A day with a leadership coach

Three characteristics of a high-performing leader

He kept returning to three. They are not a list of traits to admire — they are things the leader actually does, every week, to make a team move.

• Provide clarity. What is the task. What good looks like. What is not the task.
• Make people visualise the task in detail — then make them accountable. The visualisation has to come first. Accountability without a clear picture is just pressure.
• Create interest. Without interest, nothing moves. The leader's job is to make the work mean something to the person doing it.

The best salesperson has one gift

Not the best pitch. Not the best closer. Not the loudest in the room.

Everything else — product knowledge, persuasion, follow-up — sits on top of that one capacity. Without it, the rest is noise.

Keep the right people in the right jobs

This is the work that most organisations skip. It takes real rethinking — and he was clear that it cannot be done from a spreadsheet. Three moves matter:

1. Adjust the job content of some roles. The job as written is rarely the job as needed.
2. Set clear KPIs. If the person cannot tell you what good looks like in numbers, the role isn't designed yet.
3. Provide training. The gap between the person and the role is rarely a character flaw; usually it is a skill flaw, and skill flaws are fixable.

And then the part most organisations get wrong: assign the accountability — who will do what and when — and follow through. Follow-through is not micromanagement. It is the leader keeping the system honest.

Goal-setting: inside-out vs outside-in

Most organisations set goals by looking at what they already do and pushing it forward by some percentage. He called this inside-out — or rear-view goal setting. You are driving by looking at where you have been.

The alternative is outside-in, future-back. You start from where the world is going — where the industry, the customer, the technology will be — and you work backwards from that to what you must do now.

The practice he offered was concrete:

• Draw the map of the industry as it is. Honestly.
• Then redraw the map — as it could be, or as you intend to change it.

The gap between the two maps is the actual strategic agenda.

What it takes for people to excel

One line, and it was the line that stayed with me longest:

Not the role. The person. If the person is growing, the role will grow with them. If the person has stopped growing, no role design will save it.