I need to Innovate, Communicate and Execute. But what exactly does that mean?

When I was in the third grade I joined a YMCA basketball team.  By the beginning of the fourth grade, I had a pretty good idea what I would have to do to be the next great basketball superstar.  I would have to get really, really good at about half a dozen things:  Dribbling, Passing, Shooting, Rebounding, Defending and Playing My Position. 

How did I figure this out?  It’s all my tyrannically demanding  coach, Mr. Brady, ever had us work on during practice.  And it’s virtually all we ever did during each game.  Basketball is basically made up of a million different variations of these six basic actions.  They are the fundamentals that make up the core of the game.  Every sport has a set of fundamentals.

So what are the basic actions, the fundamentals, of Business Leadership?  That hasn’t been quite so easy to figure out. After a dozen years of some of the best training in the world followed by another dozen turning companies around, I never once heard anyone talk about business leadership fundamentals.  At least not in terms as simple as like dribbling, passing and shooting. 

But that doesn’t mean business leadership isn’t made up of a handful of basic actions that successful leaders master and do over and over.  They are just a lot harder to “see” in business than in basketball.  Basketball, like all sports, is visual.  You can see the ball, the court, the basket, the three point line.  You can see and be dazzled by the wizardry of the players.  It’s so visual and entertaining that televising it is a multi-billion dollar industry.  Watching business leaders lead, at least by my count, produces zero dollars of TV revenue.  There are a lot more business people than basketball players so you would think there would be some interest.  But there is just very little to SEE.  Business and leadership are not visual.  They’re not something you can really watch.  So figuring out what exactly is going on takes more effort.

We know great business leaders have to Innovate, Communicate, and Execute.  That is all there is to adding value, and adding value is the objective of business leadership.  But that’s not specific enough to be useful.  It’s like saying, “To be a great basketball player all you have to do is master offense and defense.”  It’s true, but it’s also so vague it’s useless.

In order for this advice to be useful enough to help you improve our skills we have to break the leadership “dimensions” of innovating, communicating and executing into the actions that leaders take to achieve them.  To this end it is possible to group all of the things that great business leaders do in each of those three dimensions into two types of actions.  The resulting 6 actions are to business leadership what dribbling, shooting and passing are to basketball.  Master them, and you will master business leadership.

As we discussed before, Innovating is the act of generating good business ideas.  Ideas that if implemented will make the business more profitable.  How does one do that, exactly?  If you could look at everything great innovators like Steve Jobs, or Henry Ford, or Leonardo Da Vinci do to come up with good ideas, you would find that you could summarize that long list of things into just two basic actions.  Understanding and Designing.

Understanding is the action of figuring out how things work.  If you want to have a good idea about how to improve a process, you have to understand how that process works.  How it takes an input and produces an output.  In order to have an idea of how to improve something, you need to understand how that thing works.  

Designing is the act of actually figuring out the better way.  It is not enough to know everything about the status quo.  You need to have the imagination and vision (along with the understanding) to come up with a better way of doing things.  A way that makes the output better in some fashion that makes the business more profitable.  If you haven’t designed a better way, you haven’t innovated yet.

Innovating comes from having a deep and useful UNDERSTANDING of the status quo…  AND knowing how to DESIGN a future that produces a better result.

The complex art of being an effective communicator can also be broken down into two fundamental types of actions.  Listening and Explaining.  At all times when we are communicating, we are either receiving information from others or sending information to them.  There is nothing else to communication.  So mastering communication requires mastering those two actions in all of their variations, from reading non-verbal cues (a form of listening) to coaching a subordinate (a form of explaining). 

Listening may be both the most important, and most underrated skill in business.  It is much more than hearing what someone says.  Good business leaders understand motivations, detect hidden messages, read body language, and decode emotions.  It is the fundamental tool of learning, gaining situational awareness and understanding others.

Explaining is the ability to move information -- an idea, an emotion, facts and figures -- from your own head to someone else’s.   It is used to motivate, persuade, coach, instruct, direct…  The ability to generate understanding and action in others is completely dependent on a leader’s ability to explain.

Communicating is the act of moving information from one person’s brain to another’s.  At all times, you are either receiving info – LISTENING – or sending info – EXPLAINING.  And more often than not, you are doing both at the same time.

Executing also has two fundamental actions:  Deciding and Acting.  Our ability to get things done starts with a resolute decision and is completed once we take the action that changes the world in the way the decision intended.

One might think of Deciding as a form of thinking or innovating, but it is actually the first, and all important step, in executing.  Most people who struggle with execution do so not because they are not good at getting work done, but rather because they are not decisive.  They are not good at deciding WHAT to do.  They get stuck in analysis paralysis.  Deciding is actually the point when one chooses to stop learning, to eliminate all of the options, and actually just DO one of them.  One can not take action without making the decision to act first.

The second part of executing is actually taking the action necessary to get the job done.  It involves both starting and finishing.  Great leaders are decisive and they are finishers. 

Execution cannot start without first DECIDING what needs to be done.

Then one must ACT! and complete the work that decision mandated.

Different leaders have different strengths, some are charismatic energizers, some introverted brainiacs, some are hard charging field marshals.  What is one leader’s strength can be another leaders Achilles heel.  But there are no leaders that are not exceptionally skilled, when compared to your average Joe, at all of these six actions.  The same is true for the NBA.  What made Michael Jordan great is very different than what made Shaquille O’Neal great.  But they both are incredibly good at dribbling, shooting, and passing.  They don’t need to be the very best in the world at each, but they have to be orders of magnitude better than you and me.  Like-wise, what made Jack Welch great had very little in common with what made Steve Jobs great.  But they both were incredibly good at each of the Six Basic Actions of business leadership.

We decided in the last chapter we need to double the size of your business leadership box, right?  To do that we simply need to find the fastest way to improve your ability to Understand, Design, Listen, Explain, Decide, and Act.