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What separates exceptional leaders from the rest?
Most executives understand leadership as a responsibility. But the best leaders I work with see it differently.
They view leadership as SERVICE – ie taking action to create more value for others. More than that, they understand that their impact depends on two critical factors: Whether their actions are genuinely VALUED by their people and how quickly they can improve and adapt to meeting changing needs and desires.
That’s because yesterday’s solutions become today’s baseline; today’s excellence becomes tomorrow’s standard, what worked this quarter may not work next quarter.
The leaders who consistently drive extraordinary results are constantly looking for ways to serve better and create more value for their team, their customers, and their organization.
Learn more in this clip of Ron’s interview with Ranjini Manian on the Championship Woman podcast.
And be sure to catch the full conversation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRVvTbKLbUI
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Below is an Autogenerated Transcript
Let’s use those six levels of service to talk about what is excellence.
Certainly, if you’re at the level called expected, that’s a baseline. If you go below that and you don’t serve someone or provide someone with what they expect from prior conversations, or maybe you have a contract or job responsibilities, then you’re not creating value. You’re actually degrading value or even destroying value. So you don’t really want to go below the level of expected, which doesn’t mean “I did what was expected of me with my procedures and my process.” No, no, no. It means did you do what the other party expected you to do?
But if you get to the next step up, which is called desired, and you serve someone the way they liked it, the way they hoped for, the way they prefer, well, you’re going to get a very different reputation as a champion woman leader, for example. In other words, you know, to adapt your style with certain people because they like it short and sweet, make it quick. But then there’s other people or teams where they really appreciate having the opportunity to connect a little bit emotionally first or explain the whole thing. Okay, that that’s a leader’s sensitivity to understand what does the other party desire.
Now, once you know what somebody prefers, you could start to think more creatively and come up with a next step that they didn’t even ask for or expect. And if you do it and they like it, it’s like getting a little gift. So, we call that surprising. That doesn’t mean that in every situation for every organization, customer, client, colleague, whatever it may be, or family member, that you need to go around as a woman and say, “Well, to be excellent, I have to do surprising, surprising, surprising.” That’s not sustainable. Ideally, you serve other people the way they want, they appreciate, desired.
You hold as an excellent minimum for yourself that you’re going to do what was expected. There was an underlying human promise there to take care of one another. And it’s totally okay to focus your improvement efforts on specific situations, recipients of your service, colleagues, internal issues, and say that’s the one I’m going to find the next step up. And let the other ones be where they are. Keeping in mind the stairs are always slipping down. So if you’re at the expected level, you can’t just leave it there and not also review because otherwise someone else may have stepped up in that area, and by default your normal practice will drop down to just basic.
