Leadership Essence — Clarity, Execution & Culture

Good leaders can have vastly different leadership styles, while with some similarities. You might ask what is the definition of a good leader, I’ll simplify the definition of a good leader here as someone good at inspiring the team and delivering results.

So, is there some common leadership capabilities that define a good leader? You might already have Amazon’s Leadership Principleat hand already, there are also tons of discussions in HBR on leadership capabilities, for example this is an interesting one: In Praise of the Incomplete Leader. I want to push the discussion further, are there 2–3 capabilities that stands out and shared among good leaders? are there 2–3 capabilities a leader should always prioritize before getting to anything else? And it is that 2–3 leadership capabilities you can’t really hire to fill the gap, and we are not talking about general skills like communication.

You might ask, why are you insisting on max 3 items on this. While, a good leader prioritizes tasks for the team, apparently they also have to prioritize tasks for themselves as well. There could be dozens of bullet points to look into, but strategically, there might be just 2–3 items that covers the most important capabilities.

I argue the 3 capabilities are: clarity, execution and culture. This is very similar to the 3C framework from Satya’s Hit Refresh book on the ingredients needed for innovation. I argue clarity & culture are key to any team leaders, many other aspects can also roll up to these 3 bullet points.

Clarity

Clarity includes vision & prioritization. The leader is crystal clear on his purpose and what really matters.

A good leader brings in vision for the team. She dreams big while grounded with measures, she articulates the vision to the team, and she passionately sells the vision to hire the best talents and convinces VC or leadership to invest.

A good leader ruthlessly prioritizes. She understands what really matters for the team to achieve the vision, she can articulate the prioritization to the team. The team comprehends the prioritization, works on very few things and get them done really well.

Execution

Good leaders understand the context in the team and partners well, and use the right management strategy to execute the vision.

Apparently vision itself doesn’t produce a good product, you need a matching execution capability. We can use the disk drive example from Innovatiors’ Dilemma. There are multiple ways to face disruptive technologies, you can: (1) ignore the emerging diruptive technologies since the majority of your existing customers don’t need it; (2) fight against the board of directors and finance, pivot the company to invest in the direction your believe in, even though it only serves a niche of the market at the moment; (3) build a resource independent org that matches the size of the market to invest in technology.

(1) leads to your company being obsolete. Both (2) and (3) can work, but (3) can save you a lot of troubles with the boards. Execution clearly makes a difference here. A good leaders need necessary execution capabilities to get shit done.

Culture

Good leaders build robust team culture, and they immerse the team within the culture. They are intentional on culture building, culture is practiced everyday everywhere in the team: hiring/promo, firing, discussions, processes etc.

That’s it?!

What about everything else? Like technical mastery, product sense, sensemaking, innovation, etc.? They are all important, but they can either be delegated or they’re part of clarity/culture in different scenarios. Let’s go through them.

Technical Mastery & Product Sense

By technical mastery I mean deep domain expertise in your competitive field. Having technical mastery in the team in absolutely a must-have, especially if technology is a competition basis for your company/team.

There are two reasons why this is not explicitly called out in previous arguments. Let’s assume your run a SaaS company selling technologies, for example, Snowflakes, selling data analytic platforms in the cloud.

1. You vision comes from your technical mastery. As you are building a technology company, in order to articulate the vision, you have to gain an understanding of the future technology trends. For example: on-prem vs cloud vs hybrid, data warehouse vs data lake vs lakehouse etc. Technical mastery is pre-requisite of your vision, so you can steer your company in the right direction, no obsolete in a few years.
2. You can delegate the technical mastery to your technical partner or CTO. Technocal mastery is composed of two areas as well: (1) technical insights to prediect how the data analystic market will evolve; (2) technical implementation to fulfill the technical vision. It is like interface and implementation, the implementation part can totally be delegated out.

In summary, technical mastery can be folded into vision and proper delegation.

Sensemaking & Innovation

There are also aspects of sensemaking (understand the context in the organization and partners), and innovation (not to be disrupted). I’d rope these into clarity and execution. If you have clarity on your “customers’ jobs to be done”, and have a good execution skill, your organization can thrive with spontaneous innovations.