CHAPTER 8

EMBODIES EXCELLENCE

AN INTRODUCTION TO EMBODYING EXCELLENCE

Outstanding leaders are committed to building a culture of high performance in their teams and constantly strive to get better at what they do. They set a personal example for others of what is expected in the organisation by living and being a champion for the values. They act with integrity and deliver on their promises and commitments. They have clear guiding principles and beliefs about their own leadership and always behave ethically.

SET AN EXAMPLE

26. I set an example by constantly striving to get better and better at what I do. Or put another way: you’ve got to be able to walk the talk.

We believe that healthy competition is … well … healthy! We also think that there is a place for healthy competition within leadership. Leaders who are highly valued by their organisation appreciate how to use competition productively. They can apply competitiveness in thoughtful ways to maximise its power and manage its more destructive elements. Such leaders are also clear about the area where competitive drive can be directed very powerfully. Namely, towards themselves in the context of their leadership.

UNHEALTHY COMPETITION

Two key areas can be described as the ‘dark side’ of a competitive nature. First, there is the ‘win at all costs’ mentality. Second, there is the eternal trap of falling prey to perfectionism.

It is far too simplistic to suggest that the global banking crisis of 2008 was caused by a single factor. What has become clear is that there were failures of leadership. It is also clear that organisational cultures in many banks led to a ‘win at all costs’ approach, where short cuts were taken, honesty was put on the back burner and people were ignored who should have been listened to. Avoid the allure of short-term gains.

The other trap to be aware of is that of falling prey to competing to be perfect. Nothing is perfect. Lots of things are excellent. So, aim for excellence – it is enabling. Perfectionism is disabling. The former helps you strive towards great performance. The latter eventually leads to giving up, never being satisfied or delivering results too slowly. Compete to be excellent not perfect.

Your number one competition = you!

Whilst you can set up competition with pretty much anything or anyone, there is only one place where you need to focus your competitive nature: yourself. There are many places you can compete with yourself to be better tomorrow than you were today:

  • relationships
  • results
  • effectiveness of your team
  • efficiency
  • role-modelling being a great leader.

Here is something we have said repeatedly to groups of leaders that produces a previously under-appreciated realisation: as a leader, you are never not role-modelling. How you ‘show up’ every single day and apply yourself to the drive for excellence (or not) is noticed, more or less consciously, by everyone in your organisation. No pressure!

LEADING MY TEAM

  • Set and maintain a standard of performance excellence and challenge members of your team who are falling into the trap of pursuing perfectionism.
  • Ask members of your team periodically how you are doing. What are you doing effectively as leader? What could you be doing better? Where do you act or behave inconsistently with your words? Make a plan of how to improve when patterns and themes become clear in the feedback you are getting.
  • Challenge members of the team who fail to uphold the standards that the team have agreed to. Provide support to improve their performance whilst also insisting that standards improve within a specified timeline.
  • When goal-setting, encourage three levels to aim for: gold, silver and bronze standard, or similar. The gold standard would be a goal that would be achievable if everything went exactly to plan or better. Scale silver and bronze goals from there.
  • Review all goals when completed to see how much more you could have aimed for when setting them.

LEADING MY ORGANISATION

  • When you notice people in the wider organisation achieving goals, such as sales targets, in a way that is inconsistent with how the organisation expects people to behave, do something. Speak up. Challenge. Find a route to feedback your views.
  • Don’t be afraid to discuss openly when peers are falling behind. Seek to understand why that might be and how you might be able to support them.
  • Play a role in organisational change initiatives early in the process. Become a leader who is recognised as adding value and enthusiasm to company wide change programmes. This sets you up as a progressive role-model.
  • Regularly seek feedback from your line manager (and other line managers if appropriate) about how you are doing. Don’t wait for the mid-year or annual appraisal cycle. Express that you are keen to do the best job possible and ask that they hold you to the highest levels of performance.

DELIVER ON PROMISES

27. I deliver on promises and commitments made to others. Or put another way: do what you say you’ll do.

People want to work for leaders who they can trust, whose perspective they value and who are open-minded. They also want to be led by someone who will do what they say they will do. In our experience, high performers like to be held to such standards too.

How do you feel about someone who says they will do something and they don’t do it? How do you feel the next time they say they will deliver on a project and yet don’t? You might give them a second or a third chance, but inevitably, in your eyes, their credibility gets eroded.

If you commit, ensure you follow through on delivery.

Here are a few reasons to sharpen your delivery focus:

  1. Integrity: effective leaders value honesty. ‘My word is my bond’ encapsulates the idea of integrity in the workplace when it comes to delivery. Delivering what and when you promise to is not only really important for the perception others hold of you, but it is also important to how you view yourself. If you commit to something, be sure to deliver.
  2. Trust: people hesitate to trust people who don’t keep their word. If someone lets us down a number of times, then we tend to judge that they are unreliable and untrustworthy. A leader’s relationships thrive on such trust, both with those they lead and with those they are ultimately answerable to – their own line manager, the board or shareholders.
  3. Credibility: credibility is a reflection of our knowledge and experience. Credibility about ourselves is difficult to claim – despite the many self-proclaimed ‘thought-leaders’ on the web. It is for others to judge. The best we can do is influence the perceptions others have of us as a leader by building our credibility over time.

LEADING MY TEAM

  • Make sure that a performance imperative for your team is that they are well prepared and know the detail. Nothing erodes trust in a team more than when people are exposed as being ill-prepared for a meeting, presentation or pitch.
  • As a team, regularly review the timelines on projects to ensure milestones are achieved on (or before) the agreed dates. As a leader, you must insist your team share accurate details about progress here. Do not accept vague promises. Build a culture of honesty about progress and problems, so solutions can be found well ahead of time, if required.
  • Without getting trapped in perfectionism, demand high quality of thinking and doing. Don’t settle. This is not a change that you can bring about with your team overnight. If things have been a little lax to this point you need to introduce such shifts in expectations clearly and steadily. People will need lots of support from you early in such a transition.

LEADING MY ORGANISATION

  • Lead project teams that are wider and more mixed than your own team and establish the same ways of working with a high delivery focus that you have built with your team.
  • Seek opportunities to learn from outside your organisation. Is there a competitor or supplier who has a laser-like focus on delivering on their promises? Create an opportunity to learn from them and bring those insights back to your own organisation and develop new ways of working that will raise performance.
  • Learn about two key approaches: agile and lean. Whilst these approaches originated in the manufacturing and engineering spheres, they are now widely employed as methodologies to enable many organisations to produce innovation quickly and efficiently. Becoming well-versed in these approaches will enable you to influence the way your organisation creates and delivers.

VALUES CHAMPION

28. I champion organisational values for others. Or put another way: values need to run through you like the words in a stick of rock.

‘Are we living the values or just laminating them?’ This is the classic question about the relevance of organisational values we were both asked early in our careers. Most organisations now do a great job in working up values statements for the business and publish them in creative and sometimes spectacular ways. They read brilliantly in the company brochure, website or in the lobby of head office. In the best cases, large groups of employees have had their say in defining them and identifying behaviours that would illustrate each value in action. Unfortunately, for all but the best leaders, this is seen as ‘job done’.

The concept of values-based organisations and leadership has been around for some time. We need to look back to philosophers of the past for some context of values and their role in shaping human behaviour. Plato, Hobbes and Rousseau deliberated over the problems of social conscience, in a similar way that many of the organisations we work with do today. Most students of leadership would agree that the increased predictability of behaviour of people with similar values enhances collaboration between leaders and followers. Followers are more likely to thrive when values are aligned across a team or organisation.

Leaders understand that values are a highly individual thing. Thus, they become an ongoing discussion – a continuous checking and re-checking of what matters most to people. Indeed, research has proven that, whilst both clarity of organisational values and personal values are important, when it comes to commitment to work, gaining clarity of personal values has the most significant impact on engagement at work. Outstanding leadership relies on you understanding what is important to you and to each of the people that work for you.

LEADING MY TEAM

  • Once you have gained clarity over the values that you hold and you think are important for the performance of your team, create time to share that with the team. Make sure people understand this is your set of values and that they do not need to hold the same things dear to them. NB: individuality is probably an important value to appear on your list.
  • Depending on the relationship and state of your team, you may be able to create a safe environment, with no judgement or criticism, where your team can share their values with each other and you.
  • Over time get to know the members of your team in some depth. This is not going to happen as a result of a single one-to-one meeting. Nor will it be the product of a solitary team away day. Notice what each person gets excited or frustrated about in their daily work. When are they at their best and why is that? Answers to such questions will provide you with clues about the values they hold.

LEADING MY ORGANISATION

  • We would expect that your organisation has completed an exercise where it has generated some ‘company values’. Do you know what they are? Do you know how you are expected to role-model these as a leader? It is less important that you can list them off than you know how to translate them into high-performing behaviours.
  • Ensure that the values are mapped across to those of your own team. Explore with your team members how close they are and where there might be gaps. Agree how to proceed.
  • Schedule a meeting with your function’s human resources business partner or a member of the learning and development team. Ask them to share their thoughts on the organisation’s values – even if there isn’t a formal set yet – and your role as a leader in living these every day. Commit to acting in line with the outputs from this discussion.

INTEGRITY

29. I act with integrity. Or put another way: become the good corporate citizen.

Doing the right thing is always the right thing. The challenge is knowing what the right thing is in any given situation, especially when you have responsibility for a significant group of people and set of results. Being guided by your own integrity is key to making good decisions more consistently.

Integrity is a word open to interpretation. It covers aspects of character, honour, ethical and righteous behaviour. It speaks to the idea that a person’s word is their bond and that when someone commits to doing something they will give of their best in order to achieve it. It is not always a guarantee of whether they succeed or not but that they did everything they could to deliver on their promise. Always.

When we talk about integrity, the result is less significant than the intention and the effort put into achieving the best outcome possible. If the intention was pure and you can evidence your rationale, you can still be said to have acted with integrity.

The clearer you are about your purpose and the values and beliefs you hold dear to you, the easier it is to maintain a sense of integrity. You may be asked to make a person redundant that you don’t feel has been treated fairly by your organisation. What do you do? Well, ultimately, you may not prevent that person from being made redundant, but as a leader you would not let your feelings and thoughts about the situation go unheard, as that would clash with your own sense of fairness and what is deemed just.

You would speak up in such situations, make a case and try to influence at least a review of the situation – even when the business case for the decision is clear. The question that you can find that you ask yourself is: ‘Is it right to let this slide without saying something?’ or ‘Am I ok with me not saying something about what feels wrong here?’ Then you can tap into your own values to check the right course of action. Usually, you’ll know when right is right.

LEADING MY TEAM

  • Work with your team to co-create a set of guidelines about how you will make effective, ethical and fair business decisions. Ensure that these are agreed and clearly recorded.
  • Check that your new guidelines fall within organisational frameworks such as any HR policies. There’s no point in working outside of such things.
  • Employ these guidelines, especially at critical points when there is no clear and obvious way forward. Let the ‘rules’ guide how you all decide which route to take.
  • Where you use these guidelines, review how effective they were after each key decision. Decide if you need to add, subtract or change them in any way to make them an even better resource.
  • When you have a particularly tricky decision to make, be sure to have someone that you can rely on for impartial advice who will act as a sounding board for you. A mentor, coach or peer can be a great source of such support.

LEADING MY ORGANISATION

  • Reframe for yourself the role you have as a leader. Yes, you lead your team, but it is important you realise and accept that you are also an important resource for the wider organisation. Step up and take on the role of a leader who has the protection of the whole organisation as a key responsibility.
  • Become an informal ambassador of doing the right thing. No need to act all authoritarian or purest about it. Equally, do not shy away from speaking up when you become aware that things are not being done as well as they might.
  • Volunteer for project teams, special interest panels and strategy groups where you think you can add some value or where you are going to learn about how the organisation wants to produce great results. Has a diversity and inclusion group just been set up at work? Get on it. Is there a wellness working party starting soon? Volunteer to contribute.

HIGH PERFORMANCE

30. I build a culture of excellence and high performance. Or put another way: welcome to Accountability Central.

Accountability is a cornerstone of creating a culture of high performance for yourself, your team and organisation.

People who have high levels of accountability take personal and complete responsibility for producing a relevant, timely result that demonstrates excellence.

Let’s dig into this idea a bit, as there are several important elements that make up the whole:

PERSONAL AND COMPLETE RESPONSIBILITY

Leaders who are high on accountability don’t need to do all the work themselves but they tend to be comfortable taking the ultimate responsibility for delivery.

RELEVANT AND TIMELY RESULT

Leaders know that they cannot deliver all the results themselves and, as a result, do at least two things really well to ensure that results are delivered on time:

  • First, they know who in their team has the right skills and can be trusted to deliver the result that is fit for purpose.
  • Second, those same leaders also have excellent systems for monitoring the progress of current work streams. Rarely does a project slip out of their vision and get missed as a result. They avoid suffocating those who are charged with delivery but they also refuse to take a laissez-faire approach.

DEMONSTRATES EXCELLENCE

As a leader, set a standard of excellence that is known by all your team and organisation. Start by holding yourself to that standard. Then demand that of your team. You simply can’t expect your team to excel if they are looking at you regularly failing to demonstrate high levels of accountability.

Building a culture of accountability produces several great outcomes for you, the team and your business because it does the following:

  1. Reduces your time in motivating people to give of their best – they do that themselves.
  2. Saves time on root cause analysis because people take control of their results and own up to mistakes.
  3. Increases the time you have available to lead effectively, rather than get bogged down in the detail.
  4. Becomes a self-selecting and de-selecting environment where you start to attract high performers and shed those that don’t want to take accountability.
  5. Enables high performance to become much more self-sustaining over the longer term.

LEADING MY TEAM

  • Set up a daily team meeting where progress is reviewed.
  • Ask each team member to report specifically on what they achieved yesterday. Ask people to commit to what they will deliver today.
  • Make sure that each comment is tracked – spreadsheets are good for this – so you know how every part of your team is progressing.
  • Provide a blend of some challenge and support. Mix this up depending on what you feel is likely to help someone improve their performance. For example, sometimes a supportive word or two or sometimes a more direct enquiry about why progress seems to have stalled.
  • Recognise achievement of team members when they deliver key milestones. Periodically adjust what people get recognition for to ensure the standard is being raised.
  • Ensure the team know what you are working on and the results you have produced. After all, you are a part of the team and this is a great way to build a culture where everyone is expected to perform at a high level all the time.

LEADING MY ORGANISATION

  • Prioritise leading your own performance. Ensure your track record is exemplary. Do great work in your technical area and in your role as leader.
  • Next, ensure your team is in the best place possible when it comes to performance and how others view it.
  • Support the performance of your peers. Review what each is involved in and offer support where you can.
  • Schedule a meeting with your line manager to share your insights into what is going well and what you are doing to drive performance to the next level. Ask for their input into anything you may have missed or could be doing differently.
  • In the right forum and in the right way, challenge where your peers and your boss could be doing things better. Now do you see why you and your team’s performance needs to be awesome?
  • If you observe poor performance at any level of the organisation, step into your role as a leader within the organisation and challenge such unacceptable standards.
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