The 5 Levels of Leadership: Proven Steps to Maximize Your Potential (21 page)

I sometimes speak about a basketball coach who had a regular practice during halftime to help the team prepare for the second half. On a whiteboard in the locker room, the coach would write three columns: Did Right—Did Wrong—Will Change. A friend of mine who runs a business heard the story and decided to do that with her company at the midpoint of the year, calling it the organization’s halftime.

She went into the meeting prepared, having made a list of her own for each of the columns. But being an effective leader on Level 3, the first thing she did was ask all the people on her team to share their observations. She added her own items to their list only when no one
else mentioned them, which was rare. The meeting was a success. Here’s what she discovered as a result:

• She was not leading by assumption. She knew where her team stood and what they thought about the work they did during the first six months.
  
• She gained a new perspective and learned things she didn’t know. This allowed her and the team to be on the same page.
  
• The team was able to make halftime adjustments before it was too late. The same kind of meeting at the end of the year would not have had the same benefits.
  
• The team took ownership of the rest of the year because their ideas had come from the heart. They were the ones who came up with what was on the whiteboard.
  

The process was so effective that it became a regular event every year.

People always want to know how they’re doing. They want to succeed. And if they’re not succeeding, most of the time they want to know how to make adjustments to improve. Most people are willing to change if they are convinced that changing will help them win. Productive leaders take responsibility for walking team members through that process.

The Law of the Chain: The Strength of the Team Is Impacted by Its Weakest Link

The Law of the Bad Apple: Rotten Attitudes Ruin a Team

The Law of Countability: Teammates Must Be Able to Count on Each Other When It Counts

The Law of the Scoreboard: The Team Can Make Adjustments When It Knows Where It Stands

A few years ago while Margaret and I were in Venice, we visited a former palace in which there was a large room where 1,500 leaders met periodically to make important decisions. Our guide pointed out the beautiful paintings on every wall. Each painting represented a specific time in the city’s history in which the Venetian leaders had achieved a significant victory because of a courageous decision and subsequent action. We were both inspired. It reminded me how important it is for leaders to create an environment for their people that inspires, challenges, and stretches them.

As you lead on Level 3, you need to make it your goal to lift up others and help them do their best. Founding Father Benjamin Franklin was a leader who understood this. In a letter written to John Paul Jones, Franklin gave the new officer advice concerning how to lead others:

Franklin’s wisdom is as valid today as it was then. He knew how to create a work environment conducive to growth and inspiration. Effective leaders on Level 3 do this well. It is a key to productivity.

I have sometimes been criticized as a leader for being too positive and praising people more than I should. I think that criticism is justified. There have been times when I have built up people on my team
more than their performance has warranted, and it has come back to bite me. Believing the best in people usually has a positive return, but sometimes it doesn’t. High faith in people is both a strength and a weakness of mine. But it’s a weakness I’m willing to live with because the usual benefits are so high. Besides, I’d rather live as a positive person and occasionally get burned than be constantly skeptical and negative. I believe that to a large extent you get what you expect in life. I don’t want to expect the worst for myself or anyone else. People need a positive environment to be productive and thrive.

The leaders set the tone more than anyone else on a team, in a department, or for an organization. Their attitude is contagious. If they are positive, encouraging, and open to growth, so are their people. If you want to succeed on Level 3, acknowledge the influence you have and use it to everyone’s best advantage.

The Law of Identity: Shared Values Define the Team

The Law of Communication: Interaction Fuels Action

The Law of the Edge: The Difference Between Two Equally Talented Teams Is Leadership

The Law of High Morale: When You’re Winning, Nothing Hurts

Developing a group of people into a productive team is no easy task. If it were, every professional sports team would be a winner and every business would earn high profits. It’s a challenge to get everybody working together to achieve a common vision. But it is definitely worth the effort. Being part of a team of people doing something of high value is one of the most rewarding experiences in life. As a leader, you have a chance to help people experience it. Don’t shrink from that great opportunity.

What’s the key to being productive? Prioritizing. To be an effective Level 3 leader, you must learn to not only get a lot done, but to get a lot of the right things done. That means understanding how to prioritize time, tasks, resources, and even people.

Jim Collins, author of
Good to Great
, asserts that effective prioritizing begins with eliminating the things you shouldn’t be doing. He writes,

Truly, the best companies channel their resources into only a few arenas—ones where they can be successful.

Staying in your areas of strength—where your efforts yield the highest return—and out of your areas of weakness is one of the keys to personal productivity. And if you can help others on your team to do the same, then you can be successful in leadership on Level 3. For years I have relied on the Pareto Principle as a guideline to help me decide what is worth focusing on and what isn’t. The Pareto Principle basically says that if you do the top 20 percent of your to-do list, it will yield you an 80 percent return on your efforts.

To help me understand what my top 20 percent is, I ask myself three questions:

• What is required of me? (what I must do)
  
• What gives me the greatest return? (what I should do)
  
• What is most rewarding to me? (what I love to do)
  

If you are early in your career or new to leadership, your must-do list will probably be the largest. Your goal as you climb the levels of leadership, is to shift your time and attention to the should-dos and love-to-dos. And if you lead well enough for long enough and build a great team, the answers for all three questions should be the same things. I feel very fortunate because that has come to pass for me. There are relatively few things I am required to do that I don’t enjoy doing.

As you lead your team, your goal should be to help every person get to the place where they are doing their should-dos and love-to-dos, because that is where they will be most effective. As a rule of thumb, try to hire, train, and position people in such a way that

To facilitate that, you must really know your people, understand their strengths and weaknesses, and be willing to have candid conversations with them. If you’ve done your work on Level 2, then you should be ready, willing, and able to do those things.

Progress always requires change. That’s a fact. Most leaders desire to create progress. It’s one of the things that make them tick. However, only when leaders reach Level 3 are they in a place where they can
start to effect change. Why is that? Well, your position is established as a leader on Level 1. You’ve built strong relationships with people on your team on Level 2. And once you’ve helped the team to achieve some results on Level 3, you’ve got the credibility and the momentum to start making changes. It’s very difficult to make changes when an organization is standing still. Get it going in
any
direction and you will find it easier to make changes to move it in the
right
direction. Momentum provides the energy for needed change.

Change in an organization is always a leadership issue. It takes a leader to create positive change. And the best way to start working as a change agent is the same as when trying to build a relationship. You need to find common ground. Any leader who wants to make changes is tempted to point out differences and try to convince others why change is needed. But that rarely works. Instead, focus on the similarities and build upon those. To get started, look for common ground in the following areas:

• Vision:
  When the vision is similar, you can bet that the people are standing together and they have the same view. If their vision is similar to yours, you all see it clearly, and everyone has a strong desire to see it come to fruition, you can probably work well together.
  
• Values:
  It’s difficult to travel with others very long if your values don’t align. Find out what others stand for and try to meet where you share the same standards.
  
• Relationships:
  Great teams have people who are as committed to one another as they are to the vision. If you’ve done the work on Level 2, you should already share common ground in this area.
  
• Attitude:
  If you are going to get people to work together for positive change, their attitudes need to be positive and tenacious. If they’re not, there will be trouble ahead.
  
• Communication:
  For change to occur, communication must be open, honest, and ongoing. When people are in the dark, they start to speculate about what’s happening. And their assumptions are often wrong. Inform people so that everyone is on the same page.
  

If you can find or create common ground in these five areas, you can move forward and introduce change. That doesn’t necessarily mean that being a change agent will be easy. But I can guarantee that if you don’t win those five areas, change will be very difficult.

There’s a big difference between Level 3 leaders and critics who simply theorize about productivity. Good leaders have an orientation toward results. They know that results always matter—regardless of how many obstacles they face, what the economy does, what kinds of problems their people experience, and so on. They fight for productivity and are held accountable no matter what. Even when they experience success! Automaker Henry Ford observed,

Good leaders on Level 3 keep pushing. If they gain momentum, they don’t back off and coast. They press on and increase the momentum so that they can accomplish even greater things. And they help their people do the same. How are they able to stay focused and accomplish so much—despite success as well as failure? Once again Henry Ford has a suggestion. “Make your future plans so long and so hard,” Ford advised, “that the people who praise you will always seem to you to be talking about something very trivial in comparison with what you are really trying to do. It is better to have a job too big for popular praise, so big that you can get a good start on it before the cheer squad can get its first intelligent glimmering of your plans. Then you will be free to work and continue your journey towards even greater success.”

Leaders who reach Level 3 always experience success. But not all of them capitalize on that success and go to the next level. To do that, they have to remain focused and productive—all while cultivating and preserving positive relationships. And the really good ones use the Production level as a platform for Level 4, where they develop other people to become good leaders in their own right.

I
f you want to use the Laws of Leadership to help you grow and win Permission on Level 3, then consider the following:

People do not naturally follow people whose leadership is weaker than their own. People follow others they respect, people who have credibility. If they recognize that someone else’s success is greater than their own, then they gladly follow that person’s lead. Why? Because what that leader has done for the organization is very likely to spill over into the life and work of the person following. It’s a win for everyone involved.