“Get it done.” These words ended the instructions I received from the CEO. He outlined in general terms where he wanted to see the company go and it was up to me as the operations director to translate his strategic concepts into action. What does it take to turn an idea into action that produces superior results? In my experience, there are five essential qualities.1. Vision
This word is beat to death in leadership literature. However, without vision i.e., without the ability to frame a reality that is distinctively different from what is presently experienced, leadership doesn’t exist. In the absence of vision, those with the responsibility to lead are reduced to platitudes about change and resort to displays of manipulation, coercion, or force. Where does vision come from? Its genesis may be extreme dissatisfaction with the present that wrestles with how things could be different. Or, it may emerge in a moment of transcendent insight. In my experience, the most powerful visions are birthed rather than hatched. They require the rigor and pain of wrestling through a new way of seeing.
2. Drive
Leaders who produce results are driven but that is not to say they are abusive. Rather, by driven I mean they possess an irrepressible and indefatigable impulse to bring their vision into reality. This drive sustains them through setbacks, failures, rejection, and success. Drive of this depth is not like a fire hose, it is more like a gentle stream that persistently erodes barriers in an almost unnoticeable gentle way. Drive is not like a bull in a china shop as much as it is the way a stream reshapes the terrain through which it flows. The leaders I know who possess the deepest sense of drive are a strange combination of patience and insistence.
3. Relevant capital
Leaders who produce superior results have learned to leverage their sense of self (meeting challenges, enduring hardships, leveraging capabilities, recognizing weaknesses) to continuously develop. But self-development is only part of the capital needed. Successful leaders also appreciate the need to develop and sustain a wide array of relationships up to and beyond the organizational level. It is from these relationships they acquire insight, connections to other resources (talent, monetary, facility, assets). These leaders know how to pull from their capital sources to provide support and momentum to their vision.
4. Habitus
Habitus is a general constitution and disposition that is structured in practice usually toward practical functions. It is that sense of presence that exudes from leaders who have been tested and proven in the mundane, intense, routine, and extraordinary situations that arise in everyday experience. The focus here is practice. The mere acquisition of experience i.e., time on the job, does not produce a powerful habitus. A dynamic sense of presence is the result of practiced discipline in making good choices, exercising character, deliberate learning, and openness to feedback. Habitus commands attention and it is what gives gravity to what a leader says and intends to communicate. Without this kind of habitus “leaders” are simply dismissed as lightweights who are following the latest fad and who can be ignored because next month’s fad will replace this month’s.
5. Bridging strategy
A bridging strategy outlines the discrete steps that must be taken to get from where the organization is today to where it needs to be tomorrow. A bridging strategy exercises the disciplined thought needed to confront the brutal facts of the present and the dogged persistence needed to move forward in change. It recognizes the accelerators and hindrances that any move to a new future encompasses. It is specific and deliberate but not so rigid that it can’t adjust to the unexpected twists and turns of change.
High capacity leaders, leaders who simultaneously leverage each of the qualities above, live and work in a way that integrates concrete and abstract worlds. They know how to inspire new ways of seeing reality because they spend time thinking about how to think and how to perceive reality around them. In other words, they live by faith, faith that sees a different reality and the potential of moving toward it.