I'm struck by how often leaders come up with four or five core strengths. We hear it all the time: "Our strengths are our people, our productivity, our creativity, and our efficiency." Somehow, many leaders think their job is to analyze the world's reality and complexity and reflect it back to their people. Not true. As a leader, your job is to make people more confident about the future you're dragging them into. To that end, you need to tell them why they're going to win. There are many competitors out there. Why will we beat them? There are many obstacles in our path. Why will we overcome them? The more clearly you can answer these questions, the more confident we will be, and therefore the more resilient, the more persistent, and the more creative.
Even if it doesn't incorporate all the reality of the world, find the edge -- one edge -- and talk about it all the time. The more you talk about it, the more it becomes true. So it goes with Brad Anderson, CEO of Best Buy. Best Buy's success over the past few years lies in its ability to identify its core strength and act on it. These days, Anderson is charging around the country telling anyone who will listen that Best Buy's strength lies in the quality of its blue shirts -- its employees in the stores. Anderson believes that Best Buy will win if its frontline people are better -- better selected, better trained, and better equipped to help the customer. Anderson is different from most leaders in that once he's decided on Best Buy's core strength, he doesn't really talk about anything else. He understands that his job as a leader is to distill the world's complexity and ambiguity -- and out of that comes the notion that Best Buy will win because its frontline people are better.
Having told his people that their strength lay in the intelligence, insight, and creativity of the frontline employees, Anderson took the required next step and identified the one score that would track their progress toward a better future: number of engaged employees. Although Best Buy's success could be measured in a variety of different ways, the company uses 12 simple questions to measure just that. Scoring is even more vivid than saying frontline employees are really important. From a leadership standpoint, a score is actionable and unambiguous.
That clarity is lost if you end up looking at 15 different metrics. It's a terrible leadership failure to tell your employees that all of these measurements are important. When followers are presented with numerous scores, they get confused. The job of a leader is to say, "Of all the things we measure, this is the most important."
Of course, a leader must take action -- action leads to impact. But actions also possess a separate, equally powerful quality. Actions are unambiguous. If you, the leader, can highlight a few carefully selected actions, then your followers will no longer have to infer the future from theoretical pronouncements about "core values" or your "mission statement." We will simply look to see what actions you take and found our faith and confidence on these. But be aware that we respond best to two types of action: symbolic action and systemic action.
Symbolic action is just that -- a representation of what the future can look like. Symbolic action grabs our attention; it gives us something new and vivid on which to focus. When Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor of New York, he decided to get rid of squeegee men -- street people who demanded payment for cleaning windshields. His action was heavily symbolic: It didn't change New Yorkers' day-to-day lives all that much, but it was a powerful demonstration of what Giuliani meant when he talked about a better quality of life.
Giuliani also instituted a twice-weekly meeting in which more than 100 senior police officers would gather to explain the city's daily crime data and defend their response to it. Giuliani declared that these meetings encouraged accountability and transparency. But the meetings' real power was that they disrupted routines. For a leader, it's important to disrupt routines. Systemic action changes behavior. It makes people realize that the world is going to be different because they're doing different things. The future becomes clearer, and out of that clarity comes confidence.
Effective leaders don't have to be passionate or charming or brilliant. What they must be is clear -- clarity is the essence of great leadership. Show us clearly who we should seek to serve, show us where our core strength lies, show us which score we should focus on and which actions we must take, and we will reward you by working our hearts out to make our better future come true.
Bill Breen is Fast Company's senior projects editor.
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