Business ‘Know-Hows’
There’s something seriously wrong with the way we think about business leadership.
We spend so much time debating the exact set of personality traits our leaders should have that we miss the most important thing: the know-how of running a business. What difference does it make if a leader can rile up the troops if the direction is fundamentally wrong? Being a business leader is not a matter of having a commanding presence or being able to make great presentations that excite an audience. It is about making good decisions and taking sound actions that get the organization to deliver results in the short term while strengthening the business in the long run. What we really want and need in our leaders is the capability to make the right decisions and take the right actions in key areas of the business. That’s what author Ram Charan calls know-how, and it isn’t something you’re born with.
1.) Positioning and repositioning the business to make money.
Finding a central idea for the business that meets customer demands and delivers the fundamentals of moneymaking is key. In today’s tumultuous world, leaders may have to reposition a business four or five times in their career.
2.) Detecting the patterns of external change
You must be able to make sense out of the complexity of the world to put your business on the offensive.
3.) Managing the social system of your business
It’s imperative that you design the mechanisms that link actions and energy to business results, while enforcing the right behaviors.
4.) Judging people
Getting to the truth of a person and unleashing their natural talents is vital. This is how leaders expand an organization’s capacity.
5.) Molding a team of leaders
It takes true skill to get high-powered, high-ego people to work as a team.
6.) Setting goals
Finding the right balance between realism and reach in setting the organization’s destination is more important than you think. Many leaders set goals by looking in the rearview mirror.
7.) Determining priorities
You need to define a clear, specific pathway to an organization’s goals.
8.) Managing non-market forces
Finally, it’s important to know how to deal with forces you don’t control.
Putting Know-How into Practice
To build your capability, choose one or two know-hows to focus on. Test yourself, make decisions, and reflect on where you went right or wrong. Try to enlist your boss or colleagues to give you feedback as well, and then test yourself again. If you keep practicing and reflecting on your actions and decisions, you’ll find that your know-how gradually improves. When you continue to refine your know-how throughout your career, you’ll reach a point where it becomes instinctive, and your judgment will be superb.
The Winning Combination
Great leaders — those who deliver results consistently over time — aren’t perfect human beings. But they have a winning combination of personality traits, thought processes, and know-hows. Any one of them would admit to having made mistakes throughout their career, but along the way, they took sandpaper to the rough edges of their personality, and learned to compensate for their inherent shortcomings. Most of them will describe experiences in which they expanded their range of thinking, learning to dig into more detail, to think more conceptually, or to broaden their lens, sometimes against their natural inclination.
