If someone, backed by millions of data points and decades of research by top professionals, shared three letters to double your career success as a leader, would you pay attention?
Well, Power Score holds this promise and may be the best book I’ve read on how to diagnose what’s preventing you from creating high performing teams, and in turn, getting the mission or business results you need. Co-written by the founder of ghSMART, a firm that advises CEOs and boards of Fortune 500 companies on leadership challenges and where only the creme of people from places like McKinsey, Bain, and BCG enter their ranks, this books holds professional weight.
In a simple framework backed by 20 years of work and in-depth interviews with more than 15,000 leaders, the authors distill down everything they learned into three letters, PWR:
1. Priorities – Do we have the right priorities?
2. Who – Do we have the right who?
3. Relationships – Do we have the right relationships?
Starting with priorities, if you are like me, you have been on those teams where no one quite knows what they are supposed to be doing. In these situations, I’ve experienced uncomfortable silences, tacit nodding of heads, or people using “business speak” to mask a lack of clear understanding. Or the priorities may be clear, but they are not the correct priorities and do not connect to your mission. Leaders need to be able to set a clear vision of where we are going, why we are going there, and make sure the priorities are leading there. Otherwise teams will waste valuable time remaining stagnant, running in the wrong direction, or creating unnecessary conflict as people realize they each have a different view on the team’s directive. Unfortunately, fewer than 24% of leaders excel at setting the right and clear priorities.
Next comes, the who, as in do we have the right people on the team? To assess this, the team needs to understand its strengths and risks and make sure the right people are matched to the right priorities. Often as a consultant, when projects start I see a mad rush for people to start doing work without the group taking a pause to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the group. In this situation, you create situations where the quiet finance genius does not speak up and is instead relegated to do PowerPoint graphics. And even better than assessing your team once a project starts, do it before by defining clear roles with concrete, qualitative and quantifiable metrics for what future success looks like in those roles. Then filter candidates relentlessly against these metrics, considering the methodology in Who. Next, once you have your team, you need to ensure you continue to have the right people and address one of the most common weaknesses of leaders—failing to remove underperformers. In this scenario, imagine you had to operate with 50% of your team. If so, who would you keep? Honing your team is critical. In fact, according to the authors the single most important thing you can do as a leader is to hire the right people and match them to the right priorities. And this is the most common failure of leaders with fewer than 14% of leaders excelling at this.
Last comes relationships, and this is where the strength of many leaders lie. 47% of leaders excel at building relationships and fellowship amongst the team. This includes keeping the team coordinated, committed, and challenged. In this area, it’s about your ability to engage the team to emotionally tap into the work, create common experiences, and overcommunicate. And by overcommunicating—assume it’ll take someone hearing a message at least 20x before it sinks in.
The authors then provide a simple exercise where you and your team can rank from one to ten how well you are performing in your P, W, and R. Multiplying those three together you get your PWR Score and can benchmark how well you are performing as a leader. Leaders that achieve 729 or above out of a possible 1,000 are twice as likely to succeed in their career than an average leader, and 20 times more likely to succeed than those that score in the bottom ten percent.
So whether you are a manager of a team, a leader of an organization, or a voter looking to elect our next leadership think about PWR, and remember the who matters the most.
Source: Smart, Geoff, Randy Street, and Alan Foster. Power Score. New York, Ballantine Books, 2015.
Note, all quoted statistics in the article comes from this book.
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