Developing Leaders Who Get Results

Leaders Make The Difference In Great Organisations

In any organisation, the real work is done by teams. Sure, each individual has a role to play, but it isn't the lone gunslingers—even the superstars—who have the most influence on an organisation. It is the collection of individuals—the team—aligned to a singular critical objective that moves the organisation forward. The highest point of leverage in influencing the effectiveness of the team is the team's leader.

Are Your Leaders Ready for Today's Challenges

The strength of your leaders has never been more important than it is today in determining the success of your organisation. However "old-school" leadership styles just don't work in the knowledge worker age.

People cannot be managed as if they are simply assets–or worse, liabilities–viewed in the organisational scheme on the same level as office furniture or computers.

In order to unleash the potential of their teams, today's leaders must see workers as "whole people," who each have a unique contribution to make in moving the organisation forward. Leaders must manage the knowledge each worker brings to the table, not just the tasks those workers are responsible for completing.

The Changing Definition of Great Leadership

In the industrial age, the definition of leadership was centered on individual's skill sets, and to a large extent, personality.

• Could leaders command respect?
• Could they demonstrate a certain level of business acumen?
• Did they go to the right management school?
• Did the leader seem like a leader?

All important questions, but what was missing was the "character" aspect of leadership—the standards for integrity and ethics. The old definition implied that a leader who created fear was better than one who inspired trust.

So is competency and character enough? It is if you expect your leaders to get superior results for a quarter or two. But if you want your leaders to achieve sustainable levels of breakthrough performance year after year, they must also possess vision. Not just the ability to see what can be, but an understanding of their role in achieving it. And an understanding of how real work gets done through the efforts of other people.

The Four Imperatives of Great Leaders

In order for leaders to become great, they must meet four imperatives:

• Inspire trust among direct reports, superiors, and peers
• Align systems and work processes so they facilitate rather than hinder achievement
• Clarify purposes by articulating why goals are established and how individual work contributes to those goals
• Unleash the unique talents and contributions of people on their teams

In meeting these essential requirements, leaders ensure that they will be able to tap the full potential of their team in achieving the organisation's most important goals. And they will be able to achieve superior results not just in the short term, but year after year—consistently, measurably, predictably.

How Can FranklinCovey Help?

FranklinCovey's flagship leadership development programme, Leadership: Great Leaders, Great Teams, Great Results, takes a "mind-set, skill-set, tool-set" approach to developing leaders who can unleash the talent and capability of their team against the organisation's highest priorities.

In addition to drawing from a proven legacy of developing effective leaders, FranklinCovey's Leadership programme also taps into the best thinking of well-known leadership experts such as Jack Welch, Ram Charan, and Fred Reicheld to create a unique, aspirational, yet immensely practical experience.

Leaders will learn how to align the four essential systems that drive success, including:

• execution—the discipline of focusing on a few critical objectives with a process for achieving those objectives
• talent—attracting, positioning, and developing individual workers in order to tap into their full potential
• core work processes—creating clearly-understood and aligned work processes for each function of the team
• customer feedback—understanding the one thing you need to know about how your customers perceive you

The fact is, no organisation has ever become great without exceptional leadership—without leaders who can connect the efforts of their teams to the critical objectives of the organisation, who can tap the full potential of each individual on their team, who can align systems and clarify purposes. And who can inspire trust. Do your leaders make your organisation great?