The Direct Leadership® Model

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Leadership Deliverables is the Essense of the Model

In essence The Direct Leadership® Model explains the leadership deliverables that need to be mastered for a leader to effectively lead his/her staff. The leadership deliverables are designed to engage and motivate employees and create visible and present everyday leadership.
 

Everyday Operational Leadership 

The Direct Leadership® Model defines a leadership narrative (which equals a job description) by means of a set of leadership roles and styles in relation to his/her staff.

7 Roles or Areas of Responsibility

A role is a set of responsibilities or themes, which the leader must juggle in relation to his/her employees: The model contains seven roles:

1. Strategy Deployer which relates to the translation of the overall visions, strategies and goals into action plans for the people you lead including ensuring that these are kept in sight on an everyday basis.
2. Organisation Developer involves ensuring that qualifications, competencies, responsibilities and processes match the goals.
3. Knowledge Manager tells the leader to encourage his/her staff to be on top of the knowledge needed to carry out their work and to ensure that individual knowledge is turned into organisational knowledge whenever relevant.
4. The Team Builder role stipulates the leader’s responsibility to ensure that both individuals and teams thrive in their daily interactions.
5. The Career Developer role spells out that the leader must ensure that each employee’s job is adequately challenging and brings out the competences of each staff member.
6. The role of Decision Enabler describes how the leader must ensure that all decisions made in his/her unit are based on relevant and timely information, just as the leader is responsible for ensuring a smooth implementation and follow-up.
7. Performance Generator delineates the role by which the leader continuously monitors that projects and plans unfold according to agreed schedules and - if not - that corrective interventions are launched.

4 Styles or Ways to Interact with Staff

The leadership styles are defined as the way a leader interacts with staff members. There are 4 distinctively different styles, that each express a specific leadership intention:

1. Using Catcher style means having the radar turned on in order to ensure that the way jobs are carried out, the results and the collaboration among staff is adequate and/or moves in the desired direction. To do so, the leaders must ’catch’ leadership opportunities, problems and threats.
2. The Initiator style is applied when the leader launches a new activity, the tasks of a given period, changes in plans, new methods, better work processes, etc.
3. The Coach style is applied when an individual or a team needs help to improve their competences, shoulder a responsibility or make their own decisions.
4. The Referee uses prompt and undramatic feedback to optimise the quality of the staff’s performance and/or collaboration.

A Leader Must Master the Combination of all 7 Roles and all 4 Styles

The leadership roles and -styles combine into a leadership matrix, which explains that every role may be carried out in any of the four styles.

If the leader is to meet the mark, he/she has to master all of the seven roles and all four styles. 

To create the connection between awareness of one’s leadership roles and taking action, the leader must understand the notion of ”leadership opportunities”, i.e. the fact that leadership must take place whenever the opportunity arises.

By knowing and understanding the seven roles you are better able to ’catch’ the leadership opportunities, as they occur on everyday basis. Once a leadership opportunity has been caught (and not lost) you must then chose whether to take action as Initiator, Coach or Referee.

Leaders Help Employees to Perform

Much leadership training ignores the ‘core’ of the leadership responsibility - to facilitate the work carried out by each employee or team – in favour of inquiring into ‘how each person feels and is dealing with their work life balance.”

When the leader instead accepts and adopts the requirement to "deliver leadership" when an opportunity shows up, he/she becomes truly instrumental to the employees.

It's really simple: Good leaders help employees to perform! 

It isn’t fair – neither to the leaders nor to their staff – to appoint leaders without making it clear to them that basic, everyday leadership work implies helping their staff to perform. 

Learn more about your fast track to master the day-to-day deliverables of leading a staff here.