Let’s get to the heart of the matter:

What are the core things you must do as a leader? Is there a secret sauce that can add flavor to your many roles?

Millions of words have been published on this topic. At one time or another, you’ve probably heard that the essential function of leadership is to:

leadership word cloud

Wow, that’s a lot of essential functions, isn’t it? Here’s the thing: if each and every one of these are a leader’s highest priority, then none is, right? You can hardly blame a bewildered leader for just winging it and hoping for the best. And it’s hard not to sympathize with an experienced leader who simply sticks with her strengths and clings to familiar routines—hunkering down even when new challenges demand new solutions.

At TrueBearing, we work with many strong leaders. In their career-long efforts to improve their abilities, they often turn to workshops, self-help books, and the wisdom of mentors for insight. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! On the contrary, those resources are often very useful; but over and over again, we notice a pattern.

These talented people are enthusiastic at first about whatever shiny new leadership tool they have acquired, whether it’s Seven Habits or Six Sigma, Situational Leadership or Lean principles. But eventually, many quietly set those tools aside with a sigh of frustration—knowing more, yet understanding less than ever about how to succeed at the complex demands of leadership. Have you ever had that experience?

The purpose of this series is not to propose another complicated model of leadership. Instead, we want to offer leaders something more fundamental. Something radical, in the old school sense of the word (from the Latin, radix,  meaning “root”).

There are two supremely important things an effective leader does, day in and day out. And every one of the “essential functions” listed above requires these two ingredients in some form.

Once you master this two-part skillset, you possess the secret sauce that is part of success across all domains of leadership. And if you don’t master these skills, you are far more likely to fail as a leader.

Do we have your attention?

Every one of the many diverse activities a leader engages each day is rooted in these two skills:

  • Harness information to make consistently good decisions.
  • Learn systematically from the less-than-good decisions.

Good leaders are good because they are always hungry for information coming from all kinds of sources, and they have figured out how to filter, understand and test that information in order to make quality decisions. Not only that, but they are willing to absorb the lessons learned from the clunkers. From green-eyeshade responsibilities like setting budget or program priorities to the touchy-feely realm of building morale and managing conflict, all of the wildly diverse activities that comprise a leader’s role every day are rooted in a decisionmaking process that is fueled by information– regardless of the task at hand.

Hunger for information. Use it to make good decisions. Learn from the rest.

Master these skills, turn them into habits, and everything else you do as a leader will have a reliable foundation.

Not easy. Not hard. Radical.

This is the second post in our Evidence-Based Decision Making On the Fly series.