidence they needed to lead during turbulent times. It took off. I then started this newsletter to equip leaders in the same fashion each week for the doubt that crashes across the bow of their leaderSHIP.