Leadership Engagement Elements

Masterful Leadership

In my blog entry from June 25, 2008 – a strong case was made that leadership development is a strategic imperative for organizations looking to maximize profitability, market share and retention of their best people.  Given this it is important that I take a bit of time understanding the definition of leadership.  Fortunately, there has been tremendous research done to solidly define leadership.  If you take just a little bit of time and examine the most popular leadership models today (Center for Creative Leadership, PDI, Lominger, Zenger Folkman, etc.) you quickly recognize that these competency models align very tightly in how they view leadership.  When boiled down to their simplest form, these leadership competencies fall into three engagement areas as follows:

Personal Engagement

At its foundation – masterful leadership is personal!   A leader who is personally engaged:

• Acts authentically and with integrity from a foundation of their personal purpose and set of core values.
• Consciously chooses to act in alignment with their vision, values and purpose in the midst the day to day situation.
• Leverages intuition to compliment reason
• Thinks systemically – designing structures that manifest their desired future.
• Advocates authentically and courageously
• Engages conflicting beliefs within themselves -facing the inner obstacles to all the above.

Organizational engagement
The primary role of a leader is to forward results consistent with their organization’s vision, mission, core values and strategic objectives.  In the “Organizational Engagement” area a masterful leader works with his or her key constituents to:

• Clarify a strategic intent that includes a compelling vision, mission and set core values.
• Honestly assesses the current realities that support or detract from the accomplishment of the strategic intent.
• Personally holds and assists others in holding a “creative tension” between this vision and the current state of reality.
• Focuses doggedly on generating measurable results that forwards the vision and mission and acts in accordance of the core values.
• Facilitates the building of structures and the development of processes that support the strategic intent and desired outcomes.

Interpersonal Engagement

A masterful leader realizes that he cannot succeed alone.  A masterful leader must relate well to others and empowers them to forward outcomes that are consistent with the vision, mission, values and core objectives of the organization.  He or she does this by:

• Creating alignment and shared ownership of the vision and measurements of accomplishment towards achievement of the vision.
• Generating a climate that fosters mutual trust and respect as well as the highest level contribution.
• Authentically and genuinely connecting with others.
• Effectively managing commitments and insisting others do the same.
• Takes stock of successes and failures to foster learning and innovation.

It is also important to point out that all of these engagement areas are interwoven and interact. While a leader does not have to be masterful in every area – they must be able to ensure all areas work together so that the desired outcomes can be accomplished in an environment that fosters team and individual fulfillment.

Yet, with this clarity it is also important to point out that competency development is not the centerline for strengthening leadership.  Experience and research has shown that nothing can be further from the truth. I will explore this issue of what it takes to develop these competencies in my next entry.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 11:53 am and is filed under Executive Engagement, Leadership Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.