The Alphabet of Leadership

By Maxwell Ubah

Leadership happens only when there are purposeful and positive interactions between the leader and the led that drive high performance.

Covering 26 chapters with several lessons, concepts, and principles, The Alphabet of Leadership is the most comprehensive and complete leadership text for improving your personal and group’s leadersh

• Language: English
• Publisher: CMD
• Release date: Apr 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781952046445

Maxwell Ubah

Dr Maxwell Ubah, CEO of Strategy House, is a highly-sought-after leadership coach in Nigeria and a leading leadership voice in Africa. He is a graduate of the Sloan Fellows programme in Leadership and Strategy from the London Business School and a member of the Strategic Planning Society, UK. He has helped thousands of executives at different stages in their personal leadership journey to improve their personal leadership effectiveness. Using simple but powerful concepts, Dr Ubah helps individuals to identify their leadership challenges and discover steps to overcome them with powerful and transformational results. A former graduate of Medicine and Surgery from the College of Medicine, University of Lagos, Dr Ubah left medicine for banking to understand the business world and how organisations function. Today he combines his medical, banking, and business backgrounds and acts as an organisational transformation consultant to help organisations diagnose and overcome their significant people and leadership challenges. He has conducted leadership trainings for different reputable organisations across different sectors in Nigeria with excellent ratings for his programmes. He has also facilitated leadership trainings in Ghana, Senegal, Zambia, Kenya, Cameroun, and Côte d’Ivoire. He is the author of the personal effectiveness book The Difference: What Successful People Know and Do That Ordinary People Do Not (available at Amazon and other leading online bookstores). He can be reached at: Twitter: @maxubah Facebook: Maxwell Ubah email: [e-mail]. Mobile: [phone]

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Copyright © 2020 by Dr. Maxwell Ubah

All right reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodies in critical article and reviews.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The reviews expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

To Tony O. Elumelu, CON,

V isionary, mentor, and leader; for believing in me and for giving me the platform to share some of the lessons contained in this book with his team in Nigeria and across Africa.

Contents

Acknowledgements

How to Get the Best from This Book

Introduction

Leadership: A Working Definition

Chapter 1: Attitude: It’s Not about You!

Chapter 2: Bold Dreams

Chapter 3: Communicate! Communicate! Communicate!

Chapter 4: Decisiveness

Chapter 5: Engage Your Constituents

Chapter 6: Focus on Excellence in Execution

Chapter 7: Grow Your People

Chapter 8: Hold Your People Accountable for Results

Chapter 9: Inspire Hope and Confidence

Chapter 10: Judge Performance Accurately

Chapter 11: Knowledge-Seeking and Dissemination

Chapter 12: Love What You Do, Whom You Do It with, and Whom You Do It For

Chapter 13: Motivate Your Employees

Chapter 14: Never Lose Faith or Give Up

Chapter 15: Open the Channels of Communication Up, Down, and Across

Chapter 16: Pursue Organisational Renewal and Positive Change

Chapter 17: Question-Based Leadership

Chapter 18: Run Effective Meetings

Chapter 19: Service-Oriented Leadership

Chapter 20: Trust Improves the Bottom Line

Chapter 21: Unify Constituents around a Common Cause

Chapter 22: Value, More Value, and Better Value

Chapter 23: Wonders Happen in the Atmosphere of Positive Stretch and Fair Rewards

Chapter 24: X-Ray Success and Failures and Institutionalised Lessons

Chapter 25: You Are Your First Follower!

Chapter 26: Zealous about Your Legacy

About the Author

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

T here are no self-made people. We are successful because of the input and contributions of many other people in our lives. I am blessed to have a wonderful spouse, family, siblings, friends, coaches, and mentors in my life. Who I am today is a reflection of the collective input of these people in my life. If I am successful today, it is because of them. And to them, I remain forever grateful.

For this particular work, I am indebted to the following people:

• My beautiful wife, IJ, for her patience, sacrifice, understanding, and contributions as I tried to wrestle with some of the concepts and write them down. Thank you for being the sounding board for some of the ideas and for making useful suggestions.

• My mentors, life coaches, and teachers whose ideologies have shaped the person I am today. Of special note is the late Peter F. Drucker, the man who made me fall in love with management sciences even as a medical student and fuelled my desire to become a management consultant.

• The executives who took time out of their busy schedules to read sections of the manuscript and for making useful comments and amendments: Kennedy Uzoka, Akin Akinfemiwa, Rasheed Olaoluwa, Emeke E. Iweriebor, Valentine Ozigbo, Obi Ibekwe, Achi Innocent, Isaac Mwige, Chike Onyia, Ify Chukwuma, Samuel Nwanze, Chuks Onwuyali, Stanley Eluwa, and Abayomi Orungbe.

How to Get the Best from This Book

W ow! You have taken a major step in developing your leadership effectiveness by buying this book. See this book as your companion and refer to it constantly. Different chapters deal with different aspects of the leadership challenge you will come across, and this book covers most of the leadership challenges you will ever face.

To get the best from this book, I recommend you do the following things:

Focus on the chapters relevant to your current leadership challenges. Read every chapter but go back and focus on the chapters relevant to your immediate needs. Reread them until you internalise the concepts. Remember that repetition is said to be the mother of skill. Don’t expect to master the concepts in one read. I have read through the manuscript several times, and even though I wrote the book, I keep learning new things each time I read it again.

Put them into practice. I actually developed a concept I call the twenty-four-hour rule. The twenty-four-hour rule states that any concept you don’t put into practice within twenty-four hours will be forgotten. Like birds, they will fly away. So as you read, try to apply something within twenty-four hours. The goal of reading this book is not to add to the statistics that you have read another leadership book or read your first leadership book. Your goal is to make progress, and progress is different from speed. Speed is how fast you are travelling; progress is travelling in the right direction. And the right direction in reading is making changes and applying the concepts. So slow down. Read this book slowly and make a conscious effort to apply the concepts.

• Teach others also. One of the greatest ways to improve your leadership effectiveness is to teach others also about the concepts. Teaching others does two things for you. First, it helps you remember what you have learnt, and second, it helps others to hold you accountable. Remembering what you have learnt and allowing people to hold you accountable are the elixir to dramatically improve your leadership effectiveness.

• Form a leadership club. Gather like-minded people and begin a discussion. Start a conversation about The Alphabet of Leadership. Share the concepts on Facebook and Twitter. Harness the power of social capital, like the AA group, to make transformational changes. Take each chapter once a week, read and discuss it as a group, then make commitments to apply the concepts each week, and report back.

• Buy a copy for someone. Spread the good news. The answer to the significant problems facing the world today lies at the heart of leadership. To overcome our significant problems today requires a new way of thinking about leadership. You can start a revolution by buying enough copies for your friends and leaders.

• Get in touch. Should you require to contact me, you can reach me at Twitter: @maxwellubah, email: [e-mail]

Introduction

T oday’s leaders face increasing pressures to deliver on business results, perhaps more than at any other time in history. The times we are in call for a new understanding of and approach to leadership and for a new breed of leaders. With the plethora of problems being faced by today’s leaders—from the pressures of globalisation to cut-throat competitive challenges, from intense regulatory supervision with deregulation of industries to technological advancements and breakthroughs, from the rise of sophisticated and more discerning consumers and aggressive investors to changes in the composition of today’s workforce, from social unrest to the rise of terrorist groups, etc.—today’s leaders cannot afford to lead in the same way as before. These challenges are a double-edged sword—they will strike death blows to industries, markets, and companies and, in their wake, birth new industries, markets, and companies. Old paradigms, methods, and models will give way to the new. Those who remain glued to the past will wake up to find out that their successes have been confined to the ash heap of history.

In spite of these challenges, the what of leadership—the ability to achieve results through people—remains constant; it is the how of leadership that’s changing. Today’s leaders must rise up to the occasion and meet the challenges of their current realities and achieve breakthrough results by adapting to a new how. Critical to the new how of leadership is how to lead people and teams to greatness—how to harness the creative energies of the workforce to achieve breakthrough results. Leadership is a relationship between the leader and the led, and no definition of leadership would be complete without taking into consideration the relationship between the leader and the led, the nature and quality of the interactions between both parties, and the ultimate outcome of such interactions. Some interactions lead to motivated employees who go out and achieve breakthrough results, while others sap the creative energies of their people and thus fail to lift the lid on performance. Leadership happens only when there are purposeful and positive interactions between the leader and the led that drive high performance. Every interaction between the leader and the led must be purposeful (goal-oriented) and positive (inspiring) and must drive performance for leadership to take place. Purposeful and positive interactions between the leader and the led are the means of leadership; high performance is the end or goal of leadership.

Leadership has been defined variously by different authors and business leaders, making congruence in definition difficult. From my years of personal study, reading different books on leadership, and with a Sloan Masters in leadership and strategy from London Business School, I believe all the definitions of leadership share four things in common, which I call the four Ps of leadership (I coined it after the four Ps of marketing)—the person of the leader, the people he is leading (his group, team, division, family, etc.), the process of leadership (motivating, influencing, inspiring, coaching, etc.), and the performance expected or achieved (the results or outcomes for which the leader is accountable for).

Figure P.1: The four Ps of leadership.

Different leadership books and authors focus on one aspect of the four Ps. Some deal with the character and credibility of the leader (person). Others deal with the team and the leader’s relationship with them (people). Others focus on what the leader does, like motivating people (process), and the rest on how the leader achieves results (performance). This book is different because it focuses on the four Ps as no treatment of leadership would be complete without taking a holistic picture of the four Ps. And every time a leader fails, if you look closely, you will find that at least one of the four Ps is missing—either in the person of the leader or in the people in the team or in the process of influencing and motivating people or in building a team or in the failure to achieve business outcomes or desired results. Either way, one or more of the puzzle pieces of the four Ps are missing in situations of leadership failure.

The concept of the four Ps is revolutionary as it provides a diagnostic tool for every leadership challenge you will encounter or have encountered. To make it simpler and memorable, I have distilled them into a mathematical formula that will be used throughout the book:

leadership = relationships × results

The relationships aspect of leadership deals with the person of the leader and the people he is leading. The results aspect deals with the performance expected, the end goal of the leadership interaction. Everything the leader does to build relationships and achieve results falls within the process aspect of leadership. That’s the what of leadership.

The how for each leader, however, varies. Some leaders focus first on results or performance and then harness the power of relationships or people to achieve the results, while others focus first on relationships in order to deliver results. Both are necessary, but while the specific strategy might be different for each leader, there are, however, some commonalities across different leadership functions, industries, and sectors. And to keep it simple but not simplistic, I have distilled the commonalities into twenty-six principles arranged in alphabetical order in this book I call The Alphabet of Leadership: The A–Z of Improving Your Leadership Effectiveness.

Although arranged in alphabetical order, you don’t necessarily have to start from letter A. Feel free to start from the chapter that addresses your immediate needs and go back to read the rest of the chapters. But do make sure to read all the chapters as they have been designed to help you improve your leadership effectiveness. See this as your leadership pill. Take one chapter daily or weekly and watch your leadership effectiveness dramatically improve. Or better still, take a chapter and pace yourself. The best way to derive maximum value from this book as I wrote earlier is to read the chapter, think of what the chapter means for you, make a decision to apply the principles of the chapter, practise them, and teach others also before moving on to the next chapter.

Because I am a leadership consultant to organisations and have been privileged to train thousands of professionals on leadership in different organisations and at different levels in Nigeria and across Africa, the leadership focus of this book bears an organisational slant as I believe that more leadership interactions happen in the context of organisations. My simplest definition of an organisation is, it’s a gathering of two or more people to achieve a specific goal. Therefore, the principles here can work for a small group of two people or a large organisation made up of thousands, and they can be applied in every context—family, community, school, business, state, and nation. Although leadership is not positional, this book will help both positional and non-positional leaders to improve their leadership effectiveness within the context of their organisational results, irrespective of the nature of their organisations—private, public, and non-profit. The masculine pronoun (he, his, him) is used for simplicity, but leadership is not gender-specific. Leadership or leading effectively is for everyone.

I’d love to hear from you. I hope this book will serve as the catalyst to give your own leadership potential the needed push and help you to improve on your leadership effectiveness—in your own unique way.

Leadership: A Working Definition

leadership = relationships × results

U sing the relationships-and-results dimension of leadership, we can easily identify three false leadership states—boss, friend, and stranger—as captured in the matrix below.

A boss focuses more on performance at the expense of the relational dimension of leadership. He can be counted upon to deliver on business results but will leave people burned out in the process. A friend focuses more on the relational dimension at the expense of results. You enjoy the company of a friend but won’t trust him with critical and sensitive organisational issues. A stranger does neither—does not build relationships or accomplish results. A leader, on the other hand, achieves results and drives performance through people. He harnesses the power of relationships to deliver outstanding results. He combines the attitude of a boss, relentlessly focusing on performance, with that of a friend, creating healthy collaborative relationships with his team. Consequently, a leader is more than a friend and more than a boss. He is also more than an individual contributor—one who achieves results by the force of his personality and the strength of his skills. He is a leader. He achieves results only through people, people who become better and more productive and more satisfied under his watch, people who will eventually call him their leader!

Chapter 1: Attitude: It’s Not about You!

Leadership begins with attitude. No title or position can make a true leader out of a man with a negative attitude.

I t’s not about you!

Michael is aggressive and very competitive by nature. He likes the spotlight and is not afraid of confronting problems or people headlong. Due to his aggressive nature, he can be counted upon to achieve business results. The challenge, however, is that Michael doesn’t care about people’s feelings in the process. He is impatient with people he considers slow learners or who do not see things from his perspective, and usually, it is either his way or the highway. He is a classic workplace bully. He has been promoted to the position of a branch manager. Will Michael make a good leader?

While ambition can guarantee personal success, it cannot guarantee effective leadership. Without ambition—the personal drive or desire for success—individuals cannot succeed, but without attitude (the right attitude), they cannot become effective leaders. We have established that leadership is ‘relationships × results’. The ambition necessary to achieve results is often at loggerheads with the qualities required to build the relationships necessary to sustain the results. So while Michael may possibly achieve results in the short to medium term, he will not achieve sustainable results in the long term unless he changes his attitude. The lesson is obvious—unrestrained ambition destroys!

All leaders are ambitious, but the focus of their ambitions is what separates great leaders from ordinary leaders. Great leaders are incredibly ambitious, but so are mediocre leaders. The difference is that great leaders are ambitious about their organisations. They have subsumed their personal ambitions for the greater good of their organisations and nations. Their ambitions can be seen through the eyes of their organisation’s success—build a world-class company, lead the market, achieve breakthrough results year-on-year, etc. To these leaders, leadership is about building enduring institutions that will consistently outperform their competitors. They take a long-term view of leadership and leading.

Both Andrew Grove of Intel and Steve Jobs of Apple Inc. commented that their greatest achievements were in building a strong company. Andrew Grove, in an interview with Nightly Business Report co-anchor Susie Gharib, said, ‘My proudest accomplishment has been to contribute to the creation of a company that has helped put a billion PCs into people’s hands.’¹ Was he ambitious? Of course! But his ambition was channelled into building a great company—attitude. For ordinary leaders, however, their ambitions are for their own personal gain—their own personal benefits at the expense of their institutions and the people they are meant to serve. To these second group of leaders, life and leadership are all about them, just like it is with Michael.

In his bestselling book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap. . . and Others Don’t, Jim Collins discovered and wrote about this same concept. Writing about what he termed level 5 leadership, the first ingredient necessary to transform a good company to a great company, he noted, ‘Level 5 leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company. It’s not that Level 5 leaders have no ego or self-interest. Indeed, they are incredibly ambitious—but their ambition is first and foremost