Three Questions Every Leader Should Ask

Robin Ryde explains in Custom-Built Leadership that there are three questions that will bring clarity to your leadership mandate. They will provide “a personal manifesto for how you will lead. They open up and provide entry to a place where your priorities, personal preferences and ambitions can be properly examined.”

How Long Have I Got? This is a question not just about tenure, but the legacy you wish to leave. This will help you to determine your priorities. Your time frame will determine your pace and help you to determine what skills and resources will be of the greatest value to you.

How Grand Is My Plan? This question has to do with your ambition and encompasses three key considerations: your appetite for taking on varying degrees of ambition, your freedom to operate, and your inheritance (it’s rare that we inherit positions of leadership as a clean slate). Timing will certainly affect your level of ambition.

How Broadly Will I Lead? As a leader you will certainly operate within a system. The question is how far will you travel into the domains that affect your issues that stand outside your formal locus of influence.

Ryde pragmatically discusses each of these questions and candidly describes the rewards and pitfalls of the kinds of decisions we make. This book is an important read for anyone taking on a new leadership task or looking to recalibrate the task they are currently in.

Ryde writes, “A long-term leadership strategy requires a very different approach to a short-term campaign. Leadership on a grand scale calls upon a different set of skills to a business-as-usual plan. Leaders who wish to influence a broad range of people and institutions need to develop different qualities to those with a narrower engagement plan.”

Posted by Michael McKinney at 01:56 AM
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