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Training Soapbox: LeadershipSigma
May 01, 2008
The new enterprise imperative: Leadership quality from bottom to top.
By Eileen M. Rogers
How can Six Sigma concepts be employed to foster and improve the quality of leadership at every level in the enterprise?
Six Sigma has come to represent quality—the first time, every time. By improving processes on both a strategic and tactical level, enterprises can achieve significant financial results and extraordinary, ongoing benefits. These benefits are gained through deepening customer relationships, strengthening culture, reducing cycle times, encouraging innovation, and increasing quality.
Six Sigma and other total quality processes engage the skills and knowledge of everyone in the organization and create a fundamental shift in the way corporations do business. In the same way, embedding a LeadershipSigma mind-set can drive enterprise transformation by leveraging leadership at every level. This approach builds leaders who can grow the business and improve every process, operation, and decision, while eliminating mistakes, inefficiencies, and lost opportunities.
What is a LeadershipSigma mind-set?
The LeadershipSigma mind-set creates leadership capability and a leadership culture throughout the organization. The demand is there. Today's business environment is leaner, with less top-down leadership and more pressure to perform. The war for talent, human capital resource constraints, volatile global competition, and cost-cutting measures all challenge everyone to lead in the achievement of extraordinary business results. Senior executives recognize this change imperative. In a 2007 study conducted by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu and the Economist Intelligence Unit, global senior executives indicate that their two top concerns are "creating a high-performance culture" (79 percent) and "leadership development" (76 percent).
This means leadership no longer can be the private preserve of top executives once they have advanced significantly in their career. Nor is it sufficient to reactively develop business leaders by simply mapping their growth and development to a formalized competency framework. The dynamic complexity of the 21st century demands a proactive process that builds leadership talent everywhere and all the time. Cultivating a whole-firm leadership mind-set energizes the workplace; increases employee engagement; and enables the organization to flex, adapt, and innovate in the global marketplace.
Additionally, the field of leadership development is exploding with new approaches, solutions, research, and insights. There is no single path. Each enterprise must craft its own result-oriented leadership development that is purpose and values driven, strategic, enterprise-wide, flexible, experiential, and embedded in an apprenticeship culture. Innovative leadership growth includes coaching dialogue, utilizes enhanced on-demand leadership learning and portals, and is incorporated into the talent performance management processes.
Leaders who are developed over time actively and consistently master the confidence and skills to:
• Recreate strategy and deliver business results
• Engage colleagues, clients, vendors, and customers in mutually valuable relationships
• Challenge the status quo and innovate
• Execute seamlessly across diverse workgroups, countries, and functions
Is there a leadership model that is meaningful for leaders at every level?
A deep and broad investigation of the available leadership frameworks, models, capabilities, competencies, skills, habits, attributes, and characteristics has uncovered limitless viewpoints and perspectives on what is required of a leader to be successful. All of these add value to the complex and textured tapestry of leadership. But are these actionable on an organizational as well as individual basis so leadership can be embedded into the organizational DNA?
To develop a leadership framework that addresses this objective, one first must answer two critical questions: What is the definition of leadership that applies at every level; and, what are the common roles that must be accomplished by leaders throughout the 21st century enterprise?
First, the high-performance leader is defined as:
• A person with whom others align—even when they have other choices—someone with constituents. People choose to align with a specific leader because they find the leader engages them in realizing their own ambitions, and this alignment occurs at every level of the enterprise.
Next, the roles performed by leaders at every level in the organization are illustrated in the LeadershipSigma Roles Model. These roles can be promoted, performed, developed, coached, and supported by every employee in the 21st century enterprise.
Key components of the leadership context include:
• Centered on Vision and Values: Without a clearly articulated vision rooted in shared values, the target is not known, and the leadership is neither authentic nor inspirational.
• Founded on Eminence and Expertise: Leaders must be recognized by others as experts in their work or field, generating respect and appreciation for the knowledge they bring to achieving results.
• Producing Visible and Measurable Results: The leader must generate visible evidence of positive progress toward the vision, creating a context for constituent belief in the mission.
The leader's roles include:
• Relationship Builder: Leaders build strong relationships with peers, colleagues, leaders, and associates internal and external to the enterprise.
• Communicator: Leaders influence and persuade by employing all communication means and media with presence, skill, and confidence.
• Innovator: Leaders challenge the status quo and create new opportunities for individual, team, and enterprise performance and results.
• Global Citizen: Leaders operate in seamless, borderless execution, working effectively with diverse colleagues and multiple cultures.
• Mentor/Coach: Leaders are dedicated to building the next generation of talent, making themselves redundant by ensuring and securing the leadership pipeline.
• Decision-Maker: Leaders individually make the tough choices, informed by a process of collaboration and consultation, even when the way is not absolutely clear.
The requisite leadership behaviors, capabilities, attributes, and characteristics are not separate lists or frameworks, but unfold out of each of the roles and components of the LeadershipSigma model, rolling up ultimately into collective enterprise success.
The LeadershipSigma mind-set and model serve as drivers of the new enterprise imperative—to build quality leaders at every level.
As in the Six Sigma approach to quality, every asset is leveraged to develop and sustain high-performance leadership. No asset is left disengaged or collecting dust. Finally, with a leadership culture firmly embedded throughout, leadership development occurs primarily where and when the leader is engaged in real-time work. Leadership performance is coached and supported with innovative approaches, while the application of customizable solutions ensures valuable personal and business results.
Eileen M. Rogers currently serves as global director, talent and leadership excellence, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, where she developed and implemented a global leadership curriculum delivered in a fully blended model. Prior to this, Rogers served in executive education director positions at Harvard, Boston University, and Babson, where she was responsible for creating leadership and management programs for corporations, government organizations and academic institutions. Contact her at: eirogers@leadershipsigma.com.
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