Why do you need leadership principles?

Leadership is an art, not a science, and it can be interpreted and exhibited in countless ways. We each have our own opinion for how leadership should be practiced. What happens to a company when it’s left up to every individual to decide what great leadership is? You risk confusion, frustration, and misalignment among both leaders and employees. And the impact on your business? Your guess is as good as any for what direction it will take if the leadership team doesn’t have a shared set of standards.

We strongly believe that there must always be encouragement for personal leadership style: authenticity is critical. But just like a company needs a vision to act as a business compass and a set of values to regulate its behaviour, so too does leadership need a common set of principles.

Leadership principles define what employees deserve from leaders in order to be productive and engaged. They also reflect what the business needs from leaders in order for it to be successful.

We’ve got three key reasons why every company should have its own leadership principles:

Your Employees Deserve great leadership

While the verb “to lead” can be used in other contexts, first and foremost we’re focused on leading others. Managers, team or squad leads, executives - whatever the title may be - if she has the responsibility for aligning the efforts of others, she has the greatest potential for positive impact.

A rule of thumb to recall here is, “Employees develop themselves, leaders develop others.” A leader’s responsibility should be to translate the business strategy into motivational goals for her reports. In doing so, the leader should be coaching her team-members to

• develop strengths,

• reveal blind spots,

• take mitigated risks,

• learn on the job,

• make good decisions,

• and find clarity in a career development path.

When leaders take on this coach role, employees not only have more autonomy within their own role, they simultaneously have comfort and security of knowing someone with competence is supporting them by setting them up for success.

Managers make up 70% of the variance within employee engagement. In other words, the chance that your employees are highly engaged (or not) is massively dependent on whether your managers are doing a great job (or not). Your employees deserve to be engaged; therefore, they deserve to have leadership taken extremely seriously on an organizational level.

You should be hiring and developing great leaders

Currently, the top two reasons individuals are hired or promoted into managerial positions are:

1. tenure - he’s worked here “long enough” to deserve the responsibility and/or prestige;

2. content expertise - he was an exceptional performer in his field of work.

Yet neither of these two reasons are correlated to good leadership. Neither predict he will be able to translate company strategy into motivating goals, nor does it tell you if he can align a team under a common mission or support the continuous development of his reports. It quickly becomes clear why 82% of management hires are considered bad hires.

If you don’t define what makes a great leader within your company, how could you possibly know whom to hire or promote?

The HR benefits don’t end here. An employee development program would not be complete without a clear map leading the way to leadership responsibility. Employees should know what they need to learn and exhibit in order to be considered for a leadership position, should they aspire to this.

Transparency and consistency in developing and rewarding the role-modeling of these leadership principle is key to a fair and successful succession plan within your company.

Your business won’t excel without great leadership

If leadership means, “Creating a future that otherwise wouldn’t exist,” then it follows that leaders are shaping the future of your company. No, this does not mean that leaders are the only ones who can contribute game-changing ideas; great leaders must also create the platform for critical ideas to come from every organizational level.

You may ask yourself, isn’t there just a “best practice” answer for what makes great leadership? And the answer is yes… and no. Yes, there are consistent trends in what makes great leadership. No, the trends don’t paint the whole picture for what your business needs.

Consider the following:

• What does your company need to be a purpose-driven or vision-led company?

• How are your values represented in leadership behaviour?

• What culture does the business need and do the employees want?

• What challenges does your market pose your company? What leadership traits are needed to overcome them?

Does your company require innovation and risk-taking? Empathy and kindness? Razor-sharp strategic thinking ability? Customer obsession or budget focus?

Your company needs a unique combination of leadership principles, as unique as your business itself.