part 3

Action: make it happen

Introduction

The productivity of effective and less effective sales people is dramatic. For instance, MetLife found that its best insurance people were twice as effective as its least effective sales people. This is a normal finding in sales-related jobs, where it is easy to make productivity comparisons. Most professional jobs are much more ambiguous than sales: success is less clear and depends on quality as much as quantity. Comparing productivity across professionals is much harder because no one is doing quite the same job. If anything, this means that productivity variations between professionals are likely to be even greater than between sales people. Bluntly, it is easier for anyone with an ambiguous workload to hide, whereas there is no hiding place for sales people. This resonates with experience. In your workplace, you probably know who really makes things happen and who hides. The productivity gap between the best and the worst can be fourfold or more, even though it is hard to prove.

So, what does it take to be in the high-performance group when it comes to making things happen? You have three priorities:

1. 1Be very clear about your goals and priorities: know what you want to achieve. If you do not know what you want, you are unlikely to find it. Goal focus lets you separate out the noise of day-to-day management from the signal. Deal with the noise, but create time to make progress towards your goal. This should sound familiar: it is about having a clear idea as part of your IPA agenda.
2. 2Find help: you cannot do it all alone, so build a team that will help you succeed. Build a network of influence and support across your organisation that will also help you. Again, this will sound familiar: it is the people part of your IPA agenda. With a great idea and great people, you are well on the way to making it happen.
3. 3Master your craft: this is where you can personally make a ­difference – and they are the things all leaders deal with. This is the focus of the remainder of this book.

Already, you will be mastering some technical skills in operations, finance, law or whatever your chosen area of expertise may be. As a leader, you need to master three more sorts of skills that the rest of this book will explore:

1. 1Organisational skills: as a leader, you have to know how to lead change, make projects work, control costs, deal with budgets, handle crises and conflicts, and make and influence decisions in uncertainty. These skills are often political. All organisations are political and you have to master the art of politics. Politics is how you make the organisation you work for work for you. Any one of these organisational and political skills can take years to master, but the basic principles are fairly simple and they are laid out in the chapters that follow.
2. 2Daily skills: if you have to explain to a five-year-old what you do all day, then explaining how you manage the intricacies of a global supply chain will not get you far. But, if you say you meet, talk and listen to people, and read and write papers, you may be understood. That is the mundane reality of what leaders actually do all day, but some are very good at it and others are not. Hone these daily skills and you will stand out from your peers. Part 4 will explore these daily skills.
3. 3Mindset skills: how you act is just a symptom of how you think. If you want to learn the secret of leadership, it is not enough to ape the symptoms (actions and behaviours) of a leader. You have to learn how to think like a leader. Fortunately, the best leaders display consistent habits of mind that we can all learn to some degree; learning any one of the mindsets can make a huge difference to your leadership practice. (This is the focus of Part 6 of the book.)

Part 3 of the book starts with making change happen, because that is the heart of leadership. You can only take people where they would not have got by themselves by changing goals, priorities and people.