By Damian D. “Skipper” Pitts
Chair, Organizational Development, N2Growth
In today’s leadership and strategy methodologies, leaders and organizations need to have five strategic rules of leadership clarity present in order to achieve greater outcomes of effort within their organizational designs. And, when they are successful, everyone will be able to manage complexity – the new complexities of business – without becoming complicated. The five strategic rules of leadership clarity are outlined as:
- Understand what others do; acknowledge their value.
- Identify the Poker’s Bluff; disrupt existing conditions.
- Increase the quality of empowerment; mobilize to maximize effort – ideate.
- Reward reciprocity; do the right things to get the right things done – timely.
- Ensure performance gaps are closed within the new complexities of business; ADMIT your truths.
These rules create greater value with lower cost and even lower effort, helping to avoid unneeded turbulence to decision-makers who are responsible for navigating the organization through the rough waves of the deep blue oceans of competition. The real battle lies within, not on the outside with competitors. Your competitive advantage must transition to become a strategic advantage using the five strategic rules. With them, you’ll be able to Get On Up, Get Into It, Get Involved and Commit to Do It – change – while allowing the organization and stakeholders to agree on reviewing the business strategies, and identify the leadership competencies and capabilities that are needed to implement them.
As a byproduct of these five rules, the ADMIT Next-Level Practices offers a fresh perspective on leadership, allowing business to remain disruptive, profitable, and innovative. Leaders will be able to think strategically, focus sharply, and move quickly to catapult the business strategies forward.
This approach presents the leadership drivers that require strategic investments to lay the organizational foundation for agile and transformational success. It explores a uniquely devised step-wise approach and explains how to Get On Up, Get Into It and Get Involved for the organization and stakeholders to agree on the right measures to change how societies behave around their products and services. The ADMIT Next-Level Practices ensure leaders are prepared to:
- Get On Up…
Acknowledge the need to innovate to change.
- Get Into It…
Disrupt existing conditions to embrace better choices – Next-Level Practice Decisions (NLPD).
- Get Involved…
Mobilize internal assets and resources through Shared Consciousness and Purpose – IDEATE.
- Commit to Do It!
Take action to do the right things to get the right things done – execute with TIME!
These five elements also offer a significant resource to a leader’s strategy and are needed to transform strategic intent into Next-level Practices throughout the organization – and on a consistent, ongoing basis. Leaders and their teams in high-performing organizations can use the five rules as a leading approach to:
- Identify the critical drivers of organizational success.
- Shape a culture that provides Shared Consciousness and Purpose for individuals to experience high performance-driven execution.
- Create a strong and sustainable pipeline of talented emerging leaders.
- Evolve the organization’s design to best align and support performance-driven execution throughout each level of the enterprise and business strategy.
Successful leaders and organizations think strategically about these types of challenges, take action to address them using the right organizational context, and influence other stakeholders to drive the organization toward the desired performance outcomes to impact the Future Picture. Is there any other way? Probably, but this one offers a great starting point for any leader to do the right things to get the right things done in short timelines.
In the end, these five strategic rules of leadership clarity and the ADMIT Next-Level Practices work to eliminate doubts about what matters most and prevents strategic distraction – allowing leaders to be able to Go Slow to Go Fast to improve situational awareness in the long-run.
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Photo by The National Guard, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.