Leadership is about what you do. It is not a position you hold or a state of being. Your leadership potential is certainly shaped by who you are as a person and your life experience, but whether this potential is realized depends on what actions you take.
Sometimes your actions will lead to positive outcomes, and sometimes they will lead to negative outcomes. While external factors can influence outcomes—making money, setting profit records, winning elections, securing a piece of business, and so on—these outcomes typically are the result of a sustained period of high-quality actions. The point is that results, by themselves, don’t define good leadership. Instead, good results typically occur as a result of good leadership.
Years of effective leadership usually precede sustainably good results. By the same token, good current results can often mask poor leadership, although this may not become apparent for several years, sometimes too late to prevent real damage.
An Ownership Mind-Set
If effective leadership typically precedes sustainably good results, what are the key elements that tend to be critical to effective leadership? If there is a wide range of potentially effective leadership styles, do these styles share certain key features? In my experience, the answer is yes.
Effective leadership begins with having the right mindset; in particular, it begins with having an ownership mind-set. This means a willingness to put oneself in the shoes of a decision maker and think through all of the considerations that the decision maker must factor into his or her thinking and actions.
Having an ownership mind-set is essential to developing into an effective leader. By the same token, the absence of an ownership mind-set often explains why certain people with great promise ultimately fail to reach their leadership potential. An ownership mind-set involves three essential elements, which I will put in the form of questions:• Can you figure out what you believe, as if you were an owner?
• Can you act on those beliefs?
• Do you act in a way that adds value to someone else: a customer, a client, a colleague, or a community? Do you take responsibility for the positive and negative impact of your actions on others?These elements are not a function of your formal position in an organization. They are not a function of title, power, or wealth, although these factors can certainly be helpful in enabling you to act like an owner. These elements are about what you do. They are about taking ownership of your convictions, actions, and impact on others. In my experience, great organizations are made up of executives who focus specifically on these elements and work to empower their employees to think and act in this way.
Do You Try to Figure Out What You Believe as if You Were in the Shoes of a Decision Maker?
The world is full of people with opinions. Television, radio, and other media are brimming over with commentators making suggestions and offering seemingly authoritative advice to government officials and corporate executives about what they ought to do. At dinners and cocktail parties—and around the water cooler at work—we talk about what others should do or should have done, or the flaws of our bosses. There’s usually very little risk in this banter, and often no one even remembers what was actually said. It can be fun and sometimes interesting. On occasion, giving our opinions may make us feel better about ourselves, because we’re weighing in on important issues. We may even think that by asserting our views, we are acting like leaders.
In our jobs, we may give our opinion on an issue from a functional or departmental point of view--in other words, a limited perspective. Or we may give an opinion without fully thinking about the issues and weighing the interests of various constituencies that our boss has to consider in order to make an important decision. We may do this because we don’t have access to additional information or, alternatively, because we believe that broadening our perspective simply isn’t part of our job description.
This kind of opinion giving may be quite appropriate and adequate in any number of situations, but it doesn’t constitute leadership. Leadership requires much more. It starts with taking on a broader perspective in figuring out what you truly believe should be done--that is, as if you were an owner.
Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Excerpted from What You Really Need to Lead: The Power of Thinking and Acting Like an Owner. Copyright 2015 Robert Steven Kaplan. All rights reserved.