CHAPTER 11
Define and Embed Clear Leadership Expectations

When an organization defines a clear set of leadership expectations, it makes explicit the behaviors all leaders need to demonstrate. These desired behaviors, consistently evident, will create the desired leadership culture. I believe defining and reinforcing clear leadership expectations to be a primary obligation of the senior leaders of any organization. However, here’s the challenge. As we have already seen, my research reveals only about half of organizations do this consistently. Imagine for a moment what happens in a company when leadership expectations are not clear. There is a high degree of confusion, on the part of both leaders and employees. The leadership experience for employees is inconsistent. There is no mechanism to hold leaders accountable for their behavior.

Depending on how you look at this, it could be either a missed opportunity or an excellent chance to set your company apart from others. This chapter will help you understand your obligation to create, communicate, and embed a clear set of leadership expectations for your leaders.

Leadership Expectations in Action—the Amazon Story

Before we explore how to define and embed a clear set of leadership expectations in your organization, let’s look at a company that has done this with success—Amazon. Now, it’s important to state that their story is controversial. Not everyone supports Amazon’s unique culture. I share their story because they provide an example of a company that has been unrelenting in using clear leadership expectations to sustain its desired culture.

Let’s start back in August of 2015 when the company made headlines in the New York Times. An article ran that described the punishing pace at which the company operated, burning out many of its employees.1 Stories of employees crying at their desks, getting text messages from their bosses after midnight, or being criticized by co-workers for leaving to pick up their kids were featured. However, other employees celebrated the company’s intense, hard-core work ethic, for teaching them to excel and finding success in their careers.

When the story broke, many people vehemently condemned the company’s culture, arguing that no company should completely ignore the work-life balance needs of employees. However, others defended the company, saying this is what it takes to run a successful company in today’s hyper-competitive world. These voices argued that Amazon is an ambitious organization that sets the bar high for its employees. Not every employee can thrive in that climate, but the company succeeds because of its high standards. The debate over Amazon’s culture got so heated that Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO, weighed in to defend his company.2

As I reflected on the story at the time, I felt that something was missing in the entire debate. This demanding, even harsh environment did not emerge by accident. The company was always clear and transparent on its leadership expectations and the kind of culture they wanted to create. You can go to their corporate website to see their 14 leadership principles.3 When you do, you will learn of the company’s desire for their leaders to:

  • Be obsessed with the customer
  • Demonstrate ownership
  • Learn and be curious
  • Hire the best talent
  • Set high standards
  • Think big
  • Have a bias for action
  • Be frugal and accomplish more with less
  • Speak candidly
  • Be “vocally self-critical” even when doing so is embarrassing
  • Have the backbone to challenge one another
  • Have conviction
  • Be tenacious and not compromise “for the sake of social cohesion”
  • Deliver results

When I reviewed these leadership principles, I immediately saw how they could lead to the hard-driving leadership culture described in the New York Times article. However, this is precisely the leadership culture Amazon wanted to create. Some will find this type of culture exciting and will relish the chance to push themselves to achieve more and more. Others will find it a harsh and even punishing environment. Regardless, Amazon provides us with an example of the importance of setting clear leadership expectations and the role they play in establishing a strong culture. By making their desired leadership principles clear, Amazon has set its standard for how leaders are expected to behave. In many ways, Amazon’s leadership principles represent their leadership contract for the organization—this is what leaders must live up to every single day. When you get this right, there are many benefits. Now this type of leadership culture isn’t for everyone. However, it’s important to state that Amazon has been clear and transparent about what it expects from leaders and employees. In many ways, that’s the whole point of setting clear leadership expectations.

The Benefits of Having a Simple, Clear, and Inspiring Leadership Contract

When an organization creates a compelling set of leadership expectations that is framed as a leadership contract, many terrific benefits emerge:

  • Increases clarity and commitment. There is an immediate sense of clarity and commitment among your leaders. In turn, this enables them to demonstrate considerable excitement and passion for your company. It also strengthens their commitment to executing your strategic priorities.
  • Creates a more consistent leadership experience. A compelling set of leadership expectations creates a common language and way of thinking about leadership. Everyone knows what it means to be a leader in your company. As a result, you improve the leadership experience in your company, as you will see greater consistency in how leaders lead their employees and teams.
  • Establishes a unified culture. A leadership contract creates a more unified leadership culture and helps drive the engagement of your leaders. This is especially valuable if your organization is attempting to transform itself and needs to evolve toward a new culture. This benefit is also essential if your organization has completed a merger or acquisition, and now needs to establish a more harmonized leadership culture.
  • Puts a spotlight on unaccountable leaders. The leadership contract provides you with a mechanism to identify unaccountable leaders. It’s important to recognize that having a clear leadership contract will move some people in leadership roles to opt out. Once they see the heightened expectations, they will make a personal decision to step down from their leadership roles. Some will ask to go back to a technical position. Others may decide to leave your organization. In the end, this is a positive outcome because few organizations today can carry people in leadership roles who are not fully committed to being truly accountable.
  • Inspires aspiring leaders. Those employees aspiring to move into leadership roles in the future now have personal clarity as to what your organization expects. Many people struggle to understand what it really means to be a leader. Your leadership contract facilitates better career discussions and helps mentors and managers determine ways to support the growth and development of aspiring leaders.

Who wouldn’t want these benefits in an organization? Next, we will explore how to go about creating a leadership contract with a clear set of leadership expectations. However, before we do that, it’s essential to consider a potential failure path in doing this critical work.

The Failure Path to Avoid

Historically, many organizations have gone about setting clear leadership expectations by creating leadership competency models. However, clients I’ve worked with have not found this approach as valuable in today’s environment. The chief complaint is that traditional competency models are just too complicated. I’ve seen leadership competency models with up to 15 competencies, each defined and then further delineated into four different managerial levels. Another complaint is that the language used is often academic, sterile, and filled with jargon, which makes the model inaccessible and uninspiring to the intended audience—your leaders. As a result, many competency models end up sitting on a company server, never seeing the light of day. They are not living documents that leaders embrace or that the organization uses to set clear expectations and drive strong accountability.

Keep this in mind as you begin to create your set of leadership expectations; you must do it in a way that is simple, clear, and inspirational.

Create a Clear Set of Leadership Expectations

In this section, we will explore how to go about creating a clear set of leadership expectations for your organization. Essentially, you are creating a company-specific leadership contract. The steps outlined below are the same ones that my teams and I have used with countless organizations around the world. In this work, we generally partner with the CEO and CHRO. We also engage with the senior executive team and other senior leaders of the organization. Some clients also engage with their boards to gain their perspective. There are five steps to the overall process shown in Figure 11.1.

The figure shows a timeline illustrating five different steps to create a company-specific leadership contract. From left-to-right, the first step is labeled as “Use your business context and strategy to identify leadership expectations,” the second step as “Create draft leadership contract,” the third step as “Validate and finalize your leadership contract,” the fourth step as “Cascade your leadership contract to your leaders,” and the fifth step as “Make it live in your organization.”

Figure 11.1 The Five Steps to Create a Company-Specific Leadership Contract

Step 1: Use Your Business Context and Strategy to Identify Leadership Expectations

As we discussed earlier in the book, leadership is rooted in context. The specific business environment and strategic imperatives define what it means to be a leader in an organization. In The Leadership Contract Field Guide, I introduced an exercise that helps leaders gain clarity about their business context and define leadership expectations. The process to create a company-specific leadership contract follows the same approach:

  • Your business context. Begin with a good understanding of your emerging business environment—the emerging trends and drivers that are expected to impact your organization over the next three to five years.
  • Your business strategy. Review your business strategy and the strategic imperatives of your organization.
  • Your desired leadership expectations. Articulate what you expect from your leaders and how they will need to step up individually and collectively to successfully lead your organization.

Think about your emerging context and business environment over the next three to five years. Consider several macro trends such as economic, political, technology, industry, regulator, or social issues and specific industry-related trends. Next, determine any organizational challenges and opportunities you anticipate emerging. Thinking about these broad issues will give you a clear sense of your context. Shift your focus to identifying and confirming the strategic priorities and imperatives for your company. Based on these insights, you will begin to identify the specific ways that leaders will need to step up, individually and collectively, to help your organization be successful.

In our client work, we typically use a guided-interview approach, which gives us a robust understanding of how senior leaders are thinking about the business, the strategy, and leadership expectations. Here are the questions you can use within your organization. As you can see, the questions connect to the business context, the strategy, and then to defining the leadership expectations:

  1. What do you believe are the primary external opportunities and threats impacting the organization currently and over the next three to five years?
  2. What strategic priorities are critical to the organization’s success over the next three to five years?
  3. Describe the elements of the leadership culture you need in your company to effectively execute your business strategy and create enduring value.
  4. What aspects of this leadership culture currently exist in your organization? What aspects need to be made stronger?
  5. In what specific ways do your leaders need to step up now in their leadership roles and demonstrate real accountability?
  6. What specific behaviors will leaders need to demonstrate consistently across the organization?
  7. In what ways do your core values need to be reflected in our leadership expectations?
  8. What is the tone that this leadership contract needs to strike to gain the most traction with your leaders?
  9. In what ways must you roll out the leadership contract so that it is fully embraced by your leaders?
  10. What specific outcomes and measures (tangible and intangible) will demonstrate to you that leadership accountability within your organization has become stronger?

Once you have collected all your data, you will aggregate the themes you see across all the interviews. You’ll immediately be able to determine the degree of alignment that exists among your senior management. You will also start to see a story emerge regarding the leadership expectations for your leaders.

At this point, it will be helpful to integrate any data that you may have also gathered through the Leadership Accountability Audit (discussed in Chapter 10). Connecting the dots between the two sets of data will make your work more concrete and substantial.

Step 2: Create a Draft Leadership Contract

You now have what you need to start creating a draft leadership contract. In many ways, this second step is a blend of art and science. Here are some factors to consider as you start to create your company-specific leadership contract:

  • Identify a meaningful set of leadership expectations. In practice, I find that it’s best to identify the top five to seven leadership expectations. However, you should not be limited by this. Some companies have more. We have already seen that Amazon has 14. While my preference is to keep the number smaller, you will need to define what best works for your organization.
  • Leverage the four terms of the leadership contract. Many organizations use the four terms of the leadership contract as inspiration when they create their expectations for leaders. Some make the four terms explicitly prominent in their company’s leadership contract. Others use it merely to test out their leadership expectations to ensure that nothing substantial is left out.
  • Use direct and straightforward language. If the language used is complex, filled with jargon, or uninspiring, then leaders will not embrace your leadership contract. The key is to make the language of your leadership contract as accessible and user-friendly as possible, and not laden with jargon.
  • Articulate why the expectations matter. Define each leadership expectation and make it clear why it is essential to the organization. Tie everything back to your business context and strategy. You can cite why each expectation matters for the successful execution of the business strategy. You may also want to stress how the leadership expectations reinforce your company’s vision, mission, and core values. The more leaders see the leadership expectations tied to several existing priorities, the better it will be.
  • Decide on the tone and language of the leadership contract. Some companies want their leadership contract to be direct, to the point, and even a little hard-hitting. Some prefer a more inspirational tone. Others want it to be very informal. In the end, I have learned there is no one best approach—you must decide what will work for you, your leaders, and your culture. An organization can genuinely make the leadership contract its own. That’s what is great about the process. I’ve seen clients have success calling this their Leadership Contract. Others have used words like leadership expectations, leadership charter, leadership pledge, leadership principles, or leadership commitments. Again, decide what will work best for your organization. Regardless of the language and tone used, you are still creating clear expectations that act as a contract for your leaders.

Step 3: Validate and Finalize Your Leadership Contract

It’s essential to gain buy-in from the senior management team. You want the senior executive team feeling good about the leadership contract and understanding how it will be a primary driver of strong accountability among leaders. With support from your senior executive team in place, you may then want to engage other leaders in the organization. Consider conducting focus groups with a cross-section of other leaders from different levels and functions. This will help you drive broader buy-in, and ensure the tone and language of your leadership contract will resonate with other leaders.

Incorporate feedback from your focus groups and then finalize your leadership contract. Based on my experience, you will know that you got your leadership contract right when two emotions emerge at the same time when you read it. First, it immediately generates excitement. The statements are aspirational and inspirational. You instinctively want to strive to be a better leader. Second, it scares you a little because you now know you are being held accountable to a higher standard of leadership behavior.

Step 4: Cascade Your Leadership Contract to All Your Leaders

With your leadership contract complete, now the significant work begins: You need to cascade it across your organization. Here are some of the many strategies that I’ve seen implemented with a high degree of success:

  • Ensure the CEO and senior executives genuinely embrace it. The CEO and senior executive team must play a key role in rolling out the leadership contract. They must own it. If HR solely owns it, there is a risk your leaders won’t embrace it. It’s best if the CEO and the senior executive team are front and center in cascading the leadership contract. The head of human resources must also be visible. You want your leaders to know that the company’s most senior leaders are invested and are leading the way for everyone else. While they are doing this, it’s also important to reinforce that the leadership contract also applies to them. I’ve seen senior executives cascade a leadership contract in a way that communicates it’s for everyone else but them. They project an attitude that they have already arrived as leaders. I can tell you with all certainty that this is a failure path and will impede your efforts.
  • Focus on the extended leadership team. Many companies bring their top two to three levels of leaders together for a leadership forum, summit, or conference (the language differs from company to company). Typically, these meetings are intended to help educate leaders on the emerging business context and the strategic priorities of the organization. They are great venues to explain, discuss, and help leaders begin to internalize the new leadership expectations. You may, as many clients have done, ask your leaders to show their commitment by signing it.
  • Cascade to all other leaders. It’s crucial to then communicate the leadership contract more broadly to all leaders. Depending on the size of the organization, this can be done through a series of town hall sessions, video broadcasts, or by asking senior leaders to speak with their teams. For example, one client placed the expectation on all the senior leaders to communicate the leadership expectations to their teams. HR created a toolkit that allowed leaders to have a series of discussions over three months in regular standing team meetings. I like this strategy a lot, as it reinforces leadership accountability at a team level.

How Cisco Cascaded Their Leadership Expectations at Scale

One company that did an amazing job of cascading their new leadership expectations was Cisco. The worldwide leader in IT and networking created “Cisco Leaders Day,” and it represented the first time in the company’s history that they took all 8,000 leaders offline for a day. The purpose of the live event was to align everyone on what it means to be a leader at the company. The day included 38 hours of discussions, six broadcasts in as many time zones, and 18 in-person locations. In a recent LinkedIn post, Fran Katsoudas, Cisco’s EVP and Chief People Officer, explained that in this new era of work, where everything is changing at an exponential pace, how we communicate, engage, and show up to our teams has never been more important.4 She wrote: “At Cisco, we know our leaders play a crucial role and are accountable to both the business and their people… we know that making the investment in our leaders and enabling them to better lead their teams has a huge impact on how we drive our strategy and deliver amazing results for our partners, customers, and shareholders.” Using their own technology, the company engaged thousands of leaders around the world, in multiple time zones and at various levels. Katsoudas also said that their Leader Day was not an isolated event, but rather part of a journey. “Leading is about constant learning,” she said, “and this is our next step in that journey—resetting expectations and engaging with all leaders… When you’re a leader, you cannot opt out of leading.”

Step 5: Make It Live in Your Organization

Once you have created and cascaded your leadership contract, then you need to ensure you embed it and make it live within your organization. Here are some strategies to consider:

  • Recruitment and selection. Your leadership contract can be a valuable guide in recruiting external candidates coming into leadership positions. One client of mine told me that once they created their leadership contract, they included it with the offer letters to external candidates. They also included a copy of my book The Leadership Contract. The new leaders were instructed to read the book and carefully consider the company’s leadership contract. Then they were asked to sign it. They wanted these individuals to submit it along with their signed employment contracts. My client learned the value of helping new leaders joining their organization be absolutely clear on what it meant to be a leader in their company and the leadership expectations they would be held accountable for demonstrating day-to-day.
  • Compensation of leaders. I have many clients engage in discussions about how their leadership contract can be embedded in their compensation strategy for leaders. Increasingly, I see organizations balance their compensation formula between what leaders deliver (business outcomes, strategic priorities) and how they deliver (degree to which leaders are stepping up to the organization’s leadership contract). This is a worthwhile conversation to have in your own organization.
  • Performance and development conversations. Your leadership contract needs to be visible in performance discussions held with leaders. This provides an ideal way to give and solicit feedback, coach leaders, and reinforce their accountability.
  • Career development. Your leadership contract can be a meaningful way to help leaders understand what it really means to be a leader. Use this information to guide career discussions. As we’ve already explored in this book, focusing these conversations at critical leadership turning points is valuable for individuals. The clearer they become about what it means to be a leader, the more they will be able to make better leadership decisions about their careers.
  • Anchor in leadership development programs. Your leadership contract needs to be part of any development program that your leaders experience. If you partner with external vendors to design and deliver some of these programs, it’s vital they understand your leadership contract. Discuss the implications for program development, as they need to make specific links to your leadership contract in their program delivery.
  • Anchor your leadership contract in teams. Encourage all leaders of teams to leverage the leadership contract to help build truly accountable teams. We explored how to do this in Chapter 8. If teams can embrace the leadership contract to create clear expectations for the team, this will increase their commitment and clarity, while helping them deliver results.
  • Recognize and celebrate accountable leadership. Some organizations have used their leadership contract to create recognition and award programs. Many are peer-nominated. Leaders and teams who are seen to be living the leadership expectations and demonstrating real accountability receive recognition for their efforts and the example they set.
  • Evolve your contract as your company evolves. Many companies change their leadership contracts as their organizations grow and change. For example, one client refreshed their leadership contract when they introduced a new strategy, which changed the company’s direction. In turn, this required leaders to step up in new ways. Given the amount of change that companies face today, it’s prudent to review your leadership contract every few years. Make sure it is still relevant and that it is articulating the leadership expectations you need your leaders to live up to at an individual and collective level.

A Company-Specific Leadership Contract in Action

Over the years, I’ve seen many companies be deliberate in creating clear leadership expectations for their leaders. In this section, we will briefly explore an example of a company that created a clear set of expectations for their leaders by establishing a leadership contract.

The Adecco Group is one of the world’s largest human resources firms and a Fortune Global 500 company. It offers end-to-end career and HR advisory services that include staffing and recruitment, career transition, reskilling, and talent development, as well as HR outsourcing and consulting.

They began a strategic journey a few years back to reshape how the world works. The company has been reinventing how it delivers its core services to customers, while at the same time establishing new businesses in emerging growth areas like digital reskilling, the gig economy, and workforce transformation. All these crucial efforts focused on helping the company enable and empower their clients and candidates to embrace and succeed in the future of work, under the vision of Making the Future Work for Everyone.

This transformation required a strong focus on fostering the right culture. It all started with company CEO Alain Dehaze. In a personal interview,5 he shared with me his belief that “Everyone is a leader and has a responsibility to do the right thing and set an example for others.” He also stressed that culture starts at the top and, therefore, he and his leadership team must model the behaviors they expect from their colleagues around the world. With this perspective in place, Dehaze and the company’s executive committee created a company-specific leadership contract for their organization that makes explicit what the company expects of leaders. It also represents a commitment by each leader to personally be accountable for their performance and for driving the desired culture.

The process was inclusive and collaborative. Dehaze wanted to ensure that each senior executive felt a deep sense of ownership and that they were also personally invested in and connected to their leadership contract. In the case of The Adecco Group, their executive committee came together as one team to co-create their leadership contract. They spent an intensive day-long session that featured healthy debate and deep engagement. They defined and aligned around 10 leadership expectations that were rooted in the company’s core values of Passion, Entrepreneurship, Responsibility, Team Spirit, and Customer Centricity. The Adecco Group Leadership Contract is shown in Figure 11.2.

The figure shows a screenshot illustrating the Adecco Group leadership contract.

Figure 11.2 The Adecco Group Leadership Contract

Once they created their company-specific leadership contract, they started to cascade it to their leaders. They wanted to make sure they were fully embedding the leadership contract as the bedrock of the culture they aspired to create at the company, today and in the future.

The rollout strategy was a collaborative process that began by working with the extended leadership team or the top 300 leaders of the organization. During a three-day Global Leadership Conference in 2018, they engaged these leaders in a half-day workshop led by executive committee members. They created interactive workshops to bring The Adecco Group Leadership Contract to life. These sessions focused on three pillars of the leadership contract—what we value, how we act, and how we lead. After the workshops, all 300 leaders voluntarily signed The Adecco Group Leadership Contract. It was a powerful way to show their commitment to embrace the 10 leadership expectations and drive them forward into the rest of the company.

A toolkit was created to support the rollout deeper into the organization. Country managers were accountable for leading workshops within their regional leadership meetings. The workshops modeled the approach used at their 2018 Global Leadership Conference to ensure consistency and alignment.

Overall, the leaders at The Adecco Group have embraced the contract as a robust framework for positive culture creation. Across the company, leaders are personally bringing this to life in their work. Just six months after the launch of the leadership contract, close to one-third of their global workforce of 34,000 was already familiar with it. In 2018, the company was once again ranked in the top five global companies to work for by Fortune’s Great Places to Work® Survey. For Dehaze, these outcomes demonstrate the power of the cohesive leadership community that is required to drive a real cultural transformation.

Many leaders began to see an immediate impact. Many saw the leadership contract as an essential reminder of the shared commitment leaders have to the business and to one another. Other leaders find it helpful to guide their efforts to be mindful in daily interactions with employees. Other Adecco Group leaders are discovering that the leadership contract provides a valuable way to have conversations with future leaders about what it means to be a leader at the company. Others are excited to see the messages reflected in the company’s global vision, which communicates that they have one team working, growing, and succeeding together.

Through the entire process, the human resources team was a crucial partner in helping make the leadership contract part of the company’s DNA. The leadership expectations are part of the company’s performance management process and integrated into leadership development programs. In turn, this helps to inspire the right behaviors and show leaders how to embrace the expectations every day with their teams. All new leaders joining the company receive The Adecco Group Leadership Contract as part of their on-boarding, training, and development (such as mandatory ethics training and e-learning programs). New hires are expected to read, internalize, and sign the leadership contract.

The Adecco Group is undergoing an exciting transformation, and strong leadership has never been more critical. Their leadership contract defines the qualities that each leader needs to embody to ensure their current and future success.

Final Thoughts

Creating a company-specific leadership contract is a crucial strategy that companies must implement. As I shared, my global research reveals only about half of companies do this, which means there is a tremendous opportunity for companies that commit to this strategy. It helps bring clarity, inspires leaders to step up, and creates a more consistent leadership experience across an organization.

Gut Check for Leaders: Define Clear Leadership Expectations

As you think about the ideas in this chapter, reflect on your answers to the following Gut Check for Leaders questions:

  1. To what extent have you and your organization created a clear set of leadership expectations for your leaders?
  2. How might your organization benefit from having a company-specific leadership contract?
  3. Does your organization do an excellent job of embedding leadership expectations in the way it operates through several key human resources practices?
  4. Does your organization regularly review your leadership expectations to evolve them as your business context and strategy change?

Notes

  1. 1Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace,” New York Times, August 15, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling -big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html?module=inline.
  2. 2David Streitfeld and Jodi Kantor, “Jeff Bezos and Amazon Employees Join Debate Over Its Culture,” New York Times, August, 17, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/18/technology/amazon -bezos-workplace-management-practices.html?module=inline.
  3. 3Amazon, “Leadership Principles,” https://www.amazon.jobs/en /principles.
  4. 4Francine Katsoudas, “The Future of Leadership,” September 26, 2017, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/future-leadership-francine -katsoudas/.
  5. 5Personal interview with Alain Dehaze, June 2019.
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