LEADERSHIP IS A PROCESS
Make Extraordinary Leadership Routine
Be More Strategic
Get Out of the Weeds
Mentor More
Your effectiveness as a leader and your brand (the leadership behaviors you are known for) are the result of the things you repeatedly do (and, of course, those things you repeatedly do not do – whether by choice or omission).
Changing your leadership outcomes and brand is as easy (and as hard) as changing your routine.
Just as coaches create playbooks and practice plays to strengthen their teams, successful leaders rely on carefully crafted leadership routines compiled and perfected across their careers. These routines are a direct reflection of how each leader perceives the purpose and work of leading. For example, leaders who conceive of leadership as a position of authority over a functional specialty develop decidedly different leadership routines than those who conceive of leadership as a position of accountability over employee experience and development.
Leaders who want to grow need to think deeply about three things:
WHY do we lead?
WHAT is the work of leading?
HOW should I change my routine (to do the work)?
The LeadershipSOPs® Vs. Your LeadershipSOPs
The LeadershipSOPs® is a proprietary leadership framework and methodology which defines the purpose of leading and helps leaders EXPLORE the work which corresponds to this purpose, CLARIFY priorities and plans, TRANSFORM through experimentation, and MASTER new routines through repetition and continuous improvement. The application of this proprietary framework and methodology results in something nobody owns but you: your, personal LeadershipSOPs.
Your LeadershipSOPs are your own standard operating procedures (SOPs) for structuring, operating, and perfecting the teams you lead. Structure, operate, and perfect (which can also be remembered by the SOP acronym) represent the three domains of leadership SOPs should be developed to pursue.
Developing and deploying LeadershipSOPs across the domains of leading helps leaders...
Lead more often, more consistently, and more comprehensively.
Establish the perfect conditions for continuous improvement.
Accelerate the identification and integration of best practices.
Be more strategic and communicate with vision.
Enhance alignment, role clarity, relationships, and trust within and across teams.
Balance accountability and sustainability.
Develop individual and team capabilities.
Lead enterprise change.
Simplify mentorship and knowledge transfer.
Crush personal and team objectives.
Lead a legacy that lasts!
Why do we lead?
“We conceive of leadership the moment we commit to an objective we cannot achieve alone.”
Leadership is born from the human tendency to embrace lofty objectives we have no hope of pursuing absent a motivated community of effort. Tragically, our passion for these objectives (and the expertise they entail) often overwhelms our passion for the people required to get the job done. In moments such as these, we act as if leadership is a process of goal-attainment rather than a process of organizational development.
Put simply, the purpose of leadership is to create the means to do collectively what we could not do alone.
Of course, the objectives which initially inspired us to form the team are not forgotten. They become the measure of the team’s success… and the team’s potency becomes the measure of the leader’s success.
Make no mistake, leaders cannot afford to completely cast aside the end goals their teams must accomplish; however, they must find a way to create the means (the team) to achieve the ends. In so doing, they must become obsessed with the purpose of leading: cultivating a willing, capable, and sustainable community of effort.
Willing — Capable — Sustainable
Your team must be willing because the concept of leadership implies your members have a “choice” (there are other, less palatable, less ethical, and much more illegal words for compelling people to work against their will). However, while the will to do work is absolutely essential, it is not enough. Inspiration will not get the right work done right. Your team must also be capable of the challenges and opportunities they will encounter. Likewise, you will fall short if your team is willing and capable today, but not tomorrow. In fact, no team will remain willing and capable for long if its leader does not attend to sustainability.
What Is the Work of Leading?
If the purpose of leading is to cultivate willing, capable, and sustainable communities of effort, the work of leading can be summarized as the work required to thoughtfully design (Structure), intentionally engage (Operate), and continuously improve (Perfect) these communities of effort. In his book, From Expert to Executive, Edward E. Tyson (the architect of the LeadershipSOPs) refers to these three domains as “The ABCs SOPs of Leading”. Of course, each domain is comprised of several dimensions which further detail the work of leading.
When leaders are not properly acquainted with this work, and the importance of developing SOPs for structuring, operating, and perfecting powerful communities of effort, they almost always resort to the work they know best: the team’s work.
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For many, the term structure conjures up images of the boxes and lines comprising an organizational chart. Organizational charts typically depict the names, levels, titles, responsibilities, and reporting relationships of each member of an organization. As such, they are one of the most common artifacts used to describe a community of effort. Although they are comprised of very basic elements, they are often the first picture we get of an organization’s strategy. Like a military battleplan, they graphically display the total troop force, types of leadership and expertise arrayed, and often how the leaders and experts are dispersed geographically.
However, while organizational charts are an essential tool for describing the structure of a community of effort, there is a lot more to describing the business architecture or organizational design of a team than just the boxes and lines of an organizational chart. As applied within the context of the LeadershipSOPs, structure implies all of the work leaders must do to devise, describe, and eventually populate a community of effort.
This work includes:
Assessing the ecosystem of stakeholders for needs, challenges, and opportunities;
Determining the primary purpose of the team (i.e., defining the value it should supply the ecosystem);
Identifying a long-range vision and its corresponding mid-term and short-term objectives;
Articulating which cultural objectives should balance the business objectives;
Devising strategies to inform resource deployment and action;
Translating the strategies into an operating model that clarifies work processes and tools;
Crafting an organization structure which supports the operating model, strategy, culture, objectives, and purpose of the team;
Calibrating rewards to incentive and reward the right behaviors; and
Identifying the knowledge and capabilities needed to populate and develop the team.
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Operating the team as it was structured is key to ensuring the vision laid out in the design is brought to life through consistent action.
While this domain could relate to an endless number of operational duties, the LeadershipSOPs framework focuses on just three broad functions:
Tactical and financial planning
Work assignment, performance monitoring, and other accountability routines
Stakeholder assessment and engagement
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The Perfect domain is comprised of the work leaders must do to continuously improve their communities of effort:
Personal development;
Coaching and feedback;
Team development;
Organizational change; and
Performance improvement.
Since all four of these items have transformation (from a current state to a desired future state) at their core, the LeadershipSOPs Transformation Model offers leaders a best practice process for EXPLORING, CLARIFYING, TRANSFORMING, and MASTERING change.
Buy the book.
From Expert to Executive is a fictional tale highlighting the evolution of a bio-tech startup through the eyes of several of its leaders. Rather than a dry technical manual, LeadershipSOPs architect and author Ed Tyson takes readers through a journey of discovery told through the eyes of the leaders experiencing it.
Book a keynote or Leadership Talk.
ED TYSON is the chief executive officer of PerSynergy Consulting, architect of the LeadershipSOPs and author of From Expert to Executive: Mastering the SOPs of Leading.
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