Monthly Archives: January 2013

#27 What does your customer want? And can your leaders provide it?

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The next exercise to refine your leadership inventory is to make a list of things that are important to your customer. Does your customer want:

  • High quality or low price? (Usually, you can’t have both!)
  • Personalized service?
  • Speedy delivery?
  • Lower cost of operations?
  • Improved market share?

The list is industry specific, and perhaps unique to the market you are targeting. Meaning, you could be targeting the medical vertical, but within that vertical, dentists will have specific needs.

Now map your leadership criteria to the list of things important to your customer. Finding the cause and effect can be difficult, if not impossible. But having the tough conversations will reveal the thought leaders in your organization. How many of them have the “facts” based on hands on experience, and how many of them are simply brilliant, analytical speakers? Hint: you need both, but lean towards those who have experience.

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#26 Can your leaders “connect?”

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Let us continue to work on the list of leaders you have. Note that everyone is a leader, they just fall into one of two buckets. You may be tempted to have more than two buckets and to stack rank within a bucket. If you can’t restrain yourself, go ahead, but that is not necessary.

There are two kinds of “connections” your leaders need to make:

  • Connect the dots: They need to see patterns in random events, see cause and effect relationships, extrapolate, work backwards from the end in mind, and process the big and the small pictures. In essence, this refers to their ability to solve problems.
  • Connect with people: A typical workplace will have multiple personalities, some warm and fuzzy, others prickly and abrasive. Add to that unpredictable behaviors and mood swings, and now you have a volatile cocktail. Your leaders need to work smoothly and easily with a wide variety of personalities, be productive and make their co-workers productive as well.

Without judgment, gather evidence to score your leaders on these two criteria. Set your opinion aside as you do this.

Based on your new insights, move your leaders from one list to the other if necessary.

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