Part One: The Leader’s Checklist
The 15 principles provide a solid foundation for a Leader’s Checklist, suitable for most leadership moments at most organizations at most times. But “most” is not always good enough. Customized checklists are required for distinct times and contexts. Among the most important divisions are those of company, role, country, moment, and personal place.
Company. Every organization requires its own customized set of checklist principles. In recent years, many of the largest have established such lists.
The Leader’s Checklist for General Electric, according to those highly familiar with the company, would include, for instance, teaching others how to lead their divisions, making tough—often wrenching—personnel decisions around performance, and continually innovating. A checklist for Google, by contrast, would place greater emphasis on pursuing individual creative sparks, keeping teams small, and guiding others in an even-keeled manner. A checklist for a major professional services firm might identify nearly a dozen special capacities that it holds to be vital for its managers, including seeing the world through clients’ eyes, enthusiastically engaging with clients, and working with them to transcend conventional thinking.
Role. Distinct positions necessitate their own unique additions to the core Leader’s Checklist. The customized principles for top executives are different from those for frontline managers. They, in turn, are different from those for company directors.
In interviewing more than a hundred company executives and institutional investors—part of a study of how the two work together or are sometimes at odds with each other—I found a special demand for chief executives to build personal familiarity with their largest investors, articulate a compelling vision for where the company was going and a persuasive strategy for getting there, and generate steady quarterly and annual growth in company earnings. In a separate study of company directors, a professional colleague and I learned that many directors place a premium on partnering with—not just monitoring—management, establishing clear lines between decisions retained by the board and those delegated to management, and taking an active role in setting company strategy.
In sum, a customized Leader’s Checklist for CEOs would include building relations with investors, making a persuasive case for how the company will create additional shareholder value, and then delivering steady and predictable growth in quarterly and annual earnings. The customized Leader’s Checklist for company directors, by contrast, might include an ability to both partner with and monitor company executives, guide company strategy, and create a bright line between delegated decisions and retained authority.9
Country. Specific principles are essential for varied national locations as well. What is required in China or India is at least partially distinct from what is essential in America or Brazil.
This can be seen in the findings of the study of leadership styles in 67 countries cited earlier. Working to engage rather than just instruct others drew high marks in countries such as the United States. By contrast, a greater premium is placed on indirect forms of communication through metaphors, parables, and the like in China.10
In pursuit of such customized principles for leading business in India, in 2007-09 three colleagues and I interviewed senior executives at 100 of the largest 150 Indian publicly traded companies. Among our interviewees was R. Gopalakrishnan, executive director of Tata Sons, which oversees Tata Group, India’s largest company in market capitalization, with interests in automobiles, communication, consulting, hotels, power, steel, and tea. Drawing upon his experience in presiding over 300,000 employees and revenue equal to 3 percent of India’s GDP, Gopalakrishnan told us that Indian executives like himself had adopted many Western leadership principles but also embraced distinctly Indian qualities in running their enterprises.
For the Indian manager, Gopalakrishnan observed, “his intellectual tradition, his y axis, is Anglo-American,” but “his action vector, his x axis, is in the Indian ethos.” Many “foreigners come to India,” he said, “they talk to Indian managers, and they find them very articulate, very analytical, very smart, very intelligent. And then they can’t for the life of them figure out why the Indian manager can’t do something about [the plan] as prescribed by the analysis.” Indian business leaders, he concluded, “think in English” but “act Indian.”
The core leadership principles of the kinds summarized earlier are much the same in both the United States and India, we have found, and I believe that they are essential for running business firms in all major economies. Company leaders everywhere emphasize company strategy and motivating the work force, both on the y axis. Yet our study of Indian executives also revealed that they generally embraced four distinctive principles, all on an x axis, constituting a kind of “India Way” for leading business on that subcontinent:11
Moment. The same need for customization of the Leader’s Checklist applies to moment as well. What is essential in changing times is at least partially different from what is required in static times. What is needed in hard times is different from the requisite list for good times. Distinctive principles can also be essential for leading during varied phases of an organization’s experience, ranging from periods of start-up and rapid growth to sudden contraction or unwanted acquisition.
For leading organizational change, for example, academic John Kotter and consultant Dan Cohen have offered up an eight-step template—checklist principles that those leading the change would be wise to embrace. These include the creation of a compelling rationale for change and small steps that pave the way for greater transformation. Each step requires graphic portrayal, such as hearing directly from distressed customers in building a “burning platform” for change.12
For leading companies during a sharp downdraft, by contrast, consider the customized checklist that emerged from a study of large American firms during the financial crisis of 2008–09. Along with two colleagues, I interviewed 14 chief executives of major, publicly traded American companies during the height of the financial crisis in 2009. We asked the CEOs what they deemed critical to the leadership of their firms during a period of nearly unprecedented cutbacks, furloughs, and layoffs brought on by the failures of Lehman Brothers, AIG, Merrill Lynch, and other financial services firms.
Interviewees included the chief executives of DuPont, Northrop Grumman, Procter & Gamble, 3M, Travelers, and Tyco. While each emphasized steps unique to his or her own firm, most also stressed eight add-on principles. One, for instance, was to devote extra time and attention to the firm’s clientele. As A. G. Lafley, then-chief executive of Procter & Gamble, put it: “A lesson I would give others on how to manage through tough times is to stay close to your customers.” Another was to swiftly recognize the hard reality and get on with corrective actions, as Tyco CEO Ed Breen described it: “You have to get as much data as quickly as possible. But you will never get it all—so you need to make decisions quickly.” The distinctive leadership principles for stressful times, as articulated by this set of chief executives, included reaffirming the mission but confronting reality, sustaining faith in recovery and the future, and concentrating on what you can control.13
Still other customized checklists are required for leading other kinds of institutions, ranging from universities and nonprofit organizations to religious movements, school systems, sports teams, community services, micro-finance institutions, and agencies such as the United Nations.14 Mission-specific checklists are also essential for leading laterally with peers and partners, and upwardly with top managers and directors.15
Personal Place. While core and customized principles constitute a kind of “true north” for every manager, each Leader’s Checklist must also be customized for one’s personal place. No two leadership positions are exactly the same, nor do any two sets of circumstances require the identical exercise of leadership. By way of illustration, here are three checklists that have been customized for personal place.