Leadership Code: Increasing Effectiveness and Impact at Different Levels

Sixth, mid-level leaders maintain composure. Mid-level leaders experience significant stress and are often required to navigate conflicting information and direction.  They must be able to manage difficult situation without frustration, maintain composure even in extremely stressful situations, and recover quickly from setbacks.

Seventh, mid-level leaders demonstrate personal commitment. Consistent with our high potential findings, mid-level leaders must be engaged.  They need to care about the work they do, believe in it, and show commitment and energy to achieve the organization’s goals.  While for front-line leaders, these behaviors were folded into authenticity—a blend of being ethical and moral and caring about what you do, for mid-level leaders demonstrating personal commitment is important in its own right. 

Executive Leadership

The term executive leaders refers broadly to leaders who are charged with directing the work of the organization so that it succeeds in a competitive world and delivers on stakeholder expectations. Executive leaders have to understand the complex and evolving external environment and set a clear and achievable direction for the organization in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity. 

In looking at the data for executives, we again found seven groupings of leader behaviors—some unique, some overlapping with other levels of leadership.  

First, as for front-line leaders and mid-level leaders, executive leaders must build the workforce.  The behaviors for executives include those described above for mid-level leaders (with greater emphasis on future talent pools) but include an additional broadening of the concept to include three additional elements. Executive leaders must maintain an updated picture of what future talent needs will be—what are the talent implications of future strategic directions. Second, executive leaders need to personally invest their time in helping key employees develop and advance. Finally, executive leaders need to make sure their own team is performing well.  It is in the people of the organization that the technical and social capabilities that will make or break the strategy reside. By being personally involved in communicating what talent matters in what roles, evaluating and developing that talent, and engaging and connecting that talent to the goals of the organization, executive leaders create the conditions for strategy to come to fruition.

Second, executive leaders resolve complex issues. Even more important at the executive level is the ability to think analytically and creatively and to use those cognitive skills to make good decisions.  Their rich mental models about the external and internal environment enable executives to see the patterns and second and third order effects that enable good decision making in ambiguous and volatile contexts.  This allows executives to see the bigger picture in a mass of detail, cut quickly to the heart of complex issues, and to make good decisions and set a clear path for future opportunities. Resolving complex issues at the executive level also includes creative thinking that allows novel ways to solve problems or identify opportunities to surface.

Third, executive leaders deliver results.  Executives still need to deliver results and are accountable for the results their organization delivers.  This requires attention to the same concepts as front-line leaders and mid-level leaders attend to—accountability, driving change, decision-making, and communication.  Here again, the step-change is in the increased scope and scale of the groups they need to establish these behaviors in.  Instead of overseeing accountability, change, decision-making, etc. in individuals they know and interact with, they are creating systems and processes that affect hundreds, thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of people.  The behaviors needed to monitor the work in progress of a whole organization are markedly different than those needed to monitor the work in progress of a content writing team or even an advertising group.  

An additional complication for executives in delivering results is the need to balance delivering short-term results with making good bets on what would work (be a good objective to have achieved) in a relatively distant time frame.  Only if they have targets can they set pathways to achieve these more distant goals.  Many executives fail because they don't know what to measure, and either spend precious resources getting information they can't actually use, or miss key indicators that have system lag times of three to five years.

Fourth, executive leaders have a positive outlook. Given the public accountability for results to external stakeholders in the face of unpredictable complex events and their public role inside and outside the organization, executives can only expect difficult circumstances, failures, and frustrations. (Read more about positive outlook here.) Executive leaders need to be able to not only maintain composure and not give in to frustration, but also to recover from setbacks quickly.  They also need to trust and be trusted and create a positive environment that enables responsive problem solving.

Fifth, executive leaders demonstrate personal commitment. As with mid-level leaders, though slightly more important given their more prominent role in the organization and the personal sacrifices generally required at the executive level, executive leaders need to show their passion for what they do, believe it is important and adds value, and demonstrate commitment and energy to achieving the organization’s goals.  If they don’t, others won’t be willing to make the effort needed for the organization’s success.

Sixth, executive leaders seek feedback. Given the power executives have, their ability to avoid executive isolation and proactively seek and hear feedback is critical to the long-term success of the organization. Executive leaders who are open and curious about what others inside and outside the organization think, and how well things are going, have better and more realistic understanding of where the organization currently is and can make more timely course corrections to adjust. They also tend to make better decisions because they get more diverse and challenging input to their thinking [see also this piece by Jerry Useem in The Atlantic that captures the challenges for executives].

Seventh, executive leaders behave ethically. As for seeking feedback, the executive behaviors around behaving ethically are more narrowly defined than for other levels in the organization.  Not tolerating unethical behavior in others and consistently living by a moral code appear to be more table stakes here—an acknowledgment that unethical behavior tolerated or perpetrated by an executive creates liability that can threaten the foundation of the whole organization.

Conclusions

While there are clear differences in the leadership requirements at different levels in an organization, there are also some key themes that are consistent across levels.   Some may not be surprising, but others we believe indicate some shifts in the expectations of leaders.

The leader’s responsibility to create the conditions for their group to deliver results is consistent across levels.  All three levels find behaviors related to accountability, driving change, communication, decision-making, and monitoring progress grouped together and fairly significant.  What changes across levels is how to implement these across a gradually increasing size of organization. These are skills that should be taught to front-line leaders, reinforced to mid-level leaders and placed in a larger context. Executives, on the other hand, need to understand the trade-offs in different systems and processes for supporting these practices—understanding that is often gained through experiences with different systems and processes over time or across organizations.

From the data, build the workforce is the dominant domain explaining leadership effectiveness at all levels in the organization.  Building on the revolutionary notion of a “Human Capital Developer” from the original Leadership Code book, this grouping of behaviors is consistent in its long-term focus across levels.  The #1 job of leaders at all levels in any organization is to know what talent is needed for the future and be actively and personally involved in growing and retaining that talent.  As with delivering results, the size and scope of the group of future leaders a leader is building for/from is one of the key variations across levels. Another difference is in the time horizon associated with the word “future.”  Future likely varies from front-line leaders who are typically looking 1-3 years out to mid-level leaders looking 3-6 years out to executives looking 6-20+ years out (depending on the industry, size, and the growth strategy of the organization).

Resolving complex issues—issues that the members of the team cannot resolve (or may not even see) themselves—is one of the unique contributions of a leader.  At all levels, one of the most critical functions of managerial leadership is seeing the path ahead within the time frame of current accountabilities. That forward view enables the team/group to transition smoothly forward from completion of today's work to what must be started next.  For front-line leaders this may be as simple as making sure tomorrow’s assembly line will have the materials needed to be able to assemble products.  For mid-level leaders it could be understanding how a new system implementation should be rolled out to keep work going with minimal disruption.  For executive leaders, it involves understanding the macrosystems -- the national and global context -- within which their organizations must maintain competitive advantage.  They actively engage the sociopolitical world so as to maintain conditions favorable to their continued advantage.  They also hold in mind several probabilistic future directions and set shorter-term targets that move the organization in directions that keep as many possible positive directions open as they continue to gather and evaluate new information on the speed of technology developments, consumer tastes, geopolitical realities, or macro-economic trends.  

A final key theme is the leader’s capacity to build relationships of mutual trust. Organizations bring disparate groups together to achieve something that cannot be achieved independently. Trust is the lubricant that allows these different individuals and groups to work together toward a common goal.  Effective leaders are willing and able to perform confidently within organizational structures in large part because they trust the motives and objectives of both the organization and their own senior leaders.  Trust of, comfort with, and the ability to operate constructively and positively within authority structures is a key leadership enabler at all levels.  As is the ability to build trusting relationships with peers and direct reports that help make things happen.  These relationships of mutual trust must be earned and built around integrity of commitment to organizational purposes.  Behaviors related to maintaining composure, positive work environments, and living by a moral code all contribute to building environments of mutual trust.   

We believe the findings above can be helpful to organizations developing a pipeline of leaders across multiple levels and can help inform the development of curricula and other interventions to help improve the quality of leadership in their organizations.  Some of the skills above can be developed if leaders have access to resources (training, coaches, other opportunities or exposure) and the personal determination to perfect their craft.  Others are challenging for even the most motivated leader to develop if they do not have some of the fundamental enablers of those behaviors.

Effective leadership development systems use a combination of both individual and organizational selection and development strategies to curate a pipeline of leaders that enables current performance and future growth.   It is an art, to be sure, but an art that can be grounded in more science than it traditionally has been.