The First Step To Transform Your Organization Begins With You

When you think about some of the most effective leaders you’ve met, have you noticed how they can seem to make the complex simple? Or how these great leaders can often distill their areas of focus down to a handful of priorities? Having interviewed dozens of turnaround CEOs I have seen this narrowing of focus with most of them. They have a handful of priorities for the business’ growth, as well as a handful of priorities for their own leadership behaviors and role focus.

The first step in transforming your organization, begins with you.

In the same way that Focus is one of the three legs of effective strategy for your company (Vision, Divergence, Focus), your focus within your role as the leader has an amazing power to accelerate your organization’s growth.

A leader, just like a company, has a singular point of strength, that if intensified, gives the highest return on effort of anything else you could focus upon. In the organization we call this the Primary Source of Leverage. It could be in areas like the business’ Marketing or Sales Methodology, Technology, Distribution Channels, or Market Focus. In you as the individual leader it could be in any of the seven areas below. Over the last three decades, I’ve refined the following process to be as simple and least time consuming as possible.

First, pick your No. 1 area of Role Focus Priority - a greatly intensified focus that you take on in your role:

• Strategy – you vision casting like never before, accentuating your organization’s divergence
• Customer – Improving your team’s focus on more of the right customers, even letting go of customers that don’t fit your strategy
• Culture – an all-out effort to make your work environment and how people treat each other, the best it can possibly be
• Innovation – your shepherding innovation objectives targeted areas of priority where improvements will have the most impact
• Coaching or Team Training - your becoming the best possible mentor, coach and/or trainer of those throughout the organization where you can have the most impact
• Product or Service – intensifying the continuous improvements in your offerings or service impressions with the customer
• Financial – improving every aspect of your organization’s management of capital

The steps for this “Leadership Transformation” are:

1. Create a Vision of Your Role – your becoming the best version of yourself as leader
2. Clarify The 7 Essential Areas of Organizational Objectives that must be delegated to the team
3. Prioritize the top 1 to 3 organizational objectives with which you should be most involved
4. Identify 1 to 3 of your organization’s greatest constraints, empower people, and kick off innovation efforts to ameliorate or eliminate those constraints
5. Identify your singular leadership Role Focus Priority
6. Identify and engage with one to three internal stakeholders, telling them of your Role Focus Priority, objectives with which want to be involved and kick off a once a month 5 minute conversation with them asking, “How am I doing focusing on my Role Focus Priority?” and “What is one thing I could do better to focus even more intensely on that?” do not respond, just take notes and say “Thank you!”
7. Engage an outside third party from either your board or a strategic growth advisor to hold you accountable to the monthly check-ins and with whom to have quarterly strategy dialogues and adjustments

You can begin at any point in the year, but the power of this is that by improving yourself first, others follow.