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Leadership From The "Ground-Up" Can Improve The Balance Sheet

Fact #1 : Effective leaders consistently influence and drive the state of organizational readiness and behavior.

Fact #2: Businesses that don't reach their potential generally experience a failure of leadership.

Fact #3: Developing organizational leadership from the"ground-up" is the critical way to create the right behaviors that sustain continuous day-to-day performance excellence, resulting in positive impact on the balance sheet.

How Leadership From "Ground-Up" Drives Balance Sheet Performance.

The value of any company resides in the strength of its management team and functional leadership to deliver customer satisfaction, operational excellence, competitive distinctiveness and financial performance.   Each of these areas directly affects the balance sheet of any company from sales and margins to liquidity, debt, A/R, A/P and capital investment.

CEO's wanting to realize improved balance sheet value to attract investment capital, enhance shareholder return or stage an exit strategy, must have their vision goals adopted, implemented and in rhythm at every level of the organization. Typically, this is the most difficult challenge that a CEO will encounter because it requires leadership behavior change at every level of the organization.

Adopting the "ground-up" leadership process requires a new look at the work of senior and mid-level management.   In addition to traditional roles of planning and organization, managers must evolve their behavior to embrace the values of adoption, accountability, communication and facilitation.   Indeed, allowing their teams to drive the day-to-day achievement of the CEO's vision goals from the ground up.

In turn, those responsible for doing the work are learning to embrace a new perspective, moving from a traditional "doing" orientation to one of "achieving."

Teamwork is enhanced, and day-to-day operating achievements are maintained through clear performance metrics--the scorecards by which success is measured and rewarded.

The Realities of Leadership

The activities and systems that move a business forward are controlled by the team of players who are called management and staff.   The successful leader focuses on influencing their readiness and behavior.   For an organization to reach new levels of performance, the organizational leader must be in the "influence business."   And the leader must influence the team's readiness quotient not their activity quotient.   The effective leader is an effective facilitator and teacher.

Being a business leader is like being a head coach and has four critical responsibilities--to recruit talent, develop/ready talent, replace lesser talent and win through a sound, differentiated vision.    Just as a winning football coach is not in the business of making tackles, blocks, passes, catches or field goals, an organizational leader is not in the business of performing technical functions.   An effective leader should be solely concerned with leading others to achieve improved strategic and operating performance.   To ready the team.   Period.

Enlightened leadership recognizes that the business can't get ahead without a staff of top performers. The kinds of people who know how to learn, adapt and stretch, people who solve rather than create problems.   Leadership today must recognize that the successful continuing growth of any business is dependent upon the development and linking of top performing management, critical function staff and technical leaders.

Becoming an Effective Leader:

How to Achieve Operating Performance Excellence and Increase
"Bankable" Value

The Roles of Leadership: Winning Respect

  • Be a Visionary: Create meaning by crafting the vision and direction that define the focus of what the business is and where it's going
  • Be a Team Builder: Put the right people in the right places and weld them in a common cause, capitalizing on their individual strengths and resources.
  • Be the Living Symbol: "Walk-the-Walk" in a highly visible way. Constantly reinforce who and what the business stands for and how it must relentlessly seek to benefit customers.
  • Be the Buck Stopper: Face the difficult issues. See the truth in challenges and make the tough decisions and dramatic changes that have to be made.

Six Steps for Building a Winning Team and Developing Winning Results

Create a meaningful business vision which rallies the organization

  1. Define organizational relationships
  2. Clarify roles and responsibilities
  3. Construct focused business objectives
  4. Establish "business driver" metrics
  5. Teach management and staff the nine (9) winning behaviors
    • Building business around creating and satisfying customers
    • Being the best at what you do or don't do it
    • Demanding brilliant execution
    • Building the best reporting and information systems possible
    • Using technology competitively
    • Targeting zero defects constantly
    • Protecting, constantly improving and documenting the systems of the business
    • Thinking and living "faster/better/added-value"
    • Developing a distinctive, differentiated market point-of-view
    • Being cautious of anything that doesn't fit core competencies and culture