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. 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: 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. When an organization creates a compelling set of leadership expectations that is framed as a leadership contract, many terrific benefits emerge: 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. 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. 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. 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: 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: 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. 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: 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. 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: 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.” 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: 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. 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. 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:Leadership Expectations in Action—the Amazon Story
The Benefits of Having a Simple, Clear, and Inspiring Leadership Contract
The Failure Path to Avoid
Create a Clear Set of Leadership Expectations
Step 1: Use Your Business Context and Strategy to Identify Leadership Expectations
Step 2: Create a Draft Leadership Contract
Step 3: Validate and Finalize Your Leadership Contract
Step 4: Cascade Your Leadership Contract to All Your Leaders
How Cisco Cascaded Their Leadership Expectations at Scale
Step 5: Make It Live in Your Organization
A Company-Specific Leadership Contract in Action
Final Thoughts
Notes