How to Unlock a Company’s Full Potential: Develop Outstanding Leaders at All Organizational Layers

Leaders are the driving force of any business, and it is essential to the success of any business that leadership roles are clearly defined at each layer of the organization. This provides clarity and focus on the results to be achieved at each layer.

A successful company should define the responsibilities of all leadership roles at all layers of the organization, from the individual employee (who leads themselves) to the CEO. Each layer of an organization has its own responsibilities, and it is important to have a clear line of sight from the individual employee all the way up to the CEO to ensure that goals are aligned.

Creating a Performance Architecture for Successful Leadership: Achieving Desired Outcomes at Every Level

In these times of constant transformation, it is essential for all leaders in a company to be equipped with the ability to manage new challenges. Without a performance architecture that defines exactly what each leader at each layer is expected to do for the company, change and transformation will take the company by surprise with their unpredictability.

To foster successful leadership, an organization must have a performance architecture that precisely describes the outcomes that must be achieved at each layer of the organization.

To understand the implications of this, we need to determine the amount of organizational layers in our company. Then we need to determine the responsibilities of the leaders of each layer.

Let’s do an example:

In our company, there are six distinct roles: individual contributor, team leader, manager, director, vice president, and CEO. Each of these roles carries its own responsibilities, ranging from creating individual objectives to fostering the leadership abilities of other people.

We start with some simplified definitions of responsibilities:

• An individual contributor’s primary responsibility is to complete assigned tasks within the given timeline.
• A team leader delegates tasks in order to ensure that the team is working efficiently and productively.
• A manager ensures that operations run smoothly and provides guidance and direction to the teams that report to him or her.

The real business world is more complex, but the simple example we started with is sufficient to illustrate the point:

Each of our roles has clearly defined responsibilities for the results to be achieved.

From my experience in the corporate world, I’ve noticed that leaders are frequently taking on duties that aren’t relevant to their level of authority, and therefore not achieving the outcome they should be. As an example, a manager may assign and observe minor tasks (the typical micromanagement approach). This often transpires when a leader has been promoted but is still stuck in their former role in the lower layer. They did not make the transition to their current layer.

This is where leadership development comes in, but leadership development that is tailored to an individual layer of your organization.

Unlock Your Company’s Maximum Potential by Investing in Layer-Specific Leadership Development

Is this idea out of step with an agile corporate culture? Absolutely not – it’s more essential than ever. In a setup with tribes, squads, and chapters, it is essential to define the goals to be accomplished and the responsibilities of the various leaders.

In summary, by providing layer-specific leadership development programs and specific coaching for individual leaders as needed, companies with a performance architecture can realize their maximum potential and attain their objectives that will ensure the success of their organization.