Leadership is a conversation. Leaders spend most of their days in conversation - meetings, phone calls, emails, and strategic communications. How you show up in these conversations determines your level of effectiveness.
How we show up together in these conversations drives our collective effectiveness.
The quality of our collective conversation largely determines our collective leadership effectiveness and business performance. We work with an extraordinary female leader of a large professional service firm who consistently leverages the best out of her Extended Leadership Team because of how she deploys herself in leadership conversations. She told us that in every conversation she has three objectives:
1) increase understanding and buy-in
2) achieve the desired outcome
3) improve the relationship
For instance, she told of having a difficult performance review with a key executive. With this framework in mind, she ensured that the content was clearly understood, outcomes were achieved, and the relationship improved. She consistently is seen as being clear, direct, fair, and compassionate. Her people know where they stand with her, and she outperforms her peers in this business at a multiple of three times their results. She is highly effective, in no small measure, because of how she models and orchestrates individual and collective leadership conversations.
Collective leadership effectiveness and intelligence represent huge untapped potential in most organizations. Management expert Peter Senge [https://www.solonline.org/?page=PeterSenge] notes that the collective intelligence and performance of most groups is well below the average intelligence and performance of the members. We usually dumb down when we come together. We act at the lowest common denominator.
The dynamics played out in most groups - overly aggressive advocacy of positions, poor listening, reactive responsiveness, political caution, ambitious self-interest, mistrust, withholding of opinions - subvert collective effectiveness. Consequently, most leadership teams function collectively well below their members' average intelligence. Collective intelligence is required for breakthroughs. Senge talked of finding leverage points - an action taken or a change made that has a magnified positive and lasting impact on intended results - within the system. If you have a long lever, you can move a very heavy object with little effort. In financial language, this is the equivalent of getting a multiple.
Businesses invest to get a multiple return on investment. Finding leverage means discovering an innovation, initiative, change, or action that, when taken, has a large, lasting, positive impact well beyond the energy of input.
We ask leaders to find leverage here by evaluating the return on their time spent in two ways.
First: are you increasing the creative capacity and capability of your organization at a multiple? If you are not getting a 5:1 ratio of return on your time spent, your ROI is sub-par. Far too many leaders spend their time on the areas that provide a 1:1 return (or worse). These areas are low leverage and need to be upgraded or eliminated. Expanding capacity and capability depends on this ratio of return.
Second, are you developing effective leadership at all levels within your organization? As a leader, you cannot scale the organization until you understand and perform your role in developing other leaders. When you enter the executive ranks, your job is to develop other leaders - and, to minimize your losses, know when someone cannot be developed in the timeframe required. When we ask leaders what they would do differently looking back, their most frequent response is this: "I would have made changes in my executive team more quickly." They hang on to low-ratio return, high-cost leaders for too long, and it costs them dearly. Having the right people on the leadership team and investing in the Leadership Agenda is high leverage. It is key to developing the collective effectiveness and intelligence required to compete. Otherwise, the business cannot grow at the pace required, the return on leadership will be sub-par, and even the best executives will likely burn out.
Collectively intelligent leadership teams consistently find leverage; those with low collective intelligence are not likely to innovate, create, and find leverage at the rate required to stay competitive. Organizations and their competitive environments are so complex that they defy rational understanding. Actions or changes in the system that would produce lasting improvement are not obvious. If they were, we would have already taken them. It is not easy to find the leverage we need amid complexity.
It takes more than one brilliant leader to consistently find non-obvious points of leverage and to expand the business' leadership capacity.
It takes an effective collective leadership team that functions well together to have collective intelligence well beyond the average level of brilliance of its members.
It takes honest, often courageous conversation to find leverage. For example, when we worked with the leadership team of one of the largest privately held companies in the world, the organization was being led by the founders' daughter. Her Top Team was working through several difficult strategic issues, and the conversation turned to performance and the culture. This team had learned over the years to have honest conversations and to address what really mattered. In one conversation at a particularly controversial moment, she made a courageous statement that changed the entire dialogue and outcome. She said, "We are defined by what we tolerate."
At that moment the entire leadership team, prompted by her clear and honest statement, coalesced around a difficult decision that elevated both culture and performance.
The quality of the leadership conversations determines collective effectiveness, which determines collective intelligence, which determines business performance. As Senior Leaders, the quality of our conversation and our relationships correlates directly with the results we create. None of this can happen without developing individually effective leadership. Individual effectiveness is required to catalyze collective effectiveness. In our leadership consulting practice, we work simultaneously on individual leadership effectiveness and collective effectiveness to improve the quality of the collective conversation.
After a year of work with any given leadership team, the most consistent feedback we receive is: "The big difference that made the difference is that we can now tell the truth to one another and have courageous conversations that get results. We can now take on complex and politically charged issues, central to moving the business forward, and we quickly cut through the complexity and personal sensitivities to arrive at high-quality decisions." Collective effectiveness is vital to fulfilling the Promise of Leadership. Developing such effectiveness, mastering leadership, in the Leadership System is a high-leverage investment. The effectiveness of the Leadership System (the Leadership Agenda) should be a key priority owned by the Top Team.
Questions to Ask Yourself:
• How effective is your leadership? How do you know? How does this compare to your industry peers?
• Is your leadership developing at the pace to stay relevant? How do you know?
• What is it about the way you show up that prevents others from providing you with well-intended feedback?
• Are you effective in achieving what matters or just very busy?
• Would you follow you?
This piece originally appeared in the book Mastering Leadership: An Integrated Framework for Breakthrough Performance and Extraordinary Business Results (Wiley, 2016). Robert J. Anderson is the founder and chairman of The Leadership Circle and the Full Circle Group. He is also the co-founder and chairman of Full Circle Group. Over the past 35 years, Anderson has dedicated his career to exploring the intersections between leadership and mastery, competence and consciousness, spirituality, and business. William A. Adams is the CEO of The Leadership Circle and the Full Circle Group. He has an uncanny way of bringing clarity and wisdom that distills moments of truth, creates solid direction, and builds confidence as he creates lifelong relationships and friendships with his clients. He is extensively sought out as a trusted advisor to CEO's, top executives and teams around the world.