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Wednesday, April 06, 2005
True leaders have a unique ability to make things simple.
The Clear Leader
Marcus Buckingham spent two decades studying great business leaders. His conclusion: True leaders have a unique ability to make things simple.
For the past two decades, Buckingham, 39, an engaging Cambridge-educated Brit, has had a front-row view of great leadership in action. He spent 17 years researching the world's best leaders and managers for the Gallup Organization.
Drawing on Gallup's studies of 80,000 managers and 3 million employees, he wrote two best-sellers: First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths. Eighteen months ago, he decided to dig deeper.
He left Gallup, and instead of focusing on the many, he set out to find the very few leaders who truly excelled. "I became more interested in the vividness of what excellence on the front line really looks like," he says. "By studying one person deeply, you might learn as much if not more than studying 10,000 broadly."
He distilled his key findings into a new book, due out this month: The One Thing You Need to Know...About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success (Free Press).
Leaders are Compelled by the Future
A leader's job is to rally people toward a better future. Leaders can't help but change the present, because the present isn't good enough.
Turn Anxiety into Confidence
For a leader, the challenge is that in every society ever studied, people fear the future. The future is unstable, unknown, and therefore potentially dangerous. So in order to succeed, leaders must engage our fear of the unknown and turn it into spiritedness.
By far the most effective way to turn fear into confidence is to be clear -- to define the future in such vivid terms that we can see where we are headed. Clarity is the antidote to anxiety, and therefore clarity is the preoccupation of the effective leader. If you do nothing else as a leader, be clear.
Be Clear about Whom You Serve
It's a scary thing to please all of the people all of the time. So to calm our fear, we need you to narrow our focus. Tell us who will be judging our success.
Be Clear About Why You're Going to Win
As a leader, your job is to make people more confident about the future you're dragging them into. To that end, you need to tell them why they're going to win.
Keep Your Core Score
The job of a leader is to say, "Of all the things we measure, this is the most important." It's a terrible leadership failure to tell your employees that all of these measurements are important. When followers are presented with numerous scores, they get confused.
If You Want to be Clear, Act
Of course, a leader must take action -- action leads to impact. But actions also possess a separate, equally powerful quality. Actions are unambiguous. If you, the leader, can highlight a few carefully selected actions, then your followers will no longer have to infer the future from theoretical pronouncements about "core values" or your "mission statement."
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