Table of Contents

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Introduction

1: Welcome to the Work of Leaders

The VAE Model

How This Book Is Organized

PART 1: Vision

2: Introduction to Crafting a Vision

What Exactly Do We Mean by Vision?

The Importance of Crafting a Vision

Vision at All Levels

3: Crafting a Vision Through Exploration

Vision > Exploration > Remaining Open

Strategies for Remaining Open

Vision > Exploration > Prioritizing the Big Picture

Strategies for Prioritizing the Big Picture

4: Crafting a Vision Through Boldness

Vision > Boldness > Being Adventurous

Strategies for Being Adventurous

Vision > Boldness > Speaking Out

Strategies for Speaking Out

5: Crafting a Vision Through Testing Assumptions

Vision > Testing Assumptions > Seeking Counsel

Strategies for Seeking Counsel

Vision > Testing Assumptions > Exploring Implications

Strategies for Exploring Implications

6: Summary of Crafting a Vision

Doing the Work: Crafting the Vision

PART 2: Alignment

7: Introduction to Building Alignment

What Exactly Do We Mean by Alignment?

The Importance of Building Alignment

Alignment at All Levels

8: Building Alignment Through Clarity

Alignment > Clarity > Explaining Rationale

Strategies for Explaining Rationale

Alignment > Clarity > Structuring Messages

Strategies for Structuring Messages

9: Building Alignment Through Dialogue

Alignment > Dialogue > Exchanging Perspectives

Strategies for Exchanging Perspectives

Alignment > Dialogue > Being Receptive

Strategies for Being Receptive

10: Building Alignment Through Inspiration

Alignment > Inspiration > Being Expressive

Strategies for Being Expressive

Alignment > Inspiration > Being Encouraging

Strategies for Being Encouraging

11: Summary of Building Alignment

Doing the Work: Building Alignment

PART 3: Execution

12: Introduction to Championing Execution

What Exactly Do We Mean by Execution?

The Importance of Championing Execution

Execution at All Levels

13: Championing Execution Through Momentum

Execution > Momentum > Being Driven

Strategies for Being Driven

Execution > Momentum > Initiating Action

Strategies for Initiating Action

14: Championing Execution Through Structure

Execution > Structure > Providing a Plan

Strategies for Providing a Plan

Execution > Structure > Analyzing In-Depth

Strategies for Analyzing In-Depth

15: Championing Execution Through Feedback

Execution > Feedback > Addressing Problems

Strategies for Addressing Problems

Execution > Feedback > Offering Praise

Strategies for Offering Praise

16: Summary of Championing Execution

Doing the Work: Championing Execution

Afterword

Composite Vignette 1: Individual Coaching

Composite Vignette 2: Group Facilitation

Composite Vignette 3: Succession Planning

Appendix A: The Development of the Work of Leaders VAE Model

Foundation

Development

Refinement

The Result: Vae Model

Appendix B: Feedback Outtakes

References

Resources

About Inscape Publishing

About the Authors

Index

Cover design by Wiley

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Straw, Julie

The work of leaders : how vision, alignment, and execution will change the way you lead / Julie Straw, Mark Scullard, Susie Kukkonen, Barry Davis. – First edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-118-63653-4 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-66351-6 (ebk.); ISBN 978-1-118-66341-7 (ebk.); ISBN 978-1-118-66352-3 (ebk.)

1. Leadership. 2. Management. I. Title.

HD57.7.S78155 2013

658.4′092–dc23

2013005850

To the 1,800 members of the Inscape Network who give so generously of your time and talents to us and to your clients. Your partnership adds immeasurable value and helps make our work more meaningful.

First and foremost, this book exists because of our relationships with a vast network of outstanding professional trainers, coaches, and consultants—the best of the best in the field of training and development. They have been our mentors and teachers, as well as our customers and business partners. Several Inscape Distributors were particularly generous in reviewing the manuscript for this book under tight timelines. In particular, Sue Hammond went above and beyond by providing us with astute developmental editing. We also want to thank Sue Bowlby, Jean Campana, Steve Dion, Chris Ewing, Sharon Ferraro, Joleen Goronkin, Murray Janewski, Sarah Kalicki-Nakamura, Lynne Kaplan, Janice Maffei, Jill McGillen, Leilani Poland, Cindy Sakai, Joanne Spigner, Rick Stamm, and Sal Silvester for taking the time to read the manuscript and provide helpful feedback. In addition, several of our Distributors shared client stories with us, including Carol Horner, Lisa Satawa, and Deb Terry. Finally, we are grateful to Keith Ayers, Anne Minton, Barb Stennes, and Roger Wenschlag for all the conversations that helped give context to this work.

We are also indebted to the clients of Distributors who used Work of Leaders and shared their experiences with us. Nathaniel Conn and Jeff Dahms were especially generous with their time, and their reflections on the VAE model helped bring our story to life. Indirectly, thousands of classroom learners supported our efforts by choosing to participate in our research after completing one of our assessments. Without them, we’d still be collecting data!

The authors are also lucky enough to work in an organization with talented individuals and high-functioning teams, and this project would not have been possible without everyone at Inscape Publishing. Special thanks to Rachel Broviak for facing the perils of putting our early ideas on paper, as well as for her flair with research and finding the right quotes. Jidana James helped us gather compelling stories and insightful feedback from many Inscape Distributors and their clients. Laurie Diethelm, Tracy LaChance, and Jeff Rauchbauer were willing to drop what they were doing to get the pieces that we needed when we needed them. The Inscape IT team, especially Don Hudson and Brad Meyer, made it possible for us to collect and retrieve the invaluable research data we use throughout the book. And our fearless leader, Jeffrey Sugerman, encouraged us to take on this challenge.

Special thanks to John Capecci for lending his expertise in effective storytelling. His thoughtful influence is woven throughout the book. We also are indebted to Emma Wilhelm, who created early drafts of our Work of Leaders story. Her work reviewing and consolidating all of the literature laid the groundwork for this book. And thanks to Aaron Rosell, who tackled the task of sorting and analyzing tens of thousands of comments with courage and humor.

We also want to thank our friends and colleagues at Wiley, especially Lisa Shannon and Cedric Crocker, whose efforts brought Inscape into the Wiley fold and allowed us to benefit from the resources of this well-respected, high-quality publisher. Matt Davis, our editor, has helped us navigate the path from concept to completion, and his flexibility and optimism have been much appreciated.

Finally, each of the authors would like to acknowledge other people in our lives who have made this project possible.

Julie would like to thank Jim Straw for his unwavering love and his support for her career ambitions, and Krystl, Kim, and Andy, for always understanding the balance of career and family. She also recognizes that, without the support of her Inscape team, especially Clare McInerney Stephenson, she would not have been able to pursue her passion for this book project.

Mark would like to thank his loving wife and feisty best friend, both of whom are Jill Scullard. His parents Julie and Mike Scullard also deserve an award for ensuring that he survived his adolescence. Thank you, guys. Finally, he needs to thank his daughter Eowyn, whose smile brings him joy and awe each and every morning.

Susie would like to thank Jukka Kukkonen for his love, encouragement, and good humor, and especially for getting up at 4:30 in the morning to help her draft a particularly difficult paragraph. She also owes a debt of gratitude to Barry Davis and Ruth Walbon for lunchtime runs that helped to keep her on an even keel. Finally, thanks to Sonja and Henri for reminding her to laugh.

Barry would like to thank Shari Davis for being his true companion and showing him love every day. He thanks Carly, Noah, and Sydney for signing up to be his kids. And finally, he thanks all of his colleagues at Inscape and his friends and teachers in the Inscape Network. Without you, this work that he loves would not be possible.

Communication, Collaboration, Accountability, Inclusion and Leadership. These are the five cornerstone beliefs of the National Collegiate Athletic Association that drive the work we do on behalf of the 360,000 student-athletes, coaches, and athletics administrators we serve on a daily basis. As Executive Vice President of Membership and Student-Athlete Affairs as well as Chief Inclusion Officer, I am often asked to speak about leadership, a subject that is fundamental to my job. To stay up-to-date, I continuously study the latest thinking and research and selectively employ new ideas that resonate with me in my leadership development work. When I was introduced to the elegant model described by authors Straw, Scullard, Kukkonen, and Davis in The Work of Leaders, I was delighted! I was immediately able to identify tools and strategies that will help me to assist others to drive innovation and leverage their unique talents.

Since 1996, the NCAA has been inviting exceptional student-athletes to attend leadership conferences and forums in which they learn about their own styles and how to build more effective relationships with others. I am proud to say that we often hear that the programs we offer are life-changing. Just this week, I received an email from a student-athlete who said, “Everything I’ve done with the NCAA and being a former student-athlete has proven to be invaluable professionally; I am eternally indebted to all of those who were a part of the process!” Recently, we introduced the three-part model of Vision, Alignment, and Execution (VAE) in the work we do with many of these student-athletes, as well as athletics professionals, administrators within higher education, and NCAA staff members.

If you spend time with this book and the VAE model, you will discover powerful tools to propel you and your teams forward. These three words—Vision, Alignment, and Execution—state a powerful truth. They are the foundation for this new playbook on leadership: one that promises to help us become more effective as we work to develop leaders who are positive agents of change. Because of what this book has taught me, I am better prepared to engage others in constructive and deliberative dialogue on more effectively developing successful leaders.

Dr. Bernard W. Franklin,

Executive Vice President/Chief Inclusion Officer, NCAA

Learning to be a leader is like learning to be a great athlete, musician, or artist. It’s a capability that develops over time, through trial and error, hard work, and practice. Leadership is learned by doing, not simply by taking notes in a classroom.

Stanford Graduate School of Business

Consider these two scenarios.

Scenario One: The CEO sends out an email announcing the company’s ambitious new sales goals and then takes the afternoon off to go golfing. The employees are left with no clear process, no strategy, and no delegation of responsibilities. Without direction or rationale, everyone is worried about making mistakes. There are whisper-sessions along the rows of cubicles. When something goes wrong, the finger-pointing begins. Trust and morale are low—and this is reflected not only in their ability to execute, but also in interactions with their customers.

Scenario Two: At the quarterly all-company meeting, the CEO stands before a simple map of the company’s strategy. “These are the three platforms that lead to our success,” he says. “If your work isn’t related to or supporting one of these things, then please stop what you’re doing—because you’re not working on the right stuff.” Since clearly establishing this vision, the company has been aligned—from the CFO who tracks the top line, to the customer-facing people who work on the front lines. All are focused on what they need to do to execute the vision and all are invested in the process. They openly collaborate, challenge one another, and celebrate accomplishments as they reach milestones.

We’re guessing that if you’ve worked in business long enough, it’s likely that there’s something familiar to you in both of these scenarios. In our case, the four of us have worked together for the last ten years at Inscape Publishing, the company described in both scenarios. Of course we feel incredibly fortunate to be the company in Scenario Two today; to work in a stimulating and rewarding environment, to have built strong relationships with our colleagues, and to benefit from the rewards of excellent leadership. But like most companies, the fortunes of our company have waxed and waned more than once in our nearly forty-year history.

Inscape was founded in 1974, and by the end of the 1980s we were firmly established as the pioneer of DiSC^®-based corporate training and assessment solutions. We had built a global network of thousands of independent training and development consultants who used our assessments and related training programs. We grew rapidly through the 1990s, but by 2000 the company faced two challenges. First, it was becoming clear that our strategy for going to market, based on paper-based assessments, was outmoded and not sustainable. What our customers wanted and needed were more advanced assessments that harnessed the power of the internet. We were, in essence, resting on our laurels: building and selling variations of a successful product rather than partnering with our customers to understand how their businesses and processes worked and could be adapted to a changing world.

Second, the leadership style adopted by Inscape’s senior executives was also outmoded. Leadership was “caretaking” rather than proactive, both at the level of business strategy and in how we worked together. The effects could be felt throughout the company.

Executives held the strategy and vision close to their vests, so employees had little sense of direction, investment, or motivation. Individuals and business areas were in silos, which created uncoordinated efforts, not to mention internal competition for resources and rewards. We were a “meeting culture,” with sluggish processes and unclear responsibilities. It wasn’t pleasant or productive.

After the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, the company’s ownership knew it was in trouble and named Jeffrey Sugerman as the new CEO. Jeffrey launched the transformation of Inscape from the first scenario we described to the second. He led the effort to help us define a new vision for our company, one that embraced the changes in the marketplace and placed our valued customers (our Distributors) at the center of our efforts. Jeffrey brought a style of leadership to Inscape that demanded a clearly communicated vision that all could understand and own; ground rules and expectations of how we would conduct ourselves, both internally and with our customers and vendors; and a positive work environment built upon openness, collaboration, and rigor. The transformation was not always comfortable or easy, but its effect was felt throughout the company as the culture changed gradually from one of mistrust to trust, from silos to collaboration, from fatigue to execution.

In short, Inscape made its way back to relevance in the marketplace through an almost textbook example of exemplary leadership. Together, we have seen first-hand how crafting a vision, building alignment around that vision, and championing the execution of that vision can transform a culture and save a company. We have also seen how essential these principles are not only to our CEO, but to the work of every leader at Inscape.

In 2007 we began our own in-depth study of what leaders at other companies do to help their organizations succeed. And after more than five years of research and development, we had boiled that work down to the same three things Jeffrey brought to Inscape—a passion and commitment to crafting a vision, building alignment, and championing execution.

In 2011, we began offering a leadership development program we call the Work of Leaders to help leaders at all levels, in all kinds of organizations, apply the simple concepts of vision, alignment, and execution (VAE) to their work. The program is available through our network of independent trainers and consultants, and the feedback we have received from them and their clients about the program has been overwhelmingly positive. The Work of Leaders is quickly becoming one of the most successful programs in the history of our company. With this book, our goal is to take the classroom experience that has been so valuable for thousands of leaders and introduce the VAE model to an even broader audience.

We are pleased to introduce The Work of Leaders to you and wish you success wherever you and your organization may be in your own leadership journey.

Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.

—Warren Bennis

Across from our Minneapolis office is a restaurant called The Super Moon Buffet. The word “super,” however, is an almost coquettish understatement. It is massive. The theme is technically Chinese, but the ambition here goes way beyond what any single country could dream up. They’ve got sushi, French fries, ham, fresh fruit, roast duck, dim sum, apple pie, barbecued spare ribs, stir-fried frog legs, baby octopus, pork chitterlings. It’s overwhelming. Each person has to come to terms with the Super Moon in his or her own way. Some people avoid paralysis by simply diving into the first dish that strikes them. Some rely on advanced mapping software. When we take out-of-towners there for lunch, they walk out the door and ask, “What just happened?”

This experience is not completely unlike sorting through the selection of leadership books on Amazon. It is massive, but not necessarily in a bad way. Just like the buffet, of course, there’s some junk in there. (What is a chitterling anyway?) But mostly there are really brilliant, helpful, and practical insights. People who’ve spent a lifetime leading or studying leadership are willing to share their wisdom with the rest of us. The problem, however, is organizing and making sense out of all this information. To say the least, it’s overwhelming.

We work for a company that’s in the learning business. It’s our job to make sure that people not only have access to information, but that they can actually absorb it. So we had a major task ahead of us when we set out to develop our own leadership training program about six years ago—make this wealth of leadership insight accessible to all kinds of people in all kinds of organizations. The key word here is “accessible.”

Now, we know that people want to access this information, and we’re not just talking about the people at the top. We asked more than 5,900 training participants in which skill areas they would voluntarily spend their time attending training. Table 1.1 shows the top five results.

Not surprisingly, people are most willing to attend training that has direct, concrete applications in their world—“technical knowledge related to my job.” It’s good to know how to do your job. But look at what’s a close second with 81 percent: “Leadership skills.” In fact, when we asked people what training would greatly increase their effectiveness at work, the number one answer, by far, was also leadership skills. More than half of the workers in our sample said they’ve read one or more leadership books in the past two years. Managers are more interested in attending leadership training than management training. People feel that there’s a lot to learn—and there is.

But again, this information has to be accessible if it’s going to make a real difference in anyone’s work. So that’s what we set out to do—make leadership accessible. In essence, our goal was to study all of the most respected thinking and research on leadership, focusing on common themes and major breakthroughs, and follow up with our own research, gaining clarification on the most promising ideas.

The first stage, our literature review, was, frankly, exhausting. Over the course of about five years, we worked with a team of people finding the best thinking on leadership. Now, it turns out that finding the best thinking also means reading a lot of the less-than-best thinking. But that’s okay; nobody got hurt.

We also realized that if we wanted to come up with a truly comprehensive view of leadership, we would have to include writers from a broad range of perspectives:

The goal was to pull out a simple structure that still captured the richness within all of this thinking. That is, what are the biggest, most important ideas?

Then we moved on to verify and build on what we had learned. We wanted clarification on these big, important ideas. How do they hold up under scrutiny? How do they apply to the work leaders do on a daily basis? As it turns out, we were in a highly enviable position to take on this sort of inquiry. We work for an organization that, among other things, helps hundreds of thousands of managers and leaders every year understand the relationship between their personalities and their work. We have as many as 3,500 people a day completing one of our online assessments, many of whom are gracious enough to help us out with our leadership research.

As a result, we can study the attitudes and behaviors of literally thousands of leaders every week. Collecting data of this magnitude usually takes months. Extensive resources are needed. Undergraduate psychology majors can be locked in rooms for weeks until they tabulate piles of surveys. Our setup, on the other hand, gave us the opportunity to quickly test hypotheses, look at the results, then test some more. We could pit grand theories and conventional wisdom against the real work that leaders do, every day. Ultimately, the VAE model in this book was created in ten stages of development, as shown in Table 1.2. You can read in more depth about this process and our research in Appendix A. And so we’re happy to say that, throughout this book, we are able to provide you with the results from dozens of studies that we have conducted over the past five years with hundreds of thousands of participants. Given all of this information, however, we were sure not to lose sight of our end goal—to create a framework of leadership that was accessible and actionable for everyone—not just the CEOs or the Ph.D.s. We wanted to take the mystery out of leadership and spell out a leader’s responsibilities as clearly as possible. The result was a leadership model of Vision, Alignment, and Execution—what we call the VAE model.