What Is Essential to Leadership?
For the last 30 years, I’ve been a leadership development practitioner. In 2002, I founded Giant Leap Consulting, and since that time, we’ve developed leadership programs that thousands of leaders across the globe have experienced. Many of those programs are multi-year in length, and most are focus on developing of new leaders. The rich participant conversations that emerge during those programs – literally thousands of them – have enhanced our understanding of what’s most essential to leading others.
We believe that there are multiple dimensions to the idea of leadership essentialism. At the highest level, what matters most is a leader’s fitness to lead, and that fitness is expressed in three distinct ways: leading yourself, leading people, and leading work. The questions can express each type of fitness: “Do I know who I am as a leader?” “Will others follow my lead?” and “Can I inspire exceptional results?”
Leading Yourself
When it comes to leading yourself, what’s essential is that you are self-aware and clearheaded about your strengths and where those strengths can have the most positive impact. Leading yourself also involves understanding the diminishing returns that the overuse of your strengths is likely to have. All of this requires a deep level of self-exploration, the kind that a coach or counselor can aid. Because when you know who you are, you become better able to understand the kinds of people you need to surround yourself with to offset or counterbalance your strengths and limitations. The examined life should lead you to become much more comfortable in your skin, reflecting authentic confidence.
Leading Others
Leading others involves a different focus and a different set of skills than leading yourself. Before you move into a leadership role, you were likely a strong individual contributor. Your bosses took notice of your productivity and performance and rewarded you by promoting you to a leadership role. But crossing off items on your own to-do list is vastly different than inspiring great performance out of a team. Getting the best out of others requires fostering a psychologically safe environment where people feel free to express themselves and do their best work. It means being more than operationally smart; it means being emotionally intelligent. It also means being emotionally mature and composed, especially when people around you aren’t being those things. As a leader, it means involving people so they feel a high degree of ownership over whatever tasks they are assigned.
Leading Work
Leading work means mastering business fundamentals such as planning, organizing, staffing, and controlling. It requires being business-minded and taking an interest in industry trends and how they are likely to impact the organization. In addition, leading work involves influencing goals, plans, processes, systems, and metrics to create efficiencies and optimize operations.
As mentioned, a lot goes into being an effective leader. But the ingredients that go into great leadership become easier to organize when divided among the three most essential leadership domains.
Leading Yourself
- Self-discipline and personal organization
- Work-life balance
- Self-care and wellness
- Personal goal setting and self-accountability
- Professionalism
- Personal courage
Leading Others
- Employee engagement
- Diversity and inclusion
- Effective communication
- Optimizing conflict
- Performance coaching
- Leading teams/team building
- Influence and persuasion
- Emotional intelligence
Leading Work
- Business ethics and values
- Visioning and Strategic thinking
- Execution, profitability, and levels of job performance
- Customer relationships, satisfaction, and loyalty
- Entrepreneurship and market development
- Business partnerships and joint ventures
- Managing and calculating risk
The list of topics under each leadership essential will always be long and in flux. But rather than getting overwhelmed by all the topics that leaders need to be trained on, pay more attention to the three ways the leaders need to be fit. Because no leader should be expected to be perfect. No leader could possibly live up to all the shifting criteria against which we judge a leader’s effectiveness. But all leaders should be fit to lead. Fit to lead themselves. Fit to lead others. And fit to lead the work.
