"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on." (Steve Jobs, Stanford commencement speech, June 2005).
What do Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Warren Buffett and Richard Branson have in common? They are inspirational leaders whose passion for growing the business is infectious. By winning the hearts as well as the minds of their executive teams and staff, they have consistently produced extraordinary ROI.
This is the third in a series of columns introducing evidence-based best practices and the resulting measurable behaviour that optimize business performance. The series will explain how to integrate these practices, perform them efficiently and leverage them to improve your organization's performance. By adopting and relentlessly making improvements based on these effective and proven strategic behavioural principles, you can transform your business into a sustainable, high-performing organization.
To be an inspirational leader, you need to fully believe in and effectively integrate and adopt five measurable behaviours.
- Lead by example. In building his culture at Apple, Steve Jobs knew that "what interests my boss, fascinates the heck out of me." This was why everyone constantly observed his behaviour and the subtleties behind it, effectively putting him under the microscope. Since your employees need to understand how you define success, they try to evaluate what you perceive as important. Thus, you need to set a good example with all your interactions and behaviours. For instance, demonstrate your respect for all employees by taking the time to listen and consider diverse perceptions on a broad range of issues. Each person has their own history, so customize your feedback by adjusting your comments without diluting your message. Examples include dressing for success and being positive, optimistic, ethical and trustworthy. Further, you must continually prioritize according to ROI if your people are to adopt that practice.
- Maximize your own contribution to the organization's success. Again, based on ROI, this means identifying your weak areas and constantly working to improve them. This could mean attending high-performance workshops to learn how to effectively execute best practices. Take what you learn and implement it in the organization. Another option is to get advice (strategic, legal, etc) from highly regarded advisers who can deliver excellent ROI in the areas your organization needs to improve. And, if you can get better ROI from different service providers, don't hesitate to replace your current ones.
- Be enthusiastic and inspire others to believe in your company's vision. Find exciting ways to communicate how your organization can improve and achieve future possibilities. Hit the refresh button with your lead team. Every quarter, drill down, review and prioritize your targets according to ROI and the improvements needed within each. Be rigorous — set metrics and timelines — as you focus on the highest priority improvements. Communicate these by circulating a continually updated document that includes who is responsible for achieving what and by when. As this is a rolling document, reprioritize goals and then rigorously improve your objectives to ensure excellent accountability.
- Facilitate emotional commitment, buy-in and ownership by all employees. From the top down, generate a mood that has everyone feeling that this is their organization and that they want to help it achieve its clear, measurable end-state – its vision. Focus your people by helping them build continually improving, high-performing teams that cascade improvements down throughout the organization. The fifth column in this series, "Being a team builder," will explain how to achieve this.
- Celebrate and reward your people when they deliver remarkable value for clients. To quote Jobs again, "Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have … It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it." One of the major reasons Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Warren Buffett and Richard Branson have built continually improving and sustainable high-performing organizations is that they successfully trumpeted the remarkable improvements of their employees by recognizing and rewarding such achievements. It's all about the people and how effectively you lead them to think. •
This column is the third in a series of edited excerpts from Donald Andrews' forthcoming book "Performance Intelligence: How to Execute High-Performing Best Practices."
Next month in Leadership Best Practices: Helping the organization learn and adapt
