The Leadership Star

CONCLUSION

Leadership is never a sure thing. There's no one formula that will guarantee your success, despite what all the gurus and celebrity CEOs tell you. The strategic and operational disciplines necessary to build and grow a business are quite different from those needed to revive a business in trouble. External changes, crises and disruptions can knock your business off course. The larger your organisation, and the more senior you are, the more individual errors can compound on your watch before you even know about them.

But you can tip the odds in your favour. A high‐quality, highly engaged workforce, aligned around a clear purpose and set of values, is much more likely to compete effectively. And a caring, open culture, with leaders at all levels who demonstrate that it's safe to speak up, is more likely to highlight issues before they become fatal.

Leaders who build highly engaged teams attract high performers to join those teams, setting up a virtuous spiral of engagement and performance. For me, that's what leadership is ultimately about — creating the conditions that allow you to achieve as a team.

And while there are no guarantees, a leader who is authentic and disciplined about living and communicating each point of the Leadership Star — and expects their team members to do the same with their teams — gives themselves an excellent chance at building and sustaining high engagement over time.

The Leadership Star framework is deliberately simple. Five points, each ...