I have been wondering about the deliverables of leaders for some time now. The usual answer is "make decisions and take responsibility"... That sound very much awful! Too vanilla, too "Clausewitz" or "Taylor", not quite sufficient any more in this world of near-instant communication.

I simply do not think that a leader is the fulcrum of decision making. It is a delusion that leaders make decisions. In my experience, most leaders are lead into decisions by their context.

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It is really easy to confuse product and process here. Budgets, performance appraisals, staff meetings, project reviews, that whole paraphernalia of modern business life is rather overwhelming. When peeling the onion, though, I distinguish a few layers of work:

To my mind, those are the actual work elements of a leader. It is their responsibility to enhance that "what" and "how" of work content and context of their domain.

Let me go into a bit more detail.

Operations:

Here I file anything that needs doing within a day or two, sometimes within an hour. Even high ranking executives need to sometimes roll up their sleeves and touch this part.

Keep the engine running

A leader needs to have his/her ear on the ground for issues. As soon as they arise, solutions need to be put in place to deal with this specific problem here and now. Mark the issue for later dissection, right now you need a finger to put into the hole in the dam. This is the efficiency aspect of you job: find the fastest and least expensive way to deal with a problem right now. Effectiveness drives your handling of structural weaknesses highlighted by this issue.

You also need to observe how your team and its context is dealing with the issue amongst each other. This will give you valuable clues to more long-term improvements.

I found it particularly helpful to keep a running tap of all the stuff that happens that triggered my direct involvement (aka my team did not handle it alone). I used a local blog on my computer for this purpose (since it is convenient), but anything will go, really.

Find and filter problems

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Listen to unrefined input

The last operational responsibility of a leader is the acquisition of unrefined input: direct & indirect reports, suppliers, customers, peers, supervisors, the works. Anybody that tells you anything about the way your team works is a valid input. It is an avalanche at first, but you quickly categorize and filter the BS from the nuggets. I have tried to capture these bits of data as well, sometimes just writing them into my blog at the end of the day, to be able to go back in there at the start of the next week (with some distance) and sort through the stuff. One of the reasons why I like staff meetings on Tuesdays or Wednesdays is that it gives me time to prepare the data from last week.

This element is very much in accordance to "go and see (GenchiGenbutsu)" in the Toyota Way.

Efficiency in this space is your ability to categorize and prioritize all this input, trigger action, and follow through. You need to get better at this. A good KPI is the number of unresolved inputs.

Design Teams

When in the heat of battle, never forget to take a hard look at the way individual teams cooperate. If there is disharmony, you need to address it. Either by changing assignments, or by creating awareness. Take not how much friction is in a team, ask for feedback on that topic. Measure friction. You will be amazed what happens when you let people vent their frustrations. Just take the discussions out of the heat of the battle. Tomorrow is a good day to bitch about today.

Tactics:

Product Management

You have product development process, even when you are doing office maintenance or refilling toner in the network printers. You do. You are providing a service to somebody else, and that somebody might like more, or different services from you.

So learn how to manage your ability to churn out new products. Be efficient in the way you discover opportunities (going back to the "Listen to unrefined input"), be effective in the way you weed out those new ideas that will not add value to your bottom line.

Portfolio Management

You offer products. Which one will you cull, which one strengthen? How often do you check again? Here the leader needs to drive a strong structure of standardization for product reviews, pipeline assessments and project management. You better do this very effectively, and measure your improvements, or this process alone can stupefy your organization in useless ground wars and political posturing.

Skills Management

Your most important asset, your people, need to become better as well. They are the ones manning the processes your developed together. You are smoothing things out in team design, this is the point where you need to make hard choices on the bus seats.

Drive efficiency here are well: how long until you make a call? How much information do you need to collect to make it? Did change tools address the issues and cause change for the good? Measure this as you would measure a product launch, it is more important than that launch.

Strategies:

Market Development

How well do you discover and develop a new market? Define KPIs that work for your industry/department, and measure them over a longer period of time (at least over 3-5 market developments). Take a hard look at the way you do it, and standardize. Learn, but cut proliferation. If you need to try things out, do it as concept cars or prototypes.

Career Development

Do you tell your people what is necessary for them to advance? Really?

I found this work to be the hardest, since most organizations do not really spell this out beyond labels: leadership, risk taking, that kind of BS. It really does not help the individual in getting better.

What worked for me was to identify strengths/opportunities and personal styles, align those with matching job profiles, and then work out which skills and behaviors need to be enhanced or addressed to match such profile. Tough job, but there are several tools available to help you. I found MBTI, StrengthFinder, and Enneagram to be the most effective:

• MBTI will tell which interaction style a person has: invaluable for making it in a team
• StrengthFinder will tell which innate capabilities the individual has
• Enneagram will open her eyes to how others perceive the world, and give her strategies on how to approach them

Culture Development

All this drive for efficiency and effectiveness needs to help build a culture of transparency and candor. Post performance information. I went as far as to disclose to my immediate reports what my compensation was. Gave them an incentive to help me actually earn the money, and a concrete reason to get going themselves.

Drive information sharing into the team. A team that shares effectively is a more efficient team.