I do quite a bit of work for investor-owned companies. In these situations my focus is on helping leaders of these organizations improve performance that translates into metric and defining the true value of leadership.
We know that confidence in leadership is important, but what exactly do we look for?
This week’s Step Up Leader Tip explores the answers in a recent Leading Blog post by Dave Ulrich and Justin Allen. Dave is the author of The Leadership Capital Index. He details how equity or debt investors can systematically and predictably determine the quality of leadership to make faster and more informed decisions and gain a critical information advantage over their competitors.
Leadership, emotional intelligence, authenticity, and charisma are not enough. Leaders succeed when they add value to others. Without making others better, all the personal qualities of leadership are more self-serving narcissism than true leadership. Good leaders inspire employees to do their best. Better leaders build organizations that outlast and outlive individual leaders.
The best leaders create investor confidence in future success.
In recent years, investors have begun to look beyond current earnings to determine a firm’s true market value. Investors have examined intangibles like strategy, brand, and R&D to ensure that a firm will produce future not just past earnings. More recently, we have found that 25 to 30% of investment decisions can be traced to investors confidence in leadership.
To determine the quality of leadership, investors can now access a Leadership Capital Index (see the book Leadership Capital Index: Realizing the Market Value of Leadership). This index gives investors a thorough and rigorous way to evaluate leadership. We envision investors starting to access and assess leadership insights much like they do financial and intangible results. The Leadership Capital Index examines both the personal qualities of a leader and the leadership team and the human capital systems that the leader puts in place.
But, how can a leader initiate conversations that give investors confidence in their leadership ability?
Here are some tips for leaders who want to realize more market value through their leadership.
As an individual leader, you and your leadership team can inspire personal confidence from investors when you demonstrate:
- Learning: Show investors that you are constantly learning and growing in your role. Talk about the future more than the past. Demonstrate to investors personal energy and vitality in creating a future.
- Strategic Clarity: Report challenges you see in the industry and have a clear strategic point of view about how to respond to those challenges.
- Predictable Execution: Deliver on promises over and over and over again.
- Leverage Talent: Say “we” more than “I”; share credit for success; make others feel better about themselves when they meet with you.
- Situational: Know how to adapt your leadership style to the situation. Make your customer brand promises your personal leadership guide.
As a leader, you should create an organization that has unique capabilities to deliver sustainable value over time. Work on creating:
- Cultural Clarity: Make sure that your internal culture matches the brand promises you make your customers.
- Talent Flow: Show investors that you have industry leading ability to bring the best people into your organization, to develop and grow them, and to remove them if necessary.
- Positive Accountability: Hold people accountable for results without becoming locked into burdensome performance appraisal systems. Learn to have positive conversations with employees.
- Information Flow: Be adept at managing the flow of information into your organization through analytics and improve decision making.
- Work Logic: Build a governance system that enables agility and responsiveness.
When you show investors that you have created both individual leaders and organization capabilities, they will respond and give you more market value.
We invite you to post your comments here. To explore what’s working well in your organization, (and perhaps what’s not), contact me for an exploratory Strategic Discovery Session.