What is it about leadership that is so difficult to implement? If we were all machines it would be very easy: just say what to do and it gets done, no matter the time, no matter how you said it nor to whom you say it or didn’t say it to…

The reality is that it is not easy.  It’s undoubtedly the greatest challenge all business owners have. To add to it, there is a lot of BS out there regarding leadership: books, courses, workshops, motivational speeches. Don’t get me wrong, some of them are awesome, emotional, even inspirational. What they don’t do is teach how to implement it in day-to-day life. They talk about leadership; seldom do they teach actual skills. To be more precise, no one teaches the skills and the behavior required for true leadership. Why? Because at the core leadership is composed by a set of soft skills and behaviors not easily taught nor learned. They require a great depth of personal human formation which takes time, dedication, personal experience and guidance.

Business owners say they want leaders in key positions in their companies because that will result in better management, but the reality is that the process to find them is flawed. When companies put individuals in key positions of leadership through hiring, promotion, inheritance…, the reality is that most don’t evaluate the skills leaders must have (such as emotional intelligence, empathy, open-mindedness, teamwork, dialogue…), we obsess on the technical skills they have to get the job done, to make more profits or choose someone just because it’s family.  Those hiring must directly correlate to technical skills they can easily measure. Soft skills are completely forgotten or just not really considered with the same due diligence as they should because they are not easily measurable.

On the other hand, companies spend a lot of time looking at the monetary/commercial aspect of the business. They manage it meticulously. They analyze it repeatedly. They understand it. They try to forecast it.  But who does all this?  What element allows all of this to happen? It’s people. When you look at how much companies spend on people versus how much they spend on the asset side of the business, there is a huge imbalance.

It’s sad to see so many great companies, large and small, with management teams that have decades of experience but poor leadership skills. Although many CEOs know the importance of leadership training, 57% of them don’t believe their training investments will bear fruit. If you look at the business community today, the amount of investment in leadership is not going up; it’s going down. Yet the biggest issue companies face continues to be leadership, not technical skill set.

All of this results in poor management. Why? Because managers have authority, and maybe know-how, but not leadership. This can lead to large employee turnover and weak morale, lack of clear direction, vision and alignment of employee-company goals, poor company culture, even poorly made decisions, etc.

McKinsey & Company found that leaders in organizations with high-quality leadership teams typically displayed 4 of 20 behaviors which account for 89% of leadership effectiveness. It’s true that different business situations often require different styles of leadership. However, these are the four consistent behaviors high-performing leaders display:

• Solving problems effectively: they have a good process that precedes decision making, this is the key to making good decisions.
• Operating with a strong results orientation: they excel in communicating a vision, setting objectives and following through to achieve results. Strong emphasize on the importance of efficiency and productivity and prioritize the highest-value work.
• Seeking different perspectives: they base their decisions on sound analysis and avoid the many biases to which decisions are prone. They monitor trends affecting the organization, grasp changes in the environment, encourage employees to contribute ideas that could improve performance, accurately differentiate between important and unimportant issues.
• Supporting others: they show a sincere interest in those around them to build trust, to inspire others and help colleagues to overcome challenges. They prevent the energy of employees from dissipating into internal conflict and align them with company priorities.

Are any of these key behaviors part of your management team’s and key leaders’ daily M.O.?

Business owners should not forget that a business’ capital is not only financial, it is also human. A business owner’s priority, no matter the size of their business, should be not only to financial capital, meticulously examining their cash flow and P&L daily but also to their human capital, development of their management team, which is their key leadership circle.

More and more business owners are aware that as part of their overall strategy they need to focus more on three key human-capital priorities to guarantee the long-term success of their business and management teams:

1. Leadership management development
2. Strategic succession planning and implementation
3. Talent acquisition and retention

As Alain Bejjani, CEO of Majid Al Futtaim Group (with 40,000+ employees in 15 countries), said, “If we want to succeed in business, we have to succeed in our people agenda.”