Leadership Worthy: How Leaders Are Made

By Bill Dellecker

You don’t have to be a natural leader to learn to be an effective one

​Are you an aspiring leader who is eager to advance your career and make a positive difference in your organization and your life? Or a current leader who wants to improve your performance and the results you can achieve through others? Leadership Worthy is packed with valuable information to help propel you to that next level. In it, business and leadership expert Bill Dellecker distills more than forty years of knowledge from his own leadership journey to explain how great leadership can be learned and to give you the practical guidance to learn it.

Leadership Worthy takes you through a logical progression of leadership development, including:

• Knowing yourself so that you can more effectively connect with others
• Understanding the three pillars of leadership
• Developing essential leadership skills
• Applying those skills in dynamic, real-world situations

Leadership Worthy’s concepts have been proven to produce leadership that supports a positive, healthy work environment in which managers, employees, and the bottom line all do well. Following its guidance can make you truly leadership worthy!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group
• Release date: Sep 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9781632995537

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

There’s a natural order to life, at least most aspects of it. When crucial relationships are ignored or turned around, desired outcomes are fleeting, and success is elusive. We cannot control many life events, but we can consistently improve our odds of success by understanding the order of critical relationships:

•Respect before trust

•Risk before reward

•Practice before perfection

•Thought before action

•Listening before speaking

•Looking before leaping

•Purpose before sacrifice

•Care before love

This is also true of leadership, where it’s vital to know self before leadership.

I’m not suggesting that you should place yourself before others but rather that you should know who you are and what you believe; along with heightened self-awareness, it becomes possible to understand and connect with others. It’s from here that genuine leadership will emerge and grow.

Tom Morris is a renowned modern-day philosopher and teacher of timeless principles. In his life-changing book True Success, he writes, Great leadership is not dictatorial. It is inspirational, organizational, and conversational. It involves shared values, and it involves shared resources.¹

Tom explains how great leadership and true success are built on these seven factors, as a condition precedent to achieving your potential:

•A conception of what we want

•A confidence to see us through

•A concentration on what it takes

•A consistency in what we do

•A commitment of emotion

•A character of high quality

•A capacity to enjoy

To become an effective leader begins here, by reflecting deeply and truly knowing who you are. The maxim Know thyself was the first of three reportedly inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in ancient Greece. (The other two were Nothing to excess and Surety brings ruin.) Socrates is attributed as stating, To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom. To know thyself is also the foundation of leadership.

On this sturdy foundation stand three essential pillars of leadership for constructing a business that will stand the test of time. We explore the fundamentals of putting people first and purpose second and valuing details always within these pages.

With those elements in place, applying a set of essential skills will enable your business to take shape and grow. Your ability to look and listen, set the tone, communicate in seven genres, measure what matters, and build and sustain momentum will combine to create your rhythm and cadence of leadership.

And along the way, adapting for change and growth will be essential for your business to remain relevant and to create lasting value. We explore adapting to change, what to do when something goes wrong, why growth matters, and how the decision to act will shape your future.

I offer you these insights for living a life worth leading, lifted from forty-plus years of personal, real-world leadership experience growing businesses from start-up to industry leader. I share stories of my experiences and the leadership lessons those experiences have taught me, many of them from the agricultural and horticultural industries, where I’ve spent most of my career. I learned early on that I’m a grower at heart; I have a green thumb for plants, people, and leadership.

My desire is to help you grow your leadership abilities, thereby accelerating and enhancing your own personal quest to become an exceptional leader.

PART I

THREE PILLARS OF LEADERSHIP

When business is going well, is it because you’re a great leader? It can be tempting to think so, but you’d be wrong. Success isn’t about you.

Leadership is about vision and strategic direction. Your leadership journey begins with attracting and engaging the right people who will generate desired results, then providing them with the resources, information, and training they need. Next, it’s about turning those people loose to collaborate, pay attention to myriad details, and consistently produce desired outcomes for clients. Their success in doing so is not because you’re a great leader; it’s because they are inspired people working toward shared goals in an environment of mutual respect and trust.

Alternately, if there are failures in execution, that could well be because you’re not a great leader. Leaders must own the outcomes. But, you might argue, how can success be attributed to others and yet failure belong to you? That’s because leaders hold a unique position of responsibility. Taking credit for the accomplishments of others isn’t leadership; it’s opportunism. Pushing blame onto team members isn’t leadership either; it’s lack of accountability.

If business isn’t tracking according to plan, the first place to look is in the mirror. The next place to look is at the people who are responsible for accomplishing the work and creating value for clients and stakeholders. Over time, it’s those people who make it happen. If you have the right people, who embrace executing the mission with dedication and commitment, is it because you’re a great leader? Indeed, that aspect could potentially be true, if the winning team is one you’ve personally recruited and nurtured.

Let’s explore the three pillars of leadership together.

1

THE FIRST PILLAR: PEOPLE FIRST

I learned a few things about business as an undergraduate in college, plus a few more in graduate school. The combined curriculum of finance, accounting, economics, marketing, management, statistics, organization theory, business law, communications, and other courses all provided me with a useful foundation for effective business analysis and decision-making. It wasn’t until I dove headfirst into the working world, however, that I learned the most important lesson of all: The most critical decisions involve people—those we hire and those with whom we associate. People first.

As a leader, your most important skills to master all involve people. If you’re an army of one, you have only yourself to lead—and that can be challenging enough! But the moment you hire someone else to join your company or your team, you’ve just raised the stakes massively. I’ve seen too many hiring decisions made on the fly—based on gut feelings coupled with an urgent need for more workers.

If a hiring decision goes wrong, the costs don’t end with that person’s departure. The damage done to a business—as well as to key relationships—can have a very long tail. Yet a busy business owner or manager may spend far more time comparing features and benefits of that new service truck, computer system, or nifty new tech gear than recruiting, evaluating, hiring, onboarding, and developing team members. An effective leader understands that his or her time investment should be the other way around.

There are two levels to leadership decision-making when hiring people:

1. The personal qualities a successful candidate must possess . Think of these as values in action, and clearly define them for every role; together they compose the mindset of the individual.

2. The core competencies and skills the position requires for accomplishing the work. Unfortunately, hiring managers often consider only skill level when making a hiring decision, because skills are top of mind relating to the work that must get done. Collectively, these make up the skillset of the individual.

If a candidate doesn’t meet personal quality standards, it doesn’t matter what he or she might actually know how to do.

HIRING A-PLAYERS

Hiring top talent shouldn’t be a vague exercise; it should be one of your most focused activities as a leader. Finding clarity around who you’re seeking and learning how to select the right person out of a candidate pool are essential skills. Fortunately, there is a logical and structured recruitment and assessment process you can follow to make better hiring decisions. Who: The A Method for Hiring is an exceptional book by Geoff Smart and Randy Street that demystifies the process and provides a set of practical tools that you can customize to your own business situation. This quotation sums up exactly why getting who right is so crucial:

In business, you are who you hire. Hire C Players, and you will always lose to the competition. Hire B Players, and you might do okay, but you will never break out. Hire A Players, and life gets very interesting no matter what you are pursuing.¹

Use your mindset and skillset and develop core interview questions (which we discuss shortly) to create a scorecard; Smart and Street state emphatically that scorecards are the guardians of your culture.² The interview and assessment process is not a personality contest; it’s a mindset and skillset assessment. You should be able to rank responses to each and every question or scenario on a scale of one to ten and compare them across candidates.

By using structured questions and following a consistent assessment approach, you’ll develop pattern recognition around qualities that are predictors of success. While no two people are exactly the same, which is what makes the hiring process so interesting (and so risky if done haphazardly), a consistent process will reveal things about the candidate that you would not otherwise learn.

One of the key approaches that I picked up via the who method is to take a chronological walk-through of a person’s career.³ You don’t need to go into ancient history for a candidate who has a career spanning many years, but you should go back a minimum of ten to as many as twenty years ago, depending on how much career movement there has been. People are more mobile than they used to be, and each career move is a chapter of their work life; collectively, they tell a career story. When screening potential candidates, start with the earliest job within the time frame and work your way up to the most recent. Smart and Street suggest asking these five insightful questions:

1. What were you hired to do?

2. What accomplishments are you most proud of?

3. What were some low points during that job?

4. Who were the people you worked with? (If interviewing managers, also ask, How would you rate the team you inherited?)

5. Why did you leave that job? ⁴

Most candidates will offer more than you might imagine. Among the insights, the final question will reveal the cause of their departure. Were they pulled into a new opportunity as a result of success, or were they pushed out due to performance or other issues? Presuming the candidate makes it to the next step, conducting a successful, position-focused interview is dependent on the quality of your questions.

ASKING INSIGHTFUL QUESTIONS

The quality of your interview questions is directly proportional to the depth of insights you’ll gain into what your candidates value, how they think and solve problems, and what they’ve accomplished. Without thoughtful planning before conducting a formal interview, the event becomes more of a random conversation and can lead down many rabbit trails. Your goal is to get to the essence of what truly matters for the position you are seeking to fill.

In larger companies, the human resources department might be helping to advertise for, screen, and present candidates. However they may come to you, as the hiring manager and a business unit leader, it is squarely your responsibility to do the focused questioning that will enable you to assess and effectively rate a pool of candidates. Having a set of structured questions is a good place to start. The order you go through them may vary, and you’ll likely add specific ones according to the individual and position, but the objective is to touch all the key topics and dig deeper into those when the answers warrant it. Shallow questions will yield shallow answers.

The following is a sample list of questions that I like to use when interviewing managerial candidates who have been prescreened as potential A-players according to key criteria:

1. Who were the key influences in your early years? What were you known for back then?

2. What is your proudest professional accomplishment?

3. Describe the qualities of a company you’d like to join.

4. What interests you most about this opportunity?

a. Why do you believe you’d be a good fit?

b. What are the top three keys to success in this position?

5. What drives you?

6. What is the most important factor to you in making a career move?

7. How would your current boss describe you? What about the prior one?

8. Which aspects of this position most inspire you? Which least inspire you?

9. Discuss your

a. Leadership style

b. Goal-setting and assessment process

c. Team development approach

10. Describe your experience with integrated business and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. What key metrics did you track? And what did you do with the information?

11. Please tell me more about this particular item from your résumé to help me understand it better.

12. What haven’t I asked that you’d like to share with me? ( You’d be surprised at the response, or lack of one, to this question! )

Pick, choose, and refine these questions to fit your specific position and suit your culture. Create a reference set for each position. In addition, I’ve found both behavioral/situational questions and role-playing to be especially enlightening in certain