In this context, D.Ulrich, J.Zenger, and N.Smallwood suggest the following fourteen specific actions described in Chapter 7 can help leaders make results a major part of their leadership equation, at whatever level they function in their companies:
1. Begin with an absolute focus on results.
2. Take complete and personal responsibility for your group's results.
3. Clearly and specifically communicate expectations and targets to the people in your group.
4. Determine what you need to do personally to improve your results.
5. Use results as the litmus test for continuing or implementing leadership practice.
6. Engage in developmental activities and opportunities that will help you produce better results.
7. Know and use every group member's capabilities to the fullest and provide everyone with appropriate developmental opportunities.
8. Experiment and innovate in every realm under your influence, looking constantly for new ways to improve performance.
9. Measure the right standards and increase the rigor with which you measure them.
10. Cnstantly take action; results won't improve without it.
11. Increase the pace or tempo of your group.
12. Seek feedback from others in the organization about ways you and your group can improve your outcomes.
13. Ensure that your subordinates and colleagues perceive that your motivation for being a leader is the achievement of positive results, not personal or political gain.
14. Model the methods and strive for the results you want your group to use and attain.
Ulrich, Zenger, and Smallwood argue that these suggestions which may be implemented right now by any leader occupying any position, will modify behavior and improve performance- all without a month-long absence from work or expenditures of large sums of money.
Highly recommended.
I have three criticisms.
There is a strong whiff of setting up a 'straw man' so that they can knock it down while building their case. I do not have any sense that other writers have unduly neglected results in writing about leadership attributes and the authors' insistence on that alleged failure gets a bit tedious. A related aspect of the same issue is that the author team is at least as good at marketing gimmickry as it is at building tables and figures. "Leadership" and "results" are two words of known selling power and they are used to the point of distraction. For this reader, the resulting 'hard sell' style casts a bit of a shadow over the authority of the work as a whole and contributes to the excessive glorification of 'leaders' as the source of all success that seems to be endemic at present.
Much more important is a major gap in the range of leadership concerns covered. They devote a chapter to each of four major groups of stakeholders: employees, the organisation, customers and investors. There is no mention at all of society, the community or the environment as stakeholders, yet any substantial organisation ignores that very important group of stakeholders at their peril.
Similarly there is little direct mention of other critically important areas for leadership attention, for example their role in nurturing the supply chain, or in managing the technologically driven step changes so well described in Baghai et al: The Alchemy of Growth. While there is some brief discussion of alternative processes for developing strategies the essential leadership role of developing strategic direction is also treated very cursorily.
The third criticism is more subtle. Concern with results necessarily means concern with measurement or assessment. The authors in general deal quite well with the issue of establishing measures of results across a range of areas concerning their four chosen groups of stakeholders and recognise the importance of qualitative as well as quantitative measures. I think they should have given more attention to the associated risk of giving inadequate attention to things that are hard to measure just because measurement is difficult. One of the great societal questions at the moment is how we value things - like the environment and community harmony - that can not easily be expressed in terms of money. Defining and measuring balanced results is getting much harder, not easier, whether at a societal or an organisational level. It involves wisdom, not just skill, and any book that seeks to relate leadership to results should directly recognise that and directly address it.
So what you have is a book that solves the problems of the 80's and 90's rather than one that addresses the dominant concerns of the next century. But within its own framework, the book does quite a good job.