How leaders produce sterling results

Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo are celebrated as the greatest footballers of their generation because of their proclivity for scoring goals. Though the duo have other skills, their uniqueness is their ability to score goals, which is the most important thing in soccer. Consequent on their dexterity at putting the ball past goalkeepers, they have overshadowed other great football players and have dominated the scene over the last 10 years with the two of them winning the highest football honour, the Ballon D’Or five times apiece.

Just as scoring goals is the essence of a football game, getting results is the essence of leadership. Leadership is about deploying resources to get results that will improve the state of the nation or organization and enhance the status of the people. The way to get result is to get the right things done. If a leader fails to get the right things done, he will fall short of getting the right results. If a leader fails to get sterling results on a consistent basis, he will shipwreck his leadership because it is the results that count and will be counted at the end of the day. Leaders are appointed, empowered and provided resources to get results. Therefore, a leader who fails to get results will be regarded as a waster of resources and a squanderer of opportunities. So, no matter what else a leader does, if he fails to get great results, he will have missed the mark by a mile. So, getting the desired result is critical in leadership. But at the base of this is getting the right things done.

How leaders get the right things done

There are various ways through which leaders get the right things done.

 

They eliminate distractions

Distraction is the greatest hindrance to leadership success. Distraction is not really about extraneous activities, it is essentially about giving attention to issues which may not be unimportant but are not critical to the main business. Paying attention to tasks that are not critical to the goal slows down progress and affects leadership effectiveness. Critical to getting things done is knowing what not to do at all. Usually leaders have so many things calling for their attention but not everything that beckons to a leader deserves his attention.

An employee approached Warren Buffet, one of the wealthiest men in the world, on how to be effective. In response, Buffet asked him to write out his top 25 goals. The employee wrote out the 25. Then Buffet asked him to review his list and circle the top five goals. The employee went through the list and after a while circled five items on the list. Buffet then asked him what he was going to do with the two lists. The employee said, “I will start working on my top five goals right away.”

When Buffet asked him about the second list his response was that, “Well, the top five are my primary focus, but the other 20 come in a close second. They are still important so I’ll work on those intermittently as I see fit. They are not as urgent, but I still plan to give them a dedicated effort.”

Buffet’s response was, “Everything you didn’t circle just became your Avoid-At-All-Cost list. No matter what, these things get no attention from you until you’ve succeeded with your top five.”

Such things must be avoided by all means.

 

They prioritize

Even after distilling his tasks to only the important ones, there is still the need to prioritize because the remaining tasks will not be of the same level of importance. To prioritize, leaders start with the most important and the hardest tasks. Once a leader is able to get around the difficult tasks, other tasks become as easy as slicing a hot knife through butter. Most people don’t get much done because they avoid tackling the most important tasks first.

A university professor wanted to impress on his students the importance of prioritizing tasks so he got a large empty jar and filled it with rocks. He then asked the students if the jar was full to which they responded in the affirmative. The professor then got some pebbles and poured same into the jar. Again, the professor asked his students if the jar was full. Again, they said it was full. The professor got some sand and poured into the jar.

He then reversed the exercise starting with sand and pebbles. At the end, there was not much space for the rocks.

The professor then went into the thrust of the exercise and said that to go far in life the students needed to know that they had to start with the important things. He said the rocks represented the most important things. When the most important things were the first to be fixed, there were spaces for others but when the less important things were the first to be fixed, there was no space for the important ones.

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They delegate

Given the limitation of every human being, no leader can really attain all he sets out to accomplish all by himself; every leader needs to work with people to get results. Therefore, delegation is critical to a leader’s success. The extent to which a leader succeeds is often the extent to which he can delegate functions to others.

Delegating functions is important because it frees the leader up to tackle the core aspects of his work. By delegating parts of his functions to others, he is able to focus on those activities that give him the highest returns. A leader who fails to delegate gets bogged down by routine tasks which consequently slow down the progress of his organization.

Learning to delegate aids the leader’s effectiveness. By lightening his workload through delegation, a leader frees himself from unnecessary stress. He does not have to be weighed down by the nitty-gritty of what others can effectively handle; what he gets to know is the action to be taken and the outcomes of the action.

 

They make people accountable

To produce delightsome results, leaders have to hold those who work with them accountable. It is impossible to manage what is not measured. As a general rule, those whose performances are not measured do not put in their best for the simple reason that there is no distinction between those who do well and the laggards. Once there is no difference between those who do well and those who do not, there is really no motivation to do well. When employees are not held accountable, they relax and fail to give their best to their organization. The more this is permitted in an organization, the poorer the results that will be turned out by it. The average person wants to contribute the least permissible by the system. But when they know that there would be questions about their performance and a consequence should they fail to deliver on agreed terms, they will raise their performance level to the expected height or even beyond.

According to Ken Blanchard, in The One Minute Manager, the best way to hold employees accountable is to agree with them beforehand on what the expectations are as well as what the rewards for performance and the consequences of non-performance are. Once employees are made to understand that failure will not be overlooked, they put in their best and get the desired result.

 

They build strategic relationships

To get desired results, leaders treat their subordinates as people, not mere statistics; they treat people as individuals, not a mass. They are genuinely interested in their followers and establish solid relationships with them.

Relationship is a critical success factor in leadership. The reason is that most people are at ease with leaders who they trust and like more than those they do not trust. Since leaders work through others to achieve their goals, leaders deliberately initiate and cultivate relationships that can bolster their leadership.

Networking provides leaders the opportunity to expand their scope of influence and extend their reach. By building relationship with people within and outside their immediate environment, they increase their chances of succeeding because in the final analysis, it is not just who a leader knows that is important but those who know him and are willing to go out on a limb for him. Those who have a network of contacts stand a better chance than those who operate alone. According to some experts, the net worth of an individual is the mean of the value of his network (a summation of the worth of all the contacts divided by their number). In other words, the quantity and quality of the people known by an individual plays a significant role in the determination of his worth.

The key to building strategic relationship is trust. When a leader is trusted, he will enjoy a groundswell of goodwill that will help him get the desired result.

 

Last line

Without delightful results, leadership becomes a yoke for the leader and the led.