Bootstrap Leadership Blog

Do you have a favorite leadership quote?  As a leader, you’ve probably been exposed to a variety of inspirational sayings and quotes down through the years.  Perhaps one or more of these have caught your attention and become a personal favorite.  While you’re not required to have a leadership quote framed and hanging in your office, it is kind of cool to find one that sums up your leadership philosophy or fits your leadership style.  Here are a few of my favorites:

“To command is to serve.  Nothing more, nothing less.”    - Andre Malraux

“Management is doing things right.  Leadership is doing the right things.”   - Peter Drucker

“Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do what you want done because he wants to do it.”    - Dwight Eisenhower

“The first responsibility of the leader is to define reality.  The last is to say thank you.  In between, the leader is a servant.”    - Max DePree

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worst when they despise him.  But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say, ‘We did this ourselves.’”    - Lao-Tzu

“A leader leads by example, whether he wants to or not.”    - Anonymous

“Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success.  Leadership determines whether the ladder is leading against the right wall.”   - Stephen Covey

“Before you become a leader, success is all about developing yourself.  When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.”                         - Jack Welch

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, then you are a leader.”    - John Quincy Adams

“Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.”    - John Kennedy

What I love about these quotes is they all have something to do with the concept of servant leadership or lifelong learning.  Quotes like these inspire us, and remind us that leadership is about those we lead, not about us.  If you have a favorite leadership quote, I’d love to read it.  Post it in the comments section, and I’ll print another list like this in a few weeks.  In the meantime – keep leading with courage and passion. 

Yesterday, I spent the day with a client that has a compelling corporate mission, one that drives everything they do.  It was inspiring to hear them talk about their goals and objectives, because everything was grounded in what it meant for their customers and the greater good.  It was clear that these people knew why they were working, and what achieving their goals meant in terms of making the world a better place.

On the way home, I got to thinking about their goals and the stark contrast with most corporate performance goals and objectives.  Usually, our performance goals represent just the base result we’re trying to achieve. Typical examples might include:  

• Meet your budget
• Achieve xx % sales growth
• Design and launch a new process, program or tool
• Achieve xx level of customer satisfaction

Think how much more powerful objectives could be if helped our people dig a little deeper for the second level of  purpose. What if every performance goal had two levels of intent – the actual result, and the compelling, emotional purpose?  I’m not just talking about adding “… in order to…” at the end of the objective.  A lot of corporate objectives include the full “so that” results picture.  I’m talking about the emotional, greater good purpose – the “why are we really here” component. 

Here’s an example from my career.  On many occasions I had the privilege of working with direct reports who were managing leadership programs.  Their objectives would include designing and running an effective program (as measured by participant ratings, etc.).  Now, these people were terrific performers, and I’m sure they wanted to create a quality learning experience simply because they were passionate about their jobs.  But what if I had motivated them even more with a longer-term vision of what this program could mean to the participants’ careers or personal lives?  Could we have done even better if our second layer objective was making these managers into better community leaders and parents? 

Give this concept some thought as you help your teams prepare their annual performance goals for 2009.  As they come back to you with a first draft of their goals and objectives, probe a bit to see if you can help them uncover deeper meaning and purpose behind those goals, and then add them to the document.  Give your people a more powerful reason for achieving results – show them how to connect what they do to the greater good.  Just about everything we do can be taken out to something of personal or social significance.  Inspire and motivate your team by helping them develop two levels of performance objectives – achieving the result will have much greater meaning for everyone involved. 

While leadership is often associated with vision, strategy, and rallying the troops, the fact is that leadership always boils down to one thing – getting things done.  No leader lasts long if they can’t make things happen.  The best leaders move the needle and get results – in short, they are relentlessly focused on execution.

Recently, I re-read Execution – The Discipline of Getting Things Done (2002) by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, and marveled at its simple brilliance.  Bossidy is the former CEO of Honeywell and Allied Signal, and spent much of his career at General Electric.  Charan is an accomplished management consultant who advises CEOs at some of the world’s leading companies.  Together, they lay out the basics of how and why business leaders at all levels need to be involved with execution.

Bossidy had a reputation as a no-nonsense leader, and it’s easy to see why from this book.  His passion for execution comes through on every page, and the authors do a good job of selling the steak of results rather than the sizzle of vision.  Building a high-performing culture isn’t easy; we all know companies that were touted as having grand visions and strategies but couldn’t make them work.  Execution is the difference between being successful and finishing in the second division. 

Bossidy and Charan cite three core processes that must be managed closely: strategy (the why and the what), operations (the how) and people (the who).   Paying close attention to what needs to get done is only the beginning.  After that, the leader needs to put the right people on the task, and ensure the right resources and processes are being applied to the work.  If you’re not paying attention to how the work is getting done, how it’s landing with customers and partners, you’re not leading effectively.  You don’t have to micro-manage your people to ensure great execution – but you do have to get in the game with them and understand how works gets done.

Here’s a few simple execution questions to ask yourself if you’re leading a team:

Are you tracking key performance metrics, and do you use them to manage the work?

• Do you know what everyone does (really) - how everyone supports the mission?
• Are you setting clear goals and objectives for achieving results?
• Are you holding a high bar for performance? 
• Are you giving equal time to strategy, people, and operations?

The next time you think about leadership, take note of what pops into your mind.  Chances are, it’s one of the sexier competencies like vision, strategy or presence.  That’s fine, those are important – just don’t forget their lunch pail, sleeves-rolled-up colleague, execution – the leadership quality that makes everything else possible.