The 7 Perspectives Of Effective Leaders
Leadership Effectiveness
Leadership today is as difficult as it has ever been. With the amount of change, uncertainty, and disruption businesses face, it can be nearly impossible for leaders to stay on top of everything that comes their way. But rather than constructing an equally complex framework to navigate this environment, the key to effective leadership can be found by keeping it simple.
Your leadership effectiveness will be determined by just two things:
the decisions you make and the influence you have.
Decision-making is not enough. Great leaders make great decisions. However, when a leader relies more on her own knowledge, experience, and charisma to drive the business rather than tapping into the shared knowledge, skills, and experience of the team, she lacks influence. People will follow her because of her knowledge and position, but rarely will they feel engaged or motivated to give extra effort.
Influence is not enough. Great leaders inspire people through vision and engagement. However, when a leader focuses too much on the future and is disinterested in where the business is at today he becomes disconnected from the specific aspects of the company’s current reality. People will follow him because of his vision and inspiration, but will lose confidence in his decision-making.
The most effective leaders get both of these areas right. They focus on making great decisions while building influence with others.
Understanding the 7 Perspectives
But as all leaders know, it is not that easy, especially in today's fast-paced and connected environment. To make the best decisions while maintaining and growing your influence, you need to see your business from 7 Perspectives. These 7 Perspectives will force you to see beyond your own knowledge and experience so that you can gain the perspective necessary to improve your leadership effectiveness. As you use this framework you’ll make better decisions and increase your influence. Let’s preview each of the perspectives:
1. Current Reality
Leaders need to have both feet firmly planted in current reality. If they don’t have a handle on today’s business, they will be unable to effectively lead through today’s opportunities and challenges. Without this perspective, your ability to make sound and relevant decisions is greatly hindered. Then, your team loses confidence and you lose influence.
2. Vision
Leaders need to see beyond today to where the business is going in the future and paint a clear and compelling picture that excites others to join them on a journey to someplace special. Not only do people want it and need it—but leadership requires it.
3. Strategic Bets
Leaders place strategic bets to close the gap from their current reality to their long-term vision and drive their organization forward with clarity and confidence. These three to five initiatives are above and beyond the normal scope of operations.
4. The Team
Leaders are able to not only see the business from their team’s perspective but also ask the right questions to best understand the unique challenges and opportunities only their teammates can see.
5. The Customer
Leaders must understand what it feels like to do business with their company or organization. To serve them well, a leader must know who their clients are, why they value their product or service and what their current and future business needs are.
6. Your Role
Leaders need to clearly see the unique value that they bring to their organization and have complete clarity on how to execute on those activities. They must focus their energy on the activities that they and only they can do—while either delegating or growing capacity to handle additional responsibilities.
7. The Outsider
Leaders need to challenge their thinking and perspective by seeking insight from an outsider. This unbiased input can broaden thinking, highlight blind spots and stretch leaders past their comfort zones. Leaders must actively seek and develop these trust-driven relationships.
Integrating the 7 Perspectives
The 7 Perspectives framework does no leader any good unless it gets integrated into their daily rhythm. The 7 Perspectives are not one-off activities or isolated actions; they have to become a part of a leader’s daily routine. Think of each of them as an ongoing discipline. Effective leaders use the framework as a foundation for their strategic planning and business management. They run discussions and decisions through each perspective. For example:
What will our customers think about this?
What do we need to hear from our team?
Do we have the necessary resources needed to execute this strategy?
How does this align with our vision?
Does this new initiative align with our current strategic bets?
Effective leaders simplify their leadership to focus on essential elements, while eliminating waste and distraction. The 7 Perspectives challenge us to see things in a new way that will allow us to make better decisions and increase our influence so we can build better teams and get better results.
Which Perspectives Do You Need To See?
While most leaders readily grasp three to four of these 7 Perspectives, very few see all of them with the same level of clarity. Do you know the areas where you’re strong and where you need work? If you have weakness in any of the perspectives, if you don’t see them clearly, then you may have real trouble making sense of the other perspectives. One weak link in an otherwise strong chain can still snap and wreck the whole thing.
To assist you we have created an assessment to help you see where you are today with each perspective. Keep in mind that no one has a perfect score in all 7 Perspectives. But once you answer a series of questions, you’ll be better equipped to see where you can improve. You can access the assessment by clicking the link below.
The 7 Perspectives Assessment
We created The 7 Perspectives of Effective Leaders assessment to highlight both what you are doing well and what might be limiting your effectiveness—your blind spots.
At Building Champions, we believe results matter and truly exceptional performance cannot be achieved alone. Leaders must inspire their teams, invest in the people around them, and work together toward a common purpose. By pursuing both results and relationships, they create healthy cultures that bring out the best in others and fuel even greater success. Contact us today to learn more about how we guide leaders, teams, and organizations that want to be healthy, high-performing and have a greater impact on everyone they serve.
