To change the performance of our businesses, we need to change our performance as leaders. What we’re talking about is leading a long term, organic process for radical business improvement, including:

- A dramatic shift in the way leaders view their roles as leaders, focusing on creating the environment for people to excel – and then getting out of the way

- Providing guidance, processes and tools to enable people’s transitions – not doing the actual work

- A dramatic shift in the way everyone views their roles, focusing on their unique and important contributions to the company’s mission and goals, and their creativity in deciding how they will reach those goals, broadening their views

- Getting everyone focused on the biggest picture, beyond their jobs, to incorporate in their thinking the context within which they work (job, departmental goals, company strategy, business issues, industry impacts, national and global scenarios)

- Broadening people’s peripheral vision for better decision-making

Why bother? To dramatically increase business results, as well as the satisfaction and energy of everyone in the organization. More energy = more creativity = better solutions = better profitability.

Dedicate your leadership to this.

Once your strategy is set, these four questions guide executives through execution:
- Where do we need to go as an organization?
- What do we need to do to get there?
- What do I need to do differently?
- How do I take people along with me?

Focus on two motivators – rational motivators (for alignment with the plan) and emotional motivators (for inspiration and engagement). Get these two working together.

In the words of Peter Drucker, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. So people’s rational understanding of the plan is just part of the success equation. They must also be emotionally engaged, and operate in an environment that accelerates, not impedes, progress toward goals. Appeal to their pride, purpose and passion.

Entrenched cultures can resist and derail new strategies. Understand your current culture, and as importantly, understand the desired culture that will accelerate progress toward your goals. Make this a collective process, asking people for their insights on the culture to aspire to. When people work and co-create together, they are a part of the process and they own the outcome. They will almost automatically begin moving in the direction they’ve collaboratively designed.

Take the time and have the discipline to create emotional motivators (rational motivators are a no-brainer – it’s where leaders spend most of their time). Allow people to find their way in the process, facilitating them, not forcing them. Help them connect their work functions to the bigger picture and the end results.

There is a direct correlation between employee engagement and bottom line performance, supported by research. You’ll definitely see a return on your investment of time and focus in these areas.

Setting strategy is one component of the strategic planning process; leading strategy must follow. Combine the development of your Strategic Plan with the development of your executive team to lead the organization in executing the plan. You will increase the robustness of the plan performance by building leadership and team capability and aligning culture to the business initiative.

This process is a collaborative one, where the conversations among leaders yield creative solutions and directions that go beyond what individuals on their own might envision. You will open up new possibilities for the team and the organization, as well as produce the positive forward momentum that comes from powerful collaboration.

In these conversations, executives gain a common understanding of their role in engaging people throughout the organization in the development and execution of the strategic plan. They then design an action plan to communicate with and engage employees.

The content of the plan is developed along side the context within which the plan will reside, i.e. the organization’s culture and dynamics. Executives must create the context within which people are most likely to respond positively to the plan, understand their role in its execution, and generate the focus and momentum for its robust implementation.

The two, context and content, are woven together for a most powerful outcome.

Executives who have one or more unique talents are proven to be more effective. In a recent Harvard study, steady leaders with no unique strengths had lower overall leadership effectiveness ratings than those who demonstrate at least one key strength. Lesson? Use your talents and demonstrate your strengths. The days of the ‘generalist’ are over.

Yet doing more of what you already do well yields only incremental improvement. To move to the next level, identify complementary skills, those that will enhance your already-proven strengths, and develop those. For example, if ‘getting results’ is your strength, consider focusing on ‘establishing stretch goals’ or ‘taking initiative’ as complementary skills. It’s cross-training for leaders, and yields significant improvement in effectiveness.

See the movie, Moneyball. Not for the baseball. Not even for Brad Pitt. But for the story of organizational transformation. One leader with a revolutionary idea for assembling a winning baseball team. Meets with all the resistance you’d expect from his entrenched staff of scouts, baseball managers and players.

Billy Beane of the Oakland A’s tries to have it both ways – new ideas (based on the theory of a 20-something Yale graduate) , old ways of implementing them. Allowing others – and himself – to pay lip service to the new while still acting from the old perspectives. Results reflect this schizophrenia – a win-loss record of 0-8.

Until the day he takes radical, unilateral actions to totally commit to the new way. No going back. All in. Demonstrating to all his total commitment. And the people around him begin to act with commitment. Slowly, in fits and starts, but surely. Results happen. A 20-game winning-streak. A shot at the World Series.

In every change process there is a moment when the leader is tested. Is he really committed to this change? Will he stake his career and reputation on it? A bold, courageous decision must be made and aligned action taken.

Or not, and then the moment is lost. And real, foundational change cannot happen.

Billy Beane throws himself wholeheartedly into the change. This is what real change requires of us – our minds and our hearts.

And what was merely conceptual becomes real.

Last week.  7 AM.  At the gym.  Several of us stood around and chatted, waiting for the doors to open for the 7:15 AM spin class.

The spin trainer had not yet arrived and so the doors must still be locked. So we talked and waited. The trainer arrived and simply walked through the door. What? Not locked? It always is before she arrives.

Wow, I thought.
Where else am I letting my preconceptions and notions stand in my way? Because of prior experiences, I assume this one is the very same and lose an opportunity for change and movement.
Where else am I waiting for someone when the pathway is already clear?
Where else am I not getting what I am committed to because of old thought patterns and beliefs?
Where else am I the only thing standing between me and what I want?

Yes, the ride was good that morning. And the best exercise I got was the mental one of challenging many old beliefs, well beyond an assumption about locked doors.

As you observe your own and others’ reactions to the assassination of Osama bin Laden,  reflect on this:

“If it were all so simple!
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds,
And it were necessary only to separate them
From the rest of us and destroy them.
But the line dividing good and evil
Cuts through the heart of every human being.
And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

There are leadership and life lessons for all of us in Solzhenitsyn’s words.

In the new CareerBuilder survey of managers, when it comes to rating the performance of their corporate leaders, 50 percent felt their leadership teams were doing a good or great job while 23 percent described their performance as poor or very poor. Corporate leaders received a poor rating from workers primarily due to insufficient communication, unrealistic workloads, and a lack of training and employee development:

• Doesn’t make an effort to listen to employees or address employee morale – 40 percent
• Not enough transparency, doesn’t communicate openly and honestly – 33 percent
• Major changes are made without warning – 30 percent
• Workloads and productivity demands are unreasonable – 27 percent
• Doesn’t motivate me – 21 percent
• Stopped investing in the development of employees – 20 percent

So it seems that both new and experienced leaders can benefit from a focus on improving their emotional intelligence. Developing our employees, providing them with communication on what is expected of them, and then feedback on how they are doing, and connecting them to their purpose, are all key areas for leadership focus.

According to a new CareerBuilder survey, more than one-quarter (26 percent) of managers said they weren’t ready to become a leader when they started managing others. Fifty-eight percent said they didn’t receive any management training.

When asked what the biggest challenge is as a manager, workers in a management position said:

• Dealing with issues between co-workers on my team – 25 percent
• Motivating team members – 22 percent
• Performance reviews – 15 percent
• Finding the resources needed to support the team – 15 percent
• Creating career paths for my team – 12 percent

Notice that all these challenges are about the emotional intelligence to deal effectively with people, not about the technical expertise to perform the function. Leaders create the environment for people to excel. Yet many leaders focus on the technical aspects of the work. People are telling us to increase our ability to dialogue with them and provide the coaching and feedback to help them excel. What’s your next area of learning to enhance your leadership?

As we embark upon March Madness, Duke’s Coach Mike Krzyzewski has revealed his secrets of success to USAWeekend.What can we learn about our own leadership effectiveness?

Coach K has three tenets:

1. Build a Cohesive Team. Focus on the team, not just individual stars. Encourage, no, require, the team to develop its own standards and expectations that it embraces and performs to.

2. Involve Everyone. Just as Coach K did for the 2008 Olympics basketball team. How do you take a bunch of individual superstars and make them a team? Be flexible. Don’t tell them what to do, ask them what needs to happen to excel.

3. Invoke a Higher Cause. As he says, “You get paid with a feeling you can’t buy.” Success. Satisfaction. Internal rewards. When you can connect people to a greater purpose, we work harder and perform better. I believe people come to work to do good work, they want to make a difference, and they want to be connected to something greater than themselves. With that set of beliefs we can lead differently than when we’re trying to manage people to a result we don’t really believe they are interested in or can achieve.

So as you’re watching your favorite team these next few weeks (hopefully for many games), think about what you can learn to upgrade your own leadership game.