By M. Middelboe on Thursday, 05 April 2018
Category: Leadership

How to “excel” your leadership, and treat it as an asset

Creating leadership value can happen by luck, coincidence or great performance of course. However, only few of us are born leaders, so why not structure your analytical approach to leadership, as you do with other assets on the company’s balance sheet. Personally, I fell in love with Dave Ulrich’s Leadership Capital Index (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. 2015), which could be one way to assess the value of your current leadership and identify improvement targets inspired by the research based drivers.

 

Great leadership is an untapped potential. According to at least some research below, only 25% of leaders are good leaders, half of them are “only managers”, and 25% are “bad supervisors”. Two other pieces of research reveal the challenge of leaders’ misperception of being inspirational. Thus, 77% of leaders find themselves inspiring, whereas 82% of employees find their leaders uninspiring. Acknowledging that inspiring leadership correlate positively with employee commitment (+32%), satisfaction (+46%) and performance (+16%), it could be fair to believe that better leadership would create more business value.

Figure 1: Leadership is an untapped potential

In brief, Leadership Capital Index makes the intangible leadership tangible, by pointing out competencies which drive leadership value, thus enabling an analytical and quantitative approach to the value of leadership. To really get my grips on how to improve the value of leadership, I have operationalized LCI – simply by creating an Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, which makes it possible to manage the multiple leadership drivers, leading indicators, calculating, calibrating and simulating the LCI. To supplement the valuation of a company the LCI approach can be applied to your own leadership and team, any other leader and team, or even a whole organization.

Table 1: The Leadership Capital Index competencies

All competencies have profound and research based rationales. But, let me share some examples  of my interpretations.

Execution

Even the “best” plan may fail, if leaders are not able to make things happen through others. Thus, leaders are valued on their ability to prioritize and focus, ensuring clear accountability, making the right decisions timely, mobilizing others, adapting quickly, and communicating sense of urgency.

People management

No leader can do the job on his own. Thus, leaders are valued who have the ability, and find the time, to be both manager and leader at the same time, which takes strong communication skills, strong and aligned teams, people development and succession.

Performance accountability

Though, some claim that results are best driven by avoiding performance management, I find delegation of both tasks and accountability a necessity to deliver as promised. I still trust creating a shared culture of “Earning the Right to Attack” – otherwise you may not find the money to make the good intentions happen in real life. Thus, clearly defined goals, standards of achievements, link to consequences, regular follow-up and feedback provides comfort.

Leading indicators

Each of the 10 capabilities is detailed with concrete characteristics, e.g. personal resilience, professional and social intelligence, mobilization of commitment and adaptability. Furthermore, each characteristic is accompanied by leading indicators, i.e. concrete questions to assess the leader’s competencies. As almost all past research is one dimensional, the ability to situationally master and mix all 10 capabilities makes the big difference.

Now, let me share some of my experience as tips & tricks for applying LCI.

Beginner’s challenges and assessment scope

Automation and communication

Weighting of LCI elements

Scale definitions and calibration

Calculating and target benchmarking

Figure 2: Leadership Capital Index – Profile Summary

Figure 3: Leadership Capital Index – Target and Gap Analysis

Call for action

Good luck with your leadership value improvement efforts.

Mads Middelboe

Executive Advisor & CEO

Leadmore ® 

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