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The Case for Clarity: A Key Leadership Quality
Dr. Maynard Brusman
“Effective leaders don’t have to be passionate. They
don’t have to be charming. They don’t have to be brilliant…They
don’t have to be great speakers. What they must be is clear.
Above all else, they must never forget the truth that of all the
human universals – our need for security, for community,
for clarity, for authority, and for respect— our need for
clarity… is the most likely to engender in us confidence,
persistence, resilience, and creativity.”
—Marcus Buckingham
In The One Thing You Need to Know:…About Great Managing,
Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success (Free Press, 2005)
There’s a lot to be said for
clarity and simplicity. When top executives make short, clear
statements about their defined customers, core strengths, desired
future, and action plans, they prevent employee confusion and
anxiety. They generate confidence throughout all levels of the
organization and replace uncertainty with resilience and creativity.
In fact, the quality of clarity may be the most essential element
for leading large groups of diverse employees toward an optimum
future.
Warren Bennis, founding chairman of
the Leadership Institute at USC’s Marshall School of Business and advisor to four U.S.
presidents, once noted that he found more than 800 definitions
of leadership. With leadership
accounting for 15 percent of an organization’s success, according
to Bennis, we need to truly understand its fundamental principles,
how to identify those who demonstrate it and how to nurture its
traits in their potential successors.
Every leader is unique, but each shares
similar “ingredients,” as
Bennis refers to key characteristics:
• A guiding vision
• Passion
• Integrity (to include self-knowledge, candor and maturity)
• Curiosity
• Caring
In their book Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional
Intelligence, coauthors Daniel Goleman, Annie McKee and Richard
Boyatzis delineate 19 traits that effective leaders possess, including:
• Emotional self-control
• Transparency
• Initiative
• Building bonds
And former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani further narrows
the list in his book Leadership:
• Know your values
• Be hopeful
• Be prepared
• Show courage
• Build a great team
• Love people
Leadership
and management guru Marcus Buckingham, quoted in the introduction
to this article, sums it up as follows: “Great
leaders rally people to a better future, by discovering what is
universal and capitalizing on it.”
Preoccupation
with the future and the ability to communicate one’s
vision with clarity drive leadership, he asserts. This does not
mean great leaders are primed to outperform your competitors, increase
productivity or help others achieve success; rather, they are dissatisfied
with the status quo, envision a better future and strive to share
it with others to achieve success.
Great leaders clearly appreciate current challenges and believe
they have what it takes to conquer them and forge ahead. They remain
optimistic and have strong egos, without becoming egomaniacal.
Great Managing Versus Great Leading
Every
manager’s starting point is the individual employee.
Managers must assess talents,
skills, knowledge, experience and goals to design a specific
future that fosters each employee’s
personal success. No manager can excel without hiring good people,
setting clear expectations, recognizing and praising excellence,
and demonstrating a sense of caring. As Buckingham puts it: “Great
managers discover what is unique about each person and capitalize
on it.”
Leaders begin with an image of the future. They then focus their
attention on persuading others that success awaits within this
vision.
The One Thing a Great Leader Must Do
Great
leaders play a different role from that of managers: They
rally people toward a better future. They are instigators driven
to bring people together to realize this future, regardless of
individuals’ unique
personalities, levels of excitement and initial commitment.
While
great managers discover each employee’s unique qualities
and capitalize on them, great leaders do the inverse: “Discover
what is universal and capitalize on it.”
Every
leader quickly learns that most people have some basic fear when
confronted with uncertainty—and
the future is always uncertain. Leaders must consequently find
a way to guide people through uncertainty and change.
Anthropologists and scientists, in fact, have discovered five
basic fears that are universal, each of which correlates with a
basic need:
| Fear |
Correlated
Need |
| Death
(our own and our family’s) |
Security |
| The outsider |
Community |
| The future |
Clarity |
| Chaos |
Authority |
| Insignificance |
Respect |
Source: Donald E. Brown in Human Universals (1991)
Of all of these universal fears and
needs, the most essential one leaders must confront is fear of
the future. The modern-day leader
is challenged by the unknown. Even with a strong ego and optimism,
leaders know they must deal with many complexities and uncertainties.
Their success depends on finding a way to engage employees’ fears
of the unknown and transforming them into a spirited commitment
to a vision for a better future.
Clarity is the tool used to accomplish this. A great leader must
define the future in vivid terms and through actions, images and
exemplary heroes that allow others to see clearly where they are
headed. Clarity is the antidote to anxiety, so use it to increase
our effectiveness.
Four Points of Clarity
Clarity in leadership applies to four key areas:
| 1. |
Whom
do we serve? Who are your customers?
How can you define them based on what they want and/or need
from you? To develop ideas for defining them with laser-sharp
clarity, ask questions like: “What
do you get from us that has real value to you?” Compiling
information from customers enables you to craft a vivid customer
definition—one that helps your employees visualize clients
and understand their concerns and values. |
| 2. |
What
is our core strength? By defining
your organization’s
core strength, you educate your employees about how they will
prevail in the future, using their edge to best competitors
despite any obstacles. When a leader instills confidence in
core strengths, resilience replaces anxiety about the future.
As Buckingham states: “The strengths you pick don’t
have to reflect current reality. You don’t have to be
right. You just have to be clear. It is also essential that
your people believe that you believe they can excel in the
ways you’ve defined.” |
| 3. |
What
is our core score? To ensure
clarity, avoid measuring several employee behaviors or skills
at once. Senior management can track several scores, but leaders
must define only the most important core score for employees
to achieve focus. Make sure the selected behavior falls under
employees’ control,
as they must have the power to influence their scores. Select
a metric that fits the customer or quantifies the group’s
core score. |
| 4. |
What
actions can we take today? Symbolic action occurs when a particular
goal is achieved to create confidence and success. Systematic
actions include new activities that focus on the needs of customers,
highlight core strengths and lead to success on core metrics.
Symbolic and systematic actions serve as behavior plans to
success. |
Embedding clarity in day-to-day operations requires focus and
discipline. While clarity is an innate talent in some people, discipline
and practice are required to develop this quality in leaders.
How Do the Best Leaders Achieve Clarity?
Most leaders are skilled at distilling and dissecting complexity
to find clarity. How do you refine this talent and increase your
capacity to fulfill your leadership roles?
All leaders develop certain disciplines to help them achieve greater
clarity. Here are a few suggestions from Buckingham:
| 1. |
Take
time to reflect. Most great leaders take some time out of their
busy schedules for reflection. This time dedicated to thinking
is incredibly valuable, allowing high-performing leaders to
achieve remarkable success, in spite of complexity. Some use
their travel time for reflection; others utilize exercise or
meditative practices. Any chosen method should allow you to
sift through the clutter, define essentials and focus on what
really matters. |
| 2. |
Select
your heroes with great care. What gets recognized gets repeated.
The individuals you recognize and celebrate become role models
for others. Look to the people and events that you want others
to emulate. When you recognize a high-achieving performer,
be explicit in your recognition by explaining, in precise terms,
how he or she served your defined customer, the core strength
he/she demonstrated, how he/she met or exceeded your core metric
and the actions he/she took to bring the desired future one
step closer. |
| 3. |
Practice.
Discipline yourself to practice
using your words, images and stories in a way that helps employees
perceive the future with clarity. The best leaders don’t try to come up with newer
and better speeches; rather, they practice and refine their
favorite speeches, focusing on the material that is real and
pertinent. They aren’t afraid to repeat themselves. Discipline
in refining your descriptions of the future will enable you
to lead your people through uncertainty and anxiety toward
a clearly defined goal. |
Leaders must never forget the universal need for security that
is created through community, clarity, authority and respect. Clarity
is the most likely element to engender confidence, persistence,
resilience and creativity.
Today’s most respected and successful
leaders are able to transform fear of the unknown into clear
visions of whom to serve, core strengths to leverage and actions
to take. They enable us to pierce the veil of complexity and
identify the single best vantage point from which to examine
our complex roles. Only then can we take clear, decisive action.
The ideas and concepts described in
this article are attributed to Marcus Buckingham, author of The
One Thing You Need to Know:…About
Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success. Buckingham
is co-author of two best-selling books: First, Break All the Rules:
What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently
(coauthored with Curt Coffman) and Now, Discover Your Strengths
(coauthored with Donald O. Clifton). He is a leading authority
on employee productivity and the practices of leading and managing.
Other Resources:
Bennis, W. 1994. On Becoming a
Leader: The Leadership Classic—Updated
and Expanded. Perseus Publishing.
Bennis, W. & Nanus, B. 1997. Leaders: Strategies for Taking
Charge. HarperBusiness.
Brown, D. 1991. Human Universals. McGraw-Hill.
Buckingham,
M. 2005. The One Thing You Need to Know:…About
Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success.
Free Press.
Giuliani,
R. & Kurson, K. 2002.
Leadership. Miramax Books.
Goleman,
D., McKee, A & Boyatzis,
R. 2002. Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional
Intelligence. Harvard Business School Press.
Working Resources is a Strategic Talent Management Consulting,
Leadership Consulting, Training and Executive Coaching Firm Helping
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Intelligent People; Emotional Intelligence-Based Interviewing and
Selection; Multi-Rater 360-Degree Feedback; Career Coaching; Change
Management; Corporate Culture Surveys and Executive Coaching.
Dr. Maynard Brusman
Consulting Psychologist and Executive Coach
Trusted Advisor to Senior Leadership Teams
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