Part One: The Leader’s Checklist
Taken together, the core and customized Leader’s Checklists should serve as a useful starting foundation for managers. But in a dynamic world, the principles will always remain subject to change and improvement through recurrent testing and frequent refinement. Careful evaluation of the leadership principles can even at times call for a surprising rewiring.
Human resource managers at Google, for example, had anticipated that possessing technology expertise would be an important principle for leading at the company. Yet on testing what proved most effective with employees, Google researchers found that seven other leadership abilities had greater impact, including a capacity to articulate a strategy and to foster others’ career development.19
In a study of the leadership at a major division of a large financial services firm, two fellow researchers and I uncovered the need for a similar revision in the customized checklist principles deemed to be most vital at that firm. One of our colleagues interviewed virtually all the top executives of a 4,000-person division, and from those interviews he identified 200 distinct capacities that at least some bankers viewed as valuable for leading the operation. When he then asked the division leaders to rank the 200, the banking executives consistently placed 39 at the top.
Our colleague then took two additional testing steps that resulted in a surprising reconfiguration of the Leader’s Checklist for this division. He first asked the leaders’ peers, direct reports, and superiors to rate each of the leaders on all of 39 capacities. Next, he looked at the financial results of the leaders a year later, knowing that their performance depended much upon whether they could muster and align the energy of the bankers who reported to them.
With this data in hand, we found that only nine of the 39 identified leadership capacities had a significant impact on financial performance of the banking leaders. Qualities that were once highly rated, such as demonstrating strong commitment to company success, establishing a team-based sales culture, and streamlining the sales process, fell away when the baseline financial test was applied. Not surprisingly, the bank division subsequently focused its leadership development programs on a customized Leader’s Checklist that comprised the nine principles that did make a difference—including the personal mentoring and motivating of the frontline bankers—and not the other 30 principles, a radical reconfiguring from what the bank had initially expected.20
Systematic study does not always confirm the status quo or even what is intuitively accepted. Sometimes, a hard look serves to upend or alter conventional, perhaps outdated wisdom. Testing the Leader’s Checklist can thus be invaluable not only for confirming its principles but also for evolving and revising them.