Albert Camus, the French author and philosopher, once wrote that we are the sum of our choices. This is certainly true for business leaders. No matter how great a visionary or communicator you may be as a business leader, in the end you will be judged by the choices you make. It is the grasping of the big, thorny issues and opportunities that will define your legacy.
Take Barack Obama. I have recently noticed more newspaper articles saying he is too passive as a leader and needs to get more involved in the tough, detailed choices across his three key political issues: the economy, US military interventions and healthcare.
Of course, President Obama will always be on the receiving end of criticism. It goes with the territory. But whether you agree with critics’ views or not, these articles are a reminder that leadership is much more than rhetorical scene-setting.
It is the big decisions you make on setting your key goals, on how you allocate your scarce resources, on your senior management appointments, on your priorities for action and on the opportunities you choose to pursue, that will shape how you will be remembered.
These decisions often have no right or wrong answers. They are instead a balance between reward and risk. Luck certainly plays a part. But so, too, do these three controllable factors:
- Establishing and following a set of clear business principles. I was recently talking to a senior director in retail who told me that he is asked to make decisions on so many issues, and faced by so many choices, that he hardly knows what his own business beliefs are. As a result he feels that he is simply surviving from day-to-day, rather than driving a forward a clear agenda.
- Separating objectives from tactics. It is unlikely that your solutions to any big undertaking will be 100 per cent right first time. Give yourself room for manoeuvre and allow yourself to make mid-course corrections in pursuit of your objectives.But don’t keep changing your objectives alongside your tactics. That only serves to create confusion and cynicism across the organisation.
- Balancing commitment and objectivity. I’ve mentioned before the dangers of becoming so committed to a particular strategy that you become blind to its likely failure. Taking an inquiry-based, rather than an advocacy approach, as Harvard professor David Garvin calls it, allows you to move from viewing decision-making as a process of persuasion and lobbying to one of testing and evaluation. An inquiry-led process also enables you to foster the constructive conflict that ultimately generates greater commitment to action.
(Pic: sara.atkins cc2.0)
