What EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP really is (and what it's not)

There are as many leadership frameworks as grains of sand on the beach, and most of them lack substance or focus only on the human aspect and are therefore fundamentally incomplete.

This one here though is way more balanced and drops many of the essential keywords that in my opinion an effective leader must embody:

✅ Vision
A leader without a vision is not a leader. “Servant leadership” is an important aspect to mobilize and empower people but WHERE do you actually want to lead them and WHY should they follow you when you don’t show them an enticing place to go? People without direction run in circles. This is literally true, when people get lost in a forest without a compass or other visual orientation cues, - e.g. the sun -, they do walk in circles (compounding error over time).

✅ Strategize
To reach your vision (“where to go”) you need to have or create a strategy (“how do I get there”). Too many leaders are too absorbed in just managing tasks or people. Yes, a leader is people oriented, and knows how to develop and bring the best out of the individual. But he needs to focus his and his organization’s attention, resources and capabilities on strategic leverage points, recognizing and guiding along the path of least resistance toward strategic goals.

✅ Culture
A vision is far away from where you are now, otherwise it’s not a vision in the first place. Getting there requires substantial change and often even transformation. And the biggest resistance to change usually is in the culture. So where is the just mentioned strategic leverage point? In the culture. That’s the work focus.

✅ Managing
An effective leader not only inspires, motivates, empowers and qualifies people (leading), he also manages tasks. In an organization people aren’t only there for “being”, they have tasks. Leading one side of the equation (the human part) is important but not enough. Next to tasks there are also budgets and technology. An effective leader skillfully orchestrates all of it into a cohesive whole.

✅ Decision
An effective leader decides. Leading is not coaching. Coaching is a very (and ever more) important meta skill, like learning or selling. So a leader should also be a good coach, otherwise he couldn’t develop his people into leaders. “A great leader doesn’t create followers but other leaders” (Tom Peters). But leadership requires decision, otherwise there is stagnation.

✅ Emotion/Empathy
In a slightly oversimplified model the causality looks like this: Beliefs --> Thoughts --> Emotions --> Action --> Results. Like it or not it's our emotions that directly drive our behavior. To produce results, effective leaders know how to manage their emotions and those of others.

2 essential leadership constituents, which I'll discuss next week, are still missing: “Purpose” (leaders must provide or instill a “Why” to inspire and align their team) and "Intuition” (to complement analytical thinking).