How much value are you creating as a leader?

How much more value can you create?

How are you supporting the ability of your customers (employees) to create value? Where should you improve to strengthen your value creation?

What are your core processes as a leader?

How much waste do you generate through your leadership activities?

Borrowing from the principles espoused in “Lean” these are just a few of the key questions that every leader should ask himself/herself as part of their own personal development initiatives. Unfortunately, in my experience, few if any of these questions are asked or answered either by individuals or their direct leaders.  This has to change.

In a world that is begging for radical reinvention of business and leadership practices, the organizations and individuals that are diligent in pursuit of the answers to these and related questions will make it through the storm.

Leadership should be one of the principal value creation components of the management system, yet  poor leadership practices often result in increased complexity, added waste and blocked attempts to streamline processes and make improvements that would otherwise benefit the organization and its customers.

One of the key reasons that leaders and leadership practices often fail to create value (or to create more value) is the lack of a common operational and actionable definition for the role of a leader.  Another cause is the lack of top management commitment to ensuring that leaders are accountable for ever-increasing contributions to the firm’s value creation mission.  I’ll focus on the former in today’s post.

During the course of my career, I’ve developed and leveraged something that I describe as The Leader’s Charter, to help develop other leaders as well as to remind me of my True North as a leader. It reads as follows:

The Leader’s Charter:
Your primary role as a leader is to create an environment that:

•facilitates high individual and team performance against company and industry standards…

•supports innovation in processes, programs and approaches…

•encourages collaboration where necessary for objective achievement…

•promotes the development of your associates in roles that leverage their talents and interests and challenge them to new and greater accomplishments.

As I sit here and think about the Charter’s application and relevance for helping leaders in context of the questions at the top of the post and in light of the world situation, I suspect that it is time for another update.  The next update must add specificity to the people development issues covered in the current version, while incorporating all of the primary “value creation” processes that a leader controls and impacts.

I don’t intend on wordsmithing the 2009 version of The Leader’s Charter here in this post, but I will take a stab at identifying a broader universe of areas that leaders must be held accountable for in their roles.  I would love your inputs, additions and constructive suggestions via comments or by e-mail.

The Value Creation Processes/Activities of a Leader

  • Developing others through coaching, feedback and by encouraging and supporting the pursuit of developmental (stretch) activities.
  • Creating a working environment that draws out the collective knowledge and skills of team members in pursuit of solving customer problems.
  • Ensuring that the standards for accountability, values, general behavior and communication are understood and adhered to by all participants.
  • Clarifying and communicating a Vision that anchors organizational goals and aspirations and gives context to team and individual activities.
  • Creating forums to gain ideas and insights into customer issues as part of strategy formulation.  Involving everyone in capturing and translating the Voice of the Customer into strategies and actions.
  • Ensuring that individuals and teams have the resources they need to carry out their tasks.
  • Ensuring that teams and individuals gain access to skills development and educational opportunities.
  • Eliminating fear from the workplace (Deming) and replacing it with a focus on customers and improvements.
  • Determining what measures contribute to improving understanding and continuous improvement and implementing the systems to monitor and act on these measures.
  • Look at the workplace as a system and support the continuous improvement of the entire system. (genesis: Deming.)

It would be easy to keep adding to this list with a series of increasingly granular tasks.  My focus is on making this granular enough to be actionable and high-level enough to not be prescriptive.

Let me know your thoughts on other ways/areas that leaders must focus on to create value in their roles and for their organizations.