The Clear Leader

Dip into most corporate or business-school curricula on leadership and you'll find a mind-numbing list of skills that the aspiring leader must master, from motivating to communicating to counseling to managing conflict, and on and on. Corporate America has vastly overcomplicated the role of a leader, says Marcus Buckingham, and that's a shame, because those disciplines, while important, fail to get to the heart of true leadership.

For the past two decades, Buckingham, 39, an engaging Cambridge-educated Brit, has had a front-row view of great leadership in action. He spent 17 years researching the world's best leaders and managers for the Gallup Organization. Drawing on Gallup's studies of 80,000 managers and 3 million employees, he wrote two best-sellers: First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths. Eighteen months ago, he decided to dig deeper. He left Gallup, and instead of focusing on the many, he set out to find the very few leaders who truly excelled. "I became more interested in the vividness of what excellence on the front line really looks like," he says. "By studying one person deeply, you might learn as much if not more than studying 10,000 broadly."

Buckingham sought out old-line outfits such as Walgreens, Best Buy, and Rio Tinto Borax -- companies that, lacking the advantages that come with product innovation, must gain an edge by mastering the disciplines of managing and leading. He distilled his key findings into a new book, due out this month: The One Thing You Need to Know...About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success (Free Press). Here, in his own words, Buckingham maps out the core concepts that mark superior leadership.

Leaders are Compelled by the Future

There's something unique and different that makes a leader, and it's not about creativity or courage or integrity. As important as they are, you can have those attributes and still fail to be a great leader. A leader's job is to rally people toward a better future. Leaders can't help but change the present, because the present isn't good enough. They succeed only when they find a way to make people excited by and confident in what comes next.

Four years ago, I was at a dinner with Bob Nardelli, who left General Electric after he was passed over for Jack Welch's job. He had just become CEO of Home Depot, and all he talked about was how exciting it would be to take on the challenge of building a better future for Home Depot. And I remember thinking, This guy hasn't had retail experience in 20 years, he's going into a situation where people are expecting him to fail, and he's following two founders -- Arthur Blank and Bernie Marcus -- who were beloved. Why is he doing this? But listening to him that night, I realized that once he'd seen a better future for Home Depot, every other consideration became irrelevant. He couldn't stop himself. With leaders, the future calls to them in a voice they can't drown out. The future is more real than the present; it compels them to act.

Turn Anxiety into Confidence

For a leader, the challenge is that in every society ever studied, people fear the future. The future is unstable, unknown, and therefore potentially dangerous. So in order to succeed, leaders must engage our fear of the unknown and turn it into spiritedness. By far the most effective way to turn fear into confidence is to be clear -- to define the future in such vivid terms that we can see where we are headed. Clarity is the antidote to anxiety, and therefore clarity is the preoccupation of the effective leader. If you do nothing else as a leader, be clear.

Be Clear about Whom You Serve

Leaders can be wrong. They can't be confusing. If we are going to follow you into the future, we need to know precisely whom we are trying to please. It's a scary thing to please all of the people all of the time. So to calm our fear, we need you to narrow our focus. Tell us who will be judging our success. When you do this with clarity, you give us confidence -- confidence in our judgment, in our decisions, and ultimately in our ability to know where to look to determine if we have fulfilled our mission.

Denny Clements, the general manager of Toyota's Lexus Group, understands this implicitly. Clements says that the only people Lexus is trying to serve are those for whom time is their most precious commodity. Everything that Lexus does -- from how it builds the car to what it puts in the car to the way it services the car -- is based on time. Clements knows he doesn't have to be right, because there is no one right answer. But he does have to be clear. If he's clear about which audience Lexus serves, his clarity will infuse his people with the confidence to face the future. In the end, his followers will make him right.