If you ask people to define what makes a great leader, they are likely to list attributes such as being a good listener, being charismatic and decisive, being able to delegate and having good people management skills. Yet ultimately, the hallmark of good leadership is success — getting results, delivering performance.
Those who consistently deliver effective performance do not necessarily share a special set of personality traits. What they have in common is technical expertise — they are good at what they do. And they focus on a number of key leadership principles that, when effectively executed, can ensure that results are delivered reliably. In this article, we investigate seven leadership performance principles. We examine the logic of these principles and look at how you can activate them in your own role to achieve greater success.
These seven principles of performance management can serve as anchors in an often stormy and foggy work environment, in which there is not only too much to do but it is also unclear exactly what should be done as a result of competing expectations and priorities. These anchors ensure that the important things do get done — and get done well.
1. Focus on the potential of others
The first principle — and a core assumption behind the seven-principles framework — is that a leader’s own performance matters far less than the performance of their team. At a certain level, it’s simple maths. If you have a leader of a team consisting of 12 people, the leader shouldn’t focus only on their own performance, but should aim to secure the best total performance from the team’s 12 members. This is not to say that leaders should not perform. But the primary focus of a leader should be the performance of others.
Another key point is that performance management begins long before performance begins. In fact, it starts with recruitment. Talented and motivated people tend to perform well. Those who are less talented and less motivated tend to perform less well. If leaders pay insufficient attention to building powerful teams, and fail to surround themselves with those who have the potential to perform highly, they will quickly find themselves in the frustrating position of trying to improve performance from a deficit position. One international leader told me that the projects he had to lead were 50 per cent compromised if the team he was given lacked the necessary skills and commitment.
Leaders therefore need to dedicate time to networking and to finding the next talented performer. And they need to be ready, if necessary, to poach talent either from an internal colleague or an external competitor. And they need to remember that differences and diversity matter. Leaders need people who will challenge them. And research confirms that higher performance is delivered by teams with a blend of talents rather than by groups whose members have similar skills.
2. Define the scope of performance
The second principle is to define exactly what individuals should focus on in their roles. The nature of many organizations is so complex and changing that roles and responsibilities can quickly become blurry. A frequent complaint is that it is not clear who is responsible for what. Poor performance is often the result of important issues falling between the responsibility of different roles and departments.
This is not to say that roles can or should ever be fully defined. Employees are expected to embrace uncertainty, to proactively take on extra tasks and responsibilities beyond their core role. But it is essential for leaders to clarify the different elements of each role. What is the core role? What is the natural extended role? And where can creativity be deployed beyond this extended role in the organization’s grey zone — and where would this be a waste of time and resources?
If these different boundaries can be drawn, and decision-making authority clarified within and across them, employees have a clearer understanding of the territory in which they have to perform to the maximum. Not defining the scope of performance can limit an individual’s potential to perform.
There are additional benefits beyond the individual level from defining the scope of performance clearly. Areas of responsibility can be discussed within and between teams and departments, and differences in focus and conflicts of interest can quickly become clear. Discussions can then be held to align expectations and improve collaboration and performance across the organization.
One consequence of this perspective is that leaders might need to advise their team members not to focus only on success in their own role, but to consider the performance needs of the broader organization. To take a simple example, beating a personal sales target may create organizational underperformance if the organization is unable to deliver punctually on the sales orders, leading to customer dissatisfaction. In such a case, it is highly questionable whether the sales team member, focusing just on their own role, has performed well at all — at least from the perspective of the organization.
Unfortunately, few internal roles and reward systems are organized on the basis of sustainable organizational success. And few leaders are brave enough to challenge the logic of the current performance management system. The result is often the illusion of performance with short-term micro-gains constantly undermining longer-term strategic benefits.
3. Align tasks and people
“How can I motivate my team members to perform better?” This frequently asked question is, unfortunately, often the wrong question. The issue is not how to motivate but how to connect roles and responsibilities to the intrinsic motivations of individuals such that external motivating becomes unnecessary. Constructing responsibilities so that they align with the strengths, inner motivations and values of team members — for whom work may be a secondary priority after their personal life or some higher ethical purpose — takes a lot of time. It involves listening to people, forming a relationship with them, and having honest and robust conversations about where their talent lies. High performance then becomes a natural and almost inevitable result.
4. Support to enable
The concept of “leader as coach” has been well established since the late 1990s, highlighting the reality that leadership is now viewed as an enabling, even an inspiring, role rather than a purely transactional one. Supportive “servant leaders” focus on the creation of learning opportunities for team members so that they can develop — and perform ever more effectively.
This learning focus can have formal elements, such as annual appraisals and personal development plans. It can also include more informal components, such as continuous feedback, periodic coaching conversations, planned training events, encouragement to network and help with connecting with a mentor.
Cultivating current and future performance offers a potentially higher return on investment of leader time, but it is frequently overlooked as a result of busy leadership schedules. Also, the empathy and listening competence required to coach and develop others is often lacking in leaders, forcing many to rely on heavy-handed advice. This can generate resentment or a negative co-dependency, useful neither for leader nor team member. All leaders should ask themselves what percentage of their time they dedicate to developing the current and future performance of others. Their answer is almost certainly: “Not enough”.
5. Earn the right to demand accountability
If the first four principles have been successfully implemented, leaders will have earned the right to demand a high level of accountability from their team members.
Many team members, despite getting support, are overwhelmed by the dynamic and complex international work environments in which they find themselves. They are poor at prioritizing, fearful of making mistakes, and can quickly fall into a reactive and defensive mindset. It is essential for leaders to challenge attitudes and behaviours that threaten to compromise performance, particularly the “victim mindset”.
Victim-thinking, or blame-thinking, is serious because it reveals a deep misunderstanding of the nature of organizations today. These are often highly fragmented, are under-resourced, have goals that are not aligned across departments and are led by leaders who disagree with each other. Welcome to the real world!
Complaints do not deliver change. And explaining one’s own failures in terms of the faults of others delays the application of the sort of solution-oriented behaviour needed to tackle tough issues.
Alongside a strong demand from leaders for accountability on the part of team members — with team members saying loud and proud, “I am responsible for these tasks” — there is a need for sanctions when performance falls short. Nothing erodes individual performance as much as a lack of consequences when promises are not kept, agreed objectives are not met or mistakes are repeated. Sanctions here do not mean punishment. Instead, as a first step, it simply means dialogues to explore the causes of failure, clarify areas of accountability and confirm future consequences if performance does not improve.
6. Talk and walk together
The concept of role modelling has a long history in leadership. Military heroes, for example, were frequently praised for “leading from the front”. Yet, role modelling is a double-edged sword for leaders trying to inspire performance simply because so many of them make poor role models.
This is not to say that they lack the necessary technical and personal skills. It is more often the case that the work ethic of leaders, their desire for quality, their speed and their impatience with those who are slow can be alienating for those who want to perform at a more normal level, with a more sustainable work-life balance.
Particularly with the younger generations, super high levels of leader commitment — to the point of sacrificing family life and health — may cause talent to desert. What may work better than the traditional “walking-the-talk” approach — showing through your actions the way you want things done — is talking and walking together with individuals and teams. In this way, you can co-create a culture of performance that is both ambitious but also engaging and sustainable.
And if we accept that leaders’ high performance levels can present a risk to team performance, then any co-created culture needs to create the space for team members to provide feedback to the team leader about how they feel and what they need in order to perform to their maximum.
7. Celebrate success
It is often said that success breeds success. In the same way, performance delivers performance. Like a sports team that begins to win and then goes on winning, working teams can gain confidence from successful performance and discover new ways to create and experience further success.
Yet, the reality is that many leaders don’t celebrate success enough, and so forgo the momentum and energy that celebrating can deliver. And celebration is not complex. It simply means taking time, perhaps organizing an event, giving up an evening, finding the money to buy everyone dinner or having the courage to make a short heartfelt presentation of thanks.
There are many easy excuses we can find for not doing this, not least that we don’t have the time. Yet even a quiet word with an individual can be highly effective, or a few words of recognition in an email to a senior sponsor in the organization, representing the commitment and efforts of team members.
And if actions speak louder than words, success can also be celebrated and rewarded concretely with an offer of a training course, an extra night’s stay in a hotel during a business trip or an invitation to a senior management event to expose individuals to strategic discussions.
A simple question
Living the seven leadership performance principles should not be that difficult. They simply require thought and a little planning. And ask yourself this question: if you don’t have the energy to commit time to this, why should your team members commit their effort to delivering the performance that you are asking for?