‘Vision without execution is hallucination.’

Thomas Edison, American inventor and businessman

This chapter covers:

• the key elements to better decision making
• the best ways to build a high-performance team that is accountable and empowered
• how to lead change.

Actually, in today’s world, this generally leads to a choiceless mentality. A shift in perspective is needed. You could contemplate factoring feedback and ideas from the front line of your organisation into your strategic thinking. You might advocate collaboration and encourage empowerment. If you give your team members and your employees the opportunity to participate and make adequate decisions, you will have a better chance of running a high-performance organisation.

Execution – the ability to work effectively towards and deliver results – is a sought after skill in the leaders of tomorrow. The achievement of tangible results, or, ‘closing’, is the real acid test. More than any other leadership skills examined in this book, execution is the one that relies on other people – it is never a solitary exercise. It emanates both from the intrinsic personal attributes of the leader, such as the abilities to make decisions and lead change, and, more importantly, the skill to build high-performance teams that feel both empowered and accountable.

Better personal decision making

Decision making is the daily duty of a leader. It should be founded on the awareness that, as human beings, our decision making ability is always imperfect. It is highly influenced by emotions, values and personal goals. To master good decision making skills, you need to develop the ability to look at different alternatives and take into account both analytical data and intuition. It is very rarely an entirely solitary exercise, so developing your ability to leverage your network and team, too, is recommended. It is also important to note that a good level of self-awareness and heightened strategic thinking helps you to develop supreme decision making skills.

Decision making is usually seen as the prerogative of the leader. If you pay attention to what leaders do every day, you will soon realise that their agendas are mainly filled with activities that lead to those points when they need to decide. They are constantly engaged in decision making – in meetings, discussions and networking. The range of types of decisions made can vary from simple – such as hiring or not hiring a person – to very complex – such as entering or exiting a market. They can be immediate – the hiring decision might be for someone to start next week – or they might be for the longer term – defining the new vision or a new strategy for the entire company. However, if you look more closely at decision making you will see that it is more of a process than a singular act. Many different inputs will be considered and weighed, consciously or not.

Embracing your prerogative to make decisions

The leadership role calls for being perfectly at ease with decision making. It will come naturally to some and less naturally to others. There is a handful of key elements to master to fully embrace your prerogative as a leader to decide:

• self-awareness – understanding your own internal decision making process
• decision making style – whether you are an ‘advocate’ or an ‘enquirer’
• practice – build your self-confidence by gaining experience.

Self-awareness

It is important to understand your internal decision making process. You can gauge your natural decision making abilities by reflecting on the following questions:

• How do I usually feel when I have to make a decision?
• How long does it usually take for me make a decision?
• What is the process I regularly follow to reach a decision (including acting on data or acting on impulse)?
• How often do I catch myself rethinking or questioning my decisions?

Your feelings might vary from excitement to fear to … nothing at all. They may differ from one decision to the other, depending on the impact or the seriousness of the decision you must make. However, they will give you a good indication of your level of comfort with decision making.

If you find you frequently experience feelings of fear or panic, then you will need to work on becoming more comfortable with the process and practise regularly. If you have a tendency to procrastinate or avoid taking decisions, using excuses such as bad timing, lack of information or readiness, this will also give you a good indication of what you need to work on. In some cases, it might be helpful to give yourself strict deadlines to make decisions by or set yourself a target number of decisions to make in a certain period of time.

The decision making process may extend from being a solitary exercise with hardly any input, to a vast consultation process. It will alter significantly depending on the decision you have to make. Being in tune with the different avenues you might take will help you to craft your decision making strategy.

Finally, the core of your decision making process remains the same for both professional and personal situations, so you may consider applying the questioning process to both areas of your life. The only differences will be that there are different actors or sources of inputs – from friends to colleagues or mentors, for instance – and, possibly, the frequency of decision making in each area.

As decision making is firmly rooted in your level of self-awareness and, particularly, your understanding of your values, objectives and mindset, the exercises included in Chapters 3 and 4 should give you additional useful pointers.

Decision making style

Are you an ‘advocate’ or an ‘enquirer’?

In their article ‘What you don’t know about making decisions’ (Harvard Business Review, September 2001), David Garvin and Michael Roberto explore two approaches to decision making. One is called advocacy – that is, someone acting with an ‘us against them’ mindset and only thinking in terms of winning or losing. An advocate acts as a spokesperson. He or she is usually trying to impose his or her viewpoint, merely treating others as opponents who need to be downplayed and converted. He or she will simply ignore minority viewpoints. The advocacy approach is usually viewed as detrimental to achieving the best possible decision, especially in group settings.

The second is referred to as enquiry. This decision making style is based on a more collaborative problem solving approach. The core of the process involves identifying, discussing and assessing the validity of different scenarios. The enquiry style relies on balanced arguments and openness to feedback and criticisms. Everyone is entitled to have a say and, through discussions, the objective is to foster a sense of shared responsibility. This is claimed to be the favoured and most efficient decision making process.

Reflecting on your level of advocacy or enquiry will help you tune into what your natural style is, giving you the ability to switch from one type of decision making style to the other, as you see fit. In principle, enquiry may be the best way to bring people together in the decision-making process, but, in some circumstances, the advocacy style might be what is needed for you or the company. For example, when there is an issue of integrity or the company’s reputation is at stake, the advocacy decision making process will probably be required. When you are in a vision building or strategic session, the enquiry process is likely to be more suitable.

Practice

A successful business leader visited an MBA class to enlighten the students. At the end of the talk, a student asked the leader, ‘What is the secret of your success?’ ‘Two words – good decisions.’ A second student asked, ‘Well, how do you learn to make good decisions?’ ‘One word – experience.’ A third student asked, ‘So how do you get the experience?’ ‘Two words’, answered the business leader, ‘Bad decisions’.¹

You can only master decision making by actually starting to make decisions. Practice only makes perfect if time is invested in assessing the impact after the facts and, ultimately, reflecting on what you have learned from both good and bad decision making.

It is largely accepted and supported by different scholars that human beings have limitations when it comes to decision making (see Herbert Simon, Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely for more on this). As individuals, our cognitive ability is constrained or conditioned by a mix of factors – the difficulty of assessing every potential angle of a situation (see Chapter 10 for more on this), our natural instinct to listen to or indulge our emotions and so on. We are also programmed to choose the path of least resistance, the way to quicker gratification, and are driven by fear of change or wanting to avoid loss of some kind.

It is therefore important to learn from our bad decision making in order to improve and break recurring patterns. This may be done by reflecting on the following possible causes:

• Emotion Did I not listen to my guts? Did I rush into this decision because of some strong emotion, such as desire or fear? Did I make the decision on a whim?
• Lack of reflection Did I have all the information I needed to hand? Did I adequately and carefully think through the consequences or impacts of my decision? Did I overlook something?
• Values Was I too lazy, self-centred or complacent? Did I just choose the easy option?

Investing time in taking stock and creating a ‘not to do’ list for decision making can make a significant difference to your future effectiveness.

Improving your analysis skills and developing alternatives

Decision making impacts all facets of the skill set required to become a leader. It has an effect on everything, from gaining credibility to what job or experience to choose, from how to network or build influence to whom to approach as stakeholders or mentors and even to vision building and formulating strategies. What really matters is not being able to always make good decisions – by nature we will always be imperfect decision makers – but minimising the number of bad decisions we make.

Try the following, either in sequence or as you see fit, to help keep bad decisions to a minimum.

Gather data

The purpose here is to make sure your decisions are as well informed as possible.

To be informed, you need an adequate amount of data.

The data gathering may take the form of specific trend analysis, financial analysis, past or projected, information on customers, suppliers, the competition …

The fundamental questions to address to ensure you gather the right data are the following:

• What do I need to know to get to a certain level of comfort in my decision making?
• Who could help me reach this comfort level and how?

You can do some of the data gathering yourself or question and challenge your team or the person who is asking you to take the decision making role. To develop different perspectives, you can also gather data by bouncing the issue around with those in your network and your mentors. All the exercises and elements described in Chapter 10 can also be useful in helping you decide how to ensure you have all the data you need.

Analysing consequences and scenarios

Gathering data is the first step. The next is to assess the data, interpret it and compare and contrast different pieces of information. Here, the point is to look for interdependencies and the impact and consequences of each potential decision. It is recommended that you specifically focus on the things you can actually control.

The value of analysing consequences and scenarios lies in assessing the impact of your decision on the entire value chain. If you systematically cater for interdependencies, this can only strengthen your decision making process. Use the value maps or mind map referred to in Chapter 10. Use a pros and cons map, decision trees or a voting exercise with your team or even alone. To put things into perspective, it’s a good idea to consider the following two questions:

• Which option is going to add the greatest value to the business or organisation?
• Which option serves me best over time?

The world presents us with dilemmas and it is becoming more and more difficult to find obvious solutions. Make sure you acknowledge this in your decision making process. Picturing the consequences of your decision is key.

Embrace discomfort

Do not shy away from decisions that are not the most expedient or the most comfortable. Doing the right thing can often involve some sense of sacrifice or discomfort.

Trusting your intuition

In his book Blink: The power of thinking without thinking (Penguin, 2006) Malcolm Gladwell describes how the unconscious mind picks up subtle clues from the environment without you realising it and how this can actually trigger decision making.

In their article ‘Good data won’t guarantee good decisions’ (Harvard Business Review, April 2012), Shvetank Shah, Andrew Horne and Jaime Capellá share research that shows data-driven decision making is not always good decision making. So what needs to be added? Intuition is the answer or using both sides of the brain – as indicated in Roger Martin’s book Opposable Mind: Winning through integrative thinking. Figure 11.1 illustrates the potential range of types of decision makers.

The best decision making is based on a mix of analysis and intuition, which is integrated thinking. If it is relatively easy to develop analytical skills, developing your intuition is a more difficult exercise; some would say it is virtually impossible.

What is intuition?

In simple terms, intuition is the ability to sense things about a situation and make decisions without involving cognitive activity. It can come from the ability to access all the information you have ever absorbed, consciously or not, that is safely stored in the back of your brain (parietal, occipital, temporal, cerebellum, basail ganglia, hypothalamus).

Intuition can be developed out of these three basic attributes:

• Intellectual knowledge or the capacity to observe, paired with the ability to continually acquire and have access to diverse and wide terms of reference. See Chapters 6, 8, 9 and 10 for exercises to help you.
• Emotional knowledge and awareness. Leaders must be empathetically in tune with their emotions and environment in order to perfect their intuitive decision making abilities. (Chapter 3 looked at this in more detail.)
• The ability to step back and let go, to consciously stop the thinking process, be in the moment and in the flow. Regularly practising meditation can help.

How can you make sure you integrate your intuition into your decision making process?

First and foremost, you will achieve this by pushing away from your mind all the data, trends, opinions or anything else you may have examined or heard. Also, forget any pros and cons lists or other devices before making a decision. Go inside yourself and simply ask either of these questions:

• How does it make you feel?
• What if it was your own money?

Pause and listen to your body and head. If your heart starts to beat faster or if you can hear a nagging inner voice telling you something, or if doubts begin to creep in, then, most probably, the decision is not the right one. Maybe you are missing a critical piece of information or you need to have another look at the data.

Pausing and listening to yourself is particularly useful in crisis mode when decisions need to be made quickly. Using this technique is helpful even before you’ve gathered all the information you might need to reach a final decision.

So, how do you know if you have made a good or bad decision? Just before you act on it, consider the following two angles:

• The personal credibility angle Can I live with the consequences of my decision?
• The knowledge limitation angle With what I know today, is there anything I could do differently?

If the answer to the first question is a resounding ‘Yes’ and the answer to the second question is a strong ‘No’, then you are probably about to make the best possible decision. If you are not sure, feel free to defer it. At times, releasing yourself from the pressure to make a decision can be the best way to find the most suitable solution.

Identifying and overcoming major obstacles to good decision making

There are some common obstacles to good decision making that will be explored here:

• Too much information If you have too many inputs from too many sources, you risk entirely clouding your judgement. In such cases, the best strategy is to pause, empty your head by going for a walk or use meditation to stop it all swirling in your head and regain perspective. As a leader, learning how to say, ‘Stop’ and taking a step back is important.
• Too much emotion If you are too high or too low on your emotional curve, you will not be in the best situation to make a decision. Being in tune with your emotional state is important and, again, having the courage and the ability to defer a decision is important.
• Too much time This can lead to both overthinking and procrastination. Make a point of setting adequate amounts of time in which to make decisions. Teach yourself to stop asking questions or for more data to be crunched. Usually, at a certain stage, it becomes apparent that any additional data will only have a marginal effect on the decision.

When faced with two alternatives, if it is not blatantly obvious which is best, it usually means that either they are equally good or equally bad. So, stay tuned and monitor how the situation evolves until the next decision point.

Always try to bear these three points in mind when making decisions:

• It is important to acknowledge that decision making is not an event but a process. It can unfold over weeks, months or years. Elements of your environment will influence your decision making, whether this is the history of the organisation, the different stakeholders or even the power plays. There will also be influences rooted in your personal history and emotions. Acknowledge these pressure points and never rush, but never duck it either.
• Keep in mind that no decision is set in stone. Changing your mind because the situation requires it is acceptable. Keeping your decision making loose and fluid is important and yielding the right results is what really matters.
• Learning how to make decisions can only come from making bad decisions. It takes courage to make decisions and leaders are courageous creatures. The only commitment you can really make is to try to become the best leader possible. Try and fail and try again to execute.

Figure 11.2 shows the best way to master the art of decision making.

Reflect on the following thought.

There is no good or bad decision, only the decision that you make and you turn into the best one possible. The rest is out of your hands.

Empowerment, accountability and change: the key concepts for delivering through others

A leader’s ability to get results is entirely dependent on whether or not he or she can build a high-performance team and adequately motivate its members.

‘Empowerment’ is the first key word here. It generally comes from delegating some of your decision making down the line and involving your team in strategic thinking.

‘Accountability’ is the second key word. It stands for being clear on what will be measured and how by defining and monitoring a set of meaningful metrics. More importantly, accountability also relates to a clear understanding of the consequences of an action and demonstrated consequence management.

Finally, the ability to lead change needs to be acquired, via heightened communication skills and the deliberate crafting of quick wins.

Returning to John Kotter and his definition of leadership, the most important part of a leader’s role is to align people, for them to deliver on a vision, make a strategy come to life and get results. The team element is of upmost importance in relation to a delivery strategy, but we are not talking about just any type of team. A leader needs a high-performance team – people who ‘get it’, will go above and beyond the call of duty and adapt and adjust to any circumstances in order to deliver.

Strengthening your ability to pick the best people

‘Play on people’s strengths, play on people’s “complementarity”, inspire them and you will always get the results you need’, said Robert Rozek, Chief Financial Officer of Korn Ferry International. What does this mean for anyone aspiring to become a leader?

To put it in black and white, your chances of success will be greatly increased if you have the right team around you. Chapter 7 examined the notion of a team in depth and presented different techniques that are useful when leading a team – knowing them, motivating them and rewarding them. However, picking team members who are going to perform well requires another skill set.

In his interview with Harvard Business Review, Kevin Ryan, Founder and CEO of the Gilt Group, summarised what it takes to build a team of people who excel, in three simple steps.

Invest adequate time in your people

Live and breathe the mantra ‘People are our most important asset’. Here are some questions that you could ask yourself:

• Do I spend enough time with my human resources person?
• Is he or she critical to the organisation?
• Do I design my vision and strategy in terms of business needs or organisational needs first?

If you answer ‘No’ to the first two questions and ‘business needs’ to the third one, you might unconsciously be hindering your organisation’s ability to deliver. To bring about change, create a regular routine of contacts with not only your human resources person but also put on your own agenda to constantly scout for talented people inside and outside your organisation. For instance, consider talking about specific projects directly with the team members concerned on a regular basis.

Put together a list of as many people in your organisation as possible and make a point of meeting with all of them in a certain period of time, to specifically assess their potential. It can be easy to do this in a flat structure, but if you are not, establish a realistic cut-off level and reassess on a regular basis. Be very clear that you have the prerogative to call anyone, any time to talk about anything and stick to it.

When it comes to vision and strategy, make a point to always start with the following question:

• What is the organisation we have or need and how does this impact our vision or strategy?

This will help embed a mentality for employees to excel at what they do into your company’s ethos.

Subtract to add

Have the courage to let some poor performers go to find a better match for the position. Commit to making things happen, either by means of internal promotion or going outside if need be.

Make your team accountable for the turnover of its people. As the mantra goes, people join organisations but leave managers. When an excellent person leaves, it impairs the ability of the whole team to deliver. Make sure you always look into the exact reasons why a good person is leaving and do what you can to prevent it happening again.

Create a virtuous circle of excellence

Birds of a feather always flock together. So, excellent people attract and hire other excellent people, whereas not-so-good people usually end up hiring average people. Most people want to work for someone impressive or talented or, simply put, for people they admire and respect.

Your ability to maintain and use both your operational and strategic networks will help with the scouting process (peers, sponsors, competitors, headhunters and so on). Remember that the need for people who excel does not diminish the need for cognitive diversity and ‘complementarity’ mentioned in Chapter 10. It just provides another angle to bear in mind when building your team. The approach to take can be summed up in the phrase ‘excellence in diversity’.

Adopting the notion of ‘accountable empowerment’

On 1 July 1916, the British Army lost the battle of the Somme, even though its troops greatly outnumbered those of the German Army. This battle is frequently used as a case study on leadership courses, demonstrating as it does the concept of ‘independent thinking obedience’. This can be summarised as the need for a deep understanding of a common and specific objective by all participants in one group, while remaining extremely open and non-proscriptive about how it should be achieved. Each individual feels empowered to adjust his or her decisions and actions in the moment. It gives all the right to react to any information received by observing what is around them, thus maximising the chance of achieving the common objective.

Participants on the leadership courses analyse how the strategy of the German Army was put together, exploring how things were discussed in preparatory meetings, what sort of language was used and how the message was clarified by reformulation and probing. They may even go back further to analyse how the individual training and professional history of the leaders of the group added to the impact on their behaviour and how a certain consistency and cohesiveness of thinking was, at times, critical to achieving the results.

How can you best use the above example to ensure better execution and delivery? Emerging from the story are three salient elements that need to be worked on by any prospective leader:

• being comfortable delegating decision making
• making a point of involving your team in formulating strategies and strategic thinking
• ensuring that there is greater accountability.

Delegating decision making

It is the prerogative of a leader to endorse and embrace the decision making process. However, it can become highly inefficient for the organisation, and somewhat demotivating for the leaders’ team, if a decision cannot be made quickly or team members don’t feel empowered or enabled to become good decision makers themselves.

To learn how to delegate decision making, remember that not all your decisions are equal, so delegate those you believe others can make. Focus your time and energy instead on taking care of the ones that will create significant change for the organisation. Consider using the matrix shown in Figure 11.3 to help you know what to delegate.

Who you delegate to is also a critical element. So, for the top left and bottom right quadrants in Figure 11.3, consider delegating first to some of your best performers. This will be a good way to test their ability to solve complicated problems and/or work when under time pressure. For decisions falling into the bottom left quadrant, delegate these to train the rest of your team members in decision making.

Decision making is also closely related to time management. To this end Table 11.1 is useful for you to complete, on your own or with your team, to adequately plan your time.

Figures 11.3 and Table 11.1 will allow you to create a clear mental picture of the decision making element of the work you and your team are undertaking. They are also beneficial for managing your time or effort and producing the best results possible. The next steps are to:

• communicate your framework or decision making plans to all your team, peers and others as required
• consider setting up co-creation of objectives sessions with your team (as described in Chapter 7) and discuss the above matrix and table as this helps to establish the ground rules for decision making – when you come in and when your team members have complete freedom – and it will not only position you as a collaborative leader but also contribute to establishing feelings of empowerment for your team.

Be aware also that knowing your team members well will allow you to judge even more effectively what to delegate to them as you will be able to do so based on their strengths and weaknesses.

Involving your team in formulating strategies

As mentioned in Chapter 7, empowerment is a key motivational factor. If you want to produce optimum results, it is critical to not operate solely by means of persuasion but by creating a sense of shared purpose. What is needed is for people to feel that the objective, vision and strategy is theirs. The best way to achieve this is to involve as many as possible in the strategic thinking process as then motivation will follow on from the team’s heightened sense of ownership that this creates. Always keep in mind that there are no longer any roles in any organisation where thinking is not required.

Roger L. Martin encapsulates what it takes to deliver results by means of empowerment in article ‘The execution trap’ (Harvard Business Review, July 2010). He uses the analogy of a white-water river, flowing from the mountain to the sea. Martin explains that in a high-performance organisation, the prerogative of choice cascades from top to bottom. At each level in the organisation, staff can exercise choice. The framework of potential choices is, of course, dictated by the overall objective and what it means for the particular function or business unit. However, every individual is given the opportunity to adjust their courses of action in a way that they think is best fitted to the situation.

There are two main ways to involve your team members in formulating strategies. The first is to adopt a co-creation process for strategic thinking (see Chapter 7). This creates a sense of empowerment as:

• the rationale for a direction or a choice has been shared
• what needs to be done is articulated and debated at the leader and next level down in the organisation at the same time
• the opportunity for the team members to give feedback to the level up and the commitment from that level to act on it or explain why they will not are integrated.

Most companies will have a rhythm of monthly reports and meetings to discuss different financial and operational metrics. You can take this one step further by integrating into these sessions a specific discussion about what is being sensed on the ground regarding what is working or not working in the execution of the strategy.

The second, and slightly more innovative, way is to use social media and instant communication while formulating strategies as this generates immediate feedback and opinion from a wider group. By encouraging collaboration and ideas from the entire organisation, loyalty, recognition, empowerment and results are all fostered.

In layman’s terms, walk the talk and commit for this to happen. It might mean major changes for your organisation, but stick to it and you will soon see results.

Ensuring accountability

Accountability is what transforms delegation and empowerment into tangible results. It is founded on clear expectations, the correct metrics and a clear understanding of the consequences should expectations not be met.

Defining and making your expectations clear to everyone is part of building rapport with your team members. This should be complemented by the co-creation of goals and objectives, at both the strategic and personal levels (see Chapter 7).

When it comes to defining metrics, it is important to integrate the following:

• How does your company create value or make money?
• How does everyone contribute to the value-creation process?

Consider using the value and interdependency maps created in Chapter 10 to define what to measure to produce the best results. These represent the basis of your metrics definition, which can be recalibrated as a result of considering the following:

• A mix of sole and shared metrics as these will always foster a greater push towards results. It may seem tough at first to implement shared metrics, as it can create tension and lead to a feeling of unfairness, but this a great way to encourage collaboration.
• Less is more. A lot of organisations engage in a frenzy of metrics and the measurement of anything and everything possible. The truth is, as human beings, we can only focus on a limited number of things at a time. Keep that in mind and consider having no more than a handful of metrics to follow and focus on. These may be a mix of internal tools (financial and operational) and external ones (assessing competition and customers), as well as a mix of qualitative and quantitative measures.

Table 11.2 shows an example of a comprehensive set of metrics.

You can integrate metrics definitions into your co-creation process to reinforce the message about your expectations, while at the same time creating a sense of joint ownership. For accountability to work, there also needs to be a monitoring process to keep up the momentum or pressure.

Most of the organisation will follow a monthly formal process, but integrating more frequent ad hoc checks and feedback can be effective. (See Chapter 7 for more on this, but the default position should remain a monthly process.)

Finally, the management of consequences is the last element that needs to be addressed when creating a culture of accountability and performance.

Courage is a trait of a leader. When in doubt remember this.

The market is not complacent, investors are not complacent, competitors are not complacent. So why should you be?

In the long term, a lack of the management of consequences when results are not delivered can only hinder the company’s profitability. If harsh decisions are not made, the strategy cannot be delivered and competitive advantages are not realised. There is a great deal at stake:

• the organisational structure, because those who excel will leave when they see that delivering and not delivering yield the same results
• the culture, because a lack of consequences creates a tendency towards procrastination and perpetrates a lack of commitment, where deadlines are discretionary and, ultimately, performance is just a fantasy.

To ingrain that there are consequences the following need to be kept in mind:

• Build your credibility and respect within and outside of your team. It gives you a certain legitimacy to act.
• Be crystal clear about what not delivering means for you and your team members. Under Jack Welch, the practice at General Electric was to get rid of the bottom 10 per cent, in performance terms, of the workforce on a yearly basis. This was a pretty powerful aid to mobilising people’s efforts. The management of consequences can be made tangible.
• To foster a trusted and open environment, you have to ensure you position yourself as being there to help and guide, to avoid ruling by fear. Here lies the delicate balance also presented in Chapter 7. Respect and trust matter.
• Lead by example, do what you say and apply a common and universal approach to the delivery of results. Of course, it is important to assess the reasons for not doing so. Is it someone’s sole responsibility or is it shared? Is it down to a lack of resources or time? It is important to listen to what people have to say and acknowledge when genuine efforts have been made, but also know when people are making excuses or not being proactive.

The management of consequences clearly emphasises the need for the delivery of results. It puts pressure on everyone to be creative, on the ball and understand what is going on. It calls for people to adjust and react quickly.

As a leader, step back from wanting to be liked when it comes to accountability. It is about building a culture of performance and loyalty to the company, not to you as a person. Accountability starts from the top.

The key qualities for leading change

Leading change is the last element to consider and begs the following question:

• What if the quintessential definition of leadership was to be able to lead change?

As mentioned at the beginning of Part 4, being a leader is about changing the way things have been happening, pushing for something different to happen because of you, because of who you are.

Here, there is a bringing together of all that has been presented to you in the previous pages, to form the skill set you need to lead change.

In his article ‘Leading change: Why transformation effort fails’ (Harvard Business Review, January 2007) John P. Kotter, a professor at the Harvard Business School and authority on the field of change management, describes the process of change in eight easy-to-follow steps.

Create a sense of urgency

Change can only come from questioning the status quo for valid reasons. This could range from losing competitive edge or being in a dire financial situation – Motorola selling its mobility patent capacity to Google to renew its financial performance – to wanting to position your organisation better to meet future market trends or changing dynamics – Shell Downstream launching its strategic review exercise to become a leaner and more agile company.

A sense of urgency is definitely necessary to mobilise others and trigger actions.

¹ Steven Bell (2012) ‘Learning to be a better decision maker: Leading from the library’, Library Journal, 26 April.