Michael Useem - The Leaders Checklist, Expanded Edition: 15 Mission-Critical Principles

Praise for the Bestselling First Edition

One of the most brilliant, original, and exciting leadership books Ive read in a long time. It will be the most useful and concise book on leadership youll ever read!

Warren Bennis, Distinguished Professor of Business, University of Southern California, and author of Still Surprised: A Memoir of a Life in Leadership

With this compact handbook, Mike Useem provides leaders what they all say they want and need but rarely get: a kick-in-the-pants reminder of those parts of the job they have neglected. The boss is now forewarned.

Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post business columnist and moderator of the On Leadership website

Leading an enterprise comes down to a set of enduring principles, and The Leaders Checklist compellingly captures the most vital. Michael Useem has written the essential companion for anybody whose leadership is on the line.

Ram Charan, advisor to CEOs and boards, and coauthor of the bestsellers Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done and The Leadership Pipeline

The Leaders Checklist reads like an adventure yarn, but packs a goldmine of scholarship and tested observations, that surrounds a list of fifteen principles that guide and teach managers to make on-target, effective business decisions, under real pressure.

Blogcritics

The Leaders Checklist can refresh a leaders sense of purpose as well as invigorate his or her calling to lead others.

John Baldoni, SmartBlog on Leadership

The Leaders Checklist gets to the point quickly. It may well set the bar for quality writing and amount of content for other business-related digital books in the future.

Patricia Faulhaber, Suite101

2011 by Michael Useem

Published by Wharton School Press

The Wharton School

University of Pennsylvania

3620 Locust Walk

2000 Steinberg Hall-Dietrich Hall

Philadelphia, PA 19104

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, without written permission of the publisher. Company and product names mentioned herein are the trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

First edition published June 2011

Expanded second edition published September 2011

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61363-006-8

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61363-005-1

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Design by Lara Andrea Taber

A n executive briefs his top management team on plans for the coming year, referencing product launches, pricing pressures, and analyst concerns. The off-site presentation proves engaging and stimulating, yet the moment feels strangely incomplete, an opportunity unfulfilled.

Managers in the room learn little more than they already knew about the executive personally. They hear nothing about how the executive views them collectively or what is expected of them individually. Even worse, they learn much about the tactics of the moment but little about the larger goals and strategies they are pursing. In the end, the executive weaves in many of the essential threads of the leadership fabric but falls short of spinning the whole cloth.

Sound familiar? It should. My work on leadership development in the United States and abroad confirms that meetings like this take place all the time, in a multitude of languages, to the universal consternation of those present. Sometimes the problem is a simple lack of experience: Leading effectively is a composite skillset enhanced by practice. Yet my research and observations suggest that, even when managers are learning on the job, the simple expedient of applying the equivalent of a pilot or surgeons checklist can mitigate and, in many cases, eliminate leadership lapses, not only in routine matters such as meetings but also when jobs, businesses, and even lives are on the line.

That is why I wrote The Leaders Checklist. It lays out a core of 15 mission-critical, time-tested leadership principles that vary surprisingly little among companies or countries. Collectively, these principles are a template for decision-making whatever the challenge, the setting, or the moment.

In Part One, I define the 15 principles that constitute the Leaders Checklist, and together we explore the principles in action, in settings as varied as Wall Street, the Civil War, and an audacious rescue carried out under the glare of international attention. I also provide an Owners Manuala set of prompts intended to assist a leaders preparedness for any situationand I counsel you on how to test and retest your own application of the principles.

The testing is critical. Learning to lead is one of those personal capacities continuously improved by repeated application and accumulated experience. And thus, testing and revising the Leaders Checklist constitutes a learning cycle that helps ensure that all of its principles are essential, complete, and relevant to individual circumstances.

In the relatively brief time since this book was first published, I have heard from scores of managers who have done just that: held these principles up to the reality of their own work lives and the exigencies of the difficult economic times we inhabit. From points far and widethe United Nations and World Economic Forum, MasterCard and Medtronic, and Eli Lilly and IBM, among othersthey have reported back to me about what they feel needs greater emphasis or more tweaking, as well as on what struck home with special force.

This preface to the expanded edition of The Leaders Checklist gives me a chance to convey their practical wisdom and direct experience to you, before you dive fully into the checklist itself. Think of this both as a highlighted edition of The Leaders Checklist, informed by on-the-ground experience, and as a goad to digest it more critically yourself when you get to the fuller explication of the 15 featured precepts. The principles, I am convinced, are timeless, but like business conditions, the circumstances are ever-changing.

While The Leaders Checklist is defined by 15 principles, multiple managers have let me know that, in their experience, three particular principles have more often been missing in action than others. In some cases, the managers said, they had too seldom or inconsistently utilized them in the exercise of their own leadership. Just as often, they had too infrequently witnessed their use among other leaders who should have embraced them. Either way, the result has been the same: compromised leadership at a moment when an enterprise cannot afford to flounder.

The three principles these managers have found most lacking, in themselves and others:

Honor the Room: Express confidence in and support for those who work for you.

Communicate Persuasively: Communicate in ways that people will never forget.

Place Common Interest First: Common purpose comes first, parochial concerns last.

Why are these three honored more in the breach than in practice? I suspect the answer lies in the fact that so many management cultures do not adequately emphasize or build these three mission-critical principles into their leadership development programs. Whatever the source of the shortfall, however, their absence is keenly felt and sometimes proves disastrous to company reputation, the bottom line, and even the national interest.