Sustainable Growth:

Effective Leadership

Results-Based Leadership

Connecting Leadership Attributes to Desired Results

"Results-Based Leadership makes one of the most important statements about the very meaning and importance of leadership."

– Warren Bennis

What is Results-Based Leadership?

Results-based leadership has relentless emphasis on results. It's simple equation:

Effective leadership = attributes × results.

"This equation suggests that leaders must strive for excellence in both terms: that is, they must both demonstrate attributes and achieve results. Each term of the equation multiplies each other; they are not cumulative."¹

Why Results-Based Leadership?

What is missing in most leadership-related writings and teachings, is the lack of attention to results. Most of them focus on organizational capabilities – such as adaptability, agility, mission-directed, or values-based – or on leadership competencies – such as vision, character, trust, and other exemplary attributes, competencies and capabilities. All well and good, but what is seriously missing is the connection between these critical capabilities and results.¹ And this is what results-based leadership is all about: how organizational capabilities and leadership competencies lead to and are connected to desired results.

Benefits of Results-Based Leadership

By helping leaders at all levels get results, results-based leadership frees productivity from constraints of hierarchy and the limitations of position.

Results-based leaders define results by understanding audience and customer needs. They continually ask and answer the question – "What is wanted?" – before they decided how to meet these needs.

Employees willingly follow result-based leaders who know both who they are (their own leadership attributes) and where they are going (their targeted results). "Such leaders instill confidence and inspire trust in others because theу are direct, focused, and consistent."¹

Results-based leadership makes performance measurement easier. "Without a results focus, calibration of leadership becomes extremely difficult. Measuring results helps organizations in many ways, from tracking leaders' individual growth, to comparing leadership effectiveness in similar roles, to clarifying the leader selection process, to structuring leadership development programs, to using results as the standard filters who should enter an organization and how they should be trained."¹

Managing for Results

Setting objectives is not enough. The only place where meaningful management results can be won is the outside world. Managing for results is expansion of Management by Objectives (MBO) into the marketplace. It is the theory and practice of how to produce results on the outside, in the market and economy.

To achieve these results, you should develop a solid, sound, customer-focused, and entrepreneurial strategy, aimed at market leadership, based on innovation, and tightly focused on decisive opportunities... More

 Case in Point  25 Lessons from Jack Welch

While boosting productivity and getting results were of paramount importance to Jack Welch, the legendary former CEO of General Electric, how someone got a team; to perform mattered more.

25 Lessons from Jack Welch

Welch urged other leaders at GE, "Make sure you have the very best people to carry your vision out. Hire those most capable of turning visions into reality – ask questions about how they might go about attacking a particular thorny problem. Promote those people who have the best record of making things happen."...More

References:

1. Results-Based Leadership, Dave Ulrich, Jack Zenger, and Norm Smallwood

2. "Management of Organizational Behavior: Utilizing Human Resources", Paul Hersey and Kenneth Blanchard

3. "The New Leaders", Daniel Goleman

4. "Effective Coaching," Myles Downey

5. "Strategic Achievement", Andrew Spanyi

6. "Managing for Results," Peter Drucker