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A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
This week’s topic, Team Excellence is raft with challenges to understand and quantify. As marketing executives to improve team excellence, we must understand leadership as a concept and how to employ it in our day to day. This week I discuss a few ways to understand and quantify leadership to help you as a marketing leader start that journey.
Want to understand how you perceive leadership as a concept? We’ve developed the Leadership Conceptualizer to help you discover your definition of leadership.
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3 Keys to Improve Leadership in Your GTM Team
Over the past 50 years there have been over 60 methodologies created to define the concept of leadership. Understanding leadership - and being able to quantify it - is paramount to improve the way your team goes to market and improve its impact on business outcomes. Great leadership is key to team excellence.
For starters, the definition of leadership I use is:
“Leadership is a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal.”
Source: Leadership: Theory and Practice, Seventh Edition, by Peter G Northouse.
By describing it as such we are able to understand leadership is:
A process - Not solely a trait, behavior, or skill
An action of influence - the affect a leader has on followers, and
A defined goal - A measurable outcome
This 3 dimensional framework allows us to evaluate individuals and create a common vocabulary for individual evaluation of leadership; and roadmap towards optimized leadership performance.
Key #1: Identify Your Leaders
There are many approaches to understand leadership, but what is key is to subscribe to a particular approach and begin using that approach in your day-to-day operations. Collaborate with human resources or outsource to leadership development partner to identify and determine which approach is right for your organization’s culture. Then, build the necessary infrastructure to constantly audit your team, develop a roadmap of improvement and measure the outcome of achieving that improvement.
Finally, use your selected approach’s methodology to identify the leaders that exist within your team. Both appointed leaders (a.k.a., managers) and emergent leaders (i.e., those that are the most influential with a group that may not necessarily have the “job title”). It is this group that will be the change makers and the ones you will rely on to realize your GTM vision and desired business outcomes.
Key #2: Quantify Leadership in Your Team
Most leadership approaches have a methodology to quantify leadership. That is, a scoring or evaluation method that will help you identify not only the type of leaders you have, but also their capacity for leadership growth. It’s not a yes / no proposition, but rather the degree to which that individual has the either traits, skills, behaviors or tools, that make that individual an influencer of others in the group.
Create a regular rhythm of business that you have your team and yourself complete various questionnaires, etc. to help quantify the leadership talent you have on your team. At MSFT, we did this annually as part of our employee review process. As a manager, it helped me understand who was an emerging leader, who was in the wrong role, and helped guide the alignment of MBOs (management business objectives) to the individual marketer and the team’s objectives. A very powerful exercise that improves eSAT, for sure.
Key #3: Build Your Roadmap to Leadership Excellence
Building a leadership excellence roadmap is paramount for your go to market team excellence. Now that you have identified and quantified leadership for your organization, chart the roadmap for improvement - including yourself. This is not just taking what your selected approach says as gospel, but customizing the methodologies of that approach to your company’s people, processes and culture. You must build a quantifiable improvement plan to drive your team excellence forward.
Your leadership roadmap should include - at minimum - inclusion in new team member onboarding; education on chosen approach, definitions, etc.; and the general path for individual leadership improvement. By the way, not all team members will want to become leaders, and that’s okay. So make sure your roadmap includes an “off ramp” for those who aren’t passionate about becoming the next crop of leaders for your organization.
Want to understand how you perceive leadership as a concept? We’ve developed the Leadership Conceptualizer to help you discover your definition of leadership.
What are your thoughts on ways to improving leadership in your go to market team? Let me know your thoughts in the Buzz community.
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