Leadership is about getting results for your followers. If you get results, people will support you, often without caring too much about how you got them; without results, all the style or charisma in the world won’t retain the support of your followers for long. This is true for the leader of a Scout troop, a sports team, a political party, a government department…and a business.
A business leader must increase shareholder value, and the public-sector leader must increase public value. (Shareholder value increases through either increasing stock price and/or paying dividends on stock that is owned, results that are usually measured as total shareholder return over some period of time. In the public sector there is a different but analogous measure: public value, the return to taxpayers of public goods in an effective and efficient way.) There is a growing belief that the long-term generation of either shareholder or public value requires the balancing or integration of the interests of multiple stakeholders in the enterprise; shareholders, employees, customers or clients, suppliers, and the various communities within which the enterprise operates and with which it interacts. Notwithstanding this view, failure to satisfy shareholders is more likely than any of the others to get business leaders into trouble.
To be an effective leader of either a private- or public-sector organization requires you to do five things:
Understand and interpret the environment in which you operate;
Develop winning strategies;
Execute them brilliantly;
Measure the impact of your strategies systematically, adjusting strategies as indicated; and,Develop organizational, departmental, team and personal capabilities.