What is leadership?
I define leadership in practical terms – my definition of leadership doesn’t get here from theory, but rather, from practical, hands-on, day-to-day leadership challenges leaders face today.
My focus is on the vital leadership characteristics that are indispensable for any leader to possess, in order to genuinely build a high performance organization, and as a consequence of this, a truly sustainable competitive advantage.
My definition of leadership is in terms of specific skills – in terms of observable, measurable, and learnable behaviors.
My leadership definition has nothing to do with charisma, charm, or magnetism.
The great majority of world-class high performing organizations are led by so-called not charismatic leaders; charisma helps leaders indeed, there is no question about that – and it also helps any person for that matter – but charisma is not a key factor in driving organizational high performance.
On the contrary, leadership is so objective that it smacks you in the face with its concreteness – the performance of an organization is the result of its leaders' behavior.
Leadership is about observable, actual, and unmistakable behaviors – it is about knowing exactly what organizational levers to use; it is about identifying a reasonable number of priorities that will have the greatest possible impact on the success of your organization.
You control a bull by grabbing it by its horns, to make it jump – and even soar – according to your dexterity.
I define leadership as having the specific skills that allow you to grab your organization by its horns in order to make it soar – to reach organizational peak performance.
Leadership skills are learnable – like any other skill.
Here on this page, you will find the most effective skills – explicit, practical, and powerful – that will give you the greatest possible impact on your company’s performance.
You will see many “old” terms on this page – there is nothing new about these good old leadership skills.
However, most of the top-level executives don’t use these leadership tools appropriately. The term “mission” for example, despite the fact that most companies have a mission statement (they probably even went to an expensive off-site meeting to craft it), their mission is nothing more than a useless paragraph written on their company’s main entrance, on their website’s corporate information page, and on their business brochures.
The information I give you on these pages tell you exactly what it is you need to do in order to make these tools have a direct impact on organizational performance.
These leadership skills are subdivided into three sections:
Head – the head of your organization
Heart – the heart of your organization
Muscle – the muscle of your organization
The overall picture of our leadership model looks like this:
