Episode #59: Three Capabilities That Can Distinguish You From Other Leaders

Today, I want to talk about three responsibilities that a leader should master. I will base them on the excellent book I recently read on this topic, CEO Excellence, written by Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller and Vikram Malhotra, all senior partners at McKinsey & Company. 

Transcript

Episode #59: Three Capabilities That Can Distinguish You From Other Leaders 

Welcome to THE CAREER ACCELERATOR, the podcast where corporate managers will find tips and tools to deliver results through others.

Today I will provide suggestions on how to master three key capabilities that will make you a better leader. 

I’m your host, Percy Cannon.

In our last episode I shared three tips to develop teamwork capabilities in your organization:

1.   Use self-discovery. Each of us approaches teamwork in a unique way, and this diversity in perspective and personality are part of what helps teams thrive. 

2.   Practice. Employees are empowered to apply their skills on a day-to-day basis when tied to a simple, memorable, and actionable framework and through a common language. When employees at all levels are equipped with the same essential skills of effective teamwork, they can move seamlessly from team to team—knowing what it takes to build an effective one—and immediately begin contributing to collective results. 

3.   Develop trust. In his best-selling book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni introduces a powerful and approachable model for effective teamwork and collaboration, which I have shared in previous podcasts. It describes five key challenges a team needs to address: the absence of Trust, unproductive Conflict, lack of Commitment, no peer-to-peer Accountability, and a focus on Personal vs. Collective Results. The absence of any one of these five critical behaviors, especially trust, can cripple teams and organizations.

Before I switch to today’s episode, I want to apologize for being silent for a few months. I had initially planned to take a few weeks off, but in the interim, I lost the discipline I had developed in the first two years of this podcast…. but I’m back now, full of energy, and ready to continue to share tips and tools to help you deliver results through your team, your peers, and even your boss.

Today, I want to talk about three responsibilities that a leader should master. I will base them on the excellent book I recently read on this topic, CEO Excellence, written by Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller and Vikram Malhotra, all senior partners at McKinsey & Company. 

1.   The first one is giving business direction by reframing your market and competition. In one of my corporate assignments, I was responsible for a product with a share over 80%, within a market that was growing very slowly. When confronted with the challenge to grow this brand, my extended team and I redefined our market. We reframed our business benefit as being part of a broader set of consumer needs. Although this resulted in reporting a much smaller market share, it provided a much bigger growth opportunity and a larger set of competitors from which to gain share points.

2.   The second capability you can master is to excel in resource allocation. As a leader, or at whatever level you may be in your organization, you should learn how to effectively distribute your limited resources. This could be choosing which activities you fund within a marketing budget, which business priorities will be staffed, or which investment project will be delayed. I will never forget the comment a senior executive made in one of the companies I worked for. In a budget discussion, he plainly told us that resource allocation was his number-one priority and resource allocation decisions were what he mostly drove through those organizations under his responsibility.   

3.   The third capability is to establish a culture in which your organization or team is aligned behind the one thing that will generate the biggest impact. I know this is very, very hard. The temptation is high to aim for more than one big initiative in your business. However, as a leader, you will not only have to decide what is most important today, but also what is NOT important. This capability connects with the previous one. Having clarity on what’s most important now will allow you to prioritize resource allocations behind it.
I recently coached a leadership team that did not really operate as a team. Each member had their own set of priorities, and very little work was done among them as a team. In fact, I don’t think they had much in common, other than working for the same company division. Their senior management hired me to coach them on how to operate as a real team. I helped them arrive at the one business priority that would unite their efforts and make them truly work as a team.
About six months later, the team received excellent feedback from their senior leaders, who noticed how they worked together to produce the desired impact.
Moreover, the senior leaders noticed how the next level in the organization was also engaged behind this common priority.

Summarizing, there are three capabilities you can master to accelerate your business impact as a leader:

1.   Giving business direction by reframing your market and competition,

2.   Excel in resource allocation, and 

3.   Establish a culture in which your organization or your team is aligned behind the one thing that will generate the greatest impact. 

In our next episode I will continue to share tips that will make you a better leader in 2023 and beyond.

Like what you heard today? Please rate, subscribe or follow this podcast and share it with your coworkers and friends.

This is Percy Cannon, working to help you make the rest of your life…the best of your life®.