The Leadership Link to Sustained Excellence

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Can your organization sustain performance excellence? Recently, McKinseyresearched the link between leadership and organizational health (i.e., the company’s ability to sustain exceptional performance over time). Key findings:

  • 80% of a company’s variance could be explained by the strength of leadership.
  • 57% of companies don’t think their training efforts are developing the leaders they need to meet their strategic priorities.

Too often, they note, leadership development focuses on bringing universal leadership capabilities to a limited number of individuals in the company. Why doesn’t this work? Change is constant. Decision-making needs to be decentralized. Impacts need to be achieved across the organization. Effective leadership needs to be local.

They suggest four principles that closely align with our approach to developing leaders who can thrive in high-change environments.

  • Focus on leadership behaviors most effective for driving performance.McKinsey identified 4 that account for as much as 89% of leadership effectiveness. One is focused on results. The other 3 on people.
  • Identify a critical mass of influencers so that change becomes self-sustaining. This is true for any change. You need to identify your key stakeholders and influencers and make a plan for engaging them.
  • Use neuroscience to create lasting change. Neuroscience helps explain why we resist change and what we can do to create change. It provides insight into motivation, decision making and influence. Leadership development needs to utilize these concepts to help leaders create highly effective and efficient leadership practices.
  • Integrate programs into broader organizational systems and measure impact. Leadership development can’t stand alone. It needs to be aligned to the strategy and integrated into how you hire, enable high performance, reward and recognize.

Leading change is now central to every leader’s role, and the organization’s success.  

It follows that leadership development and change leadership development should not be looked at as separate topics or processes. Change leadership should be fully integrated into training programs, but also into all leadership development strategies, plans and assignments. And every senior leader should be asking themselves:

How ready is my team to lead change?  

What are their change leadership strengths and weaknesses?