The Barefoot Leader: Simple Effective Leadership

Copyright © 2016 by James Carolin.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016909614

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5144-9693-0

      Softcover      978-1-5144-9692-3

      eBook         978-1-5144-9739-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Cover Photo credit: iStock by Getty

Rev. date: 11/29/2016

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Contents

How to Get the Most from This Book

Meet the Barefoot Leader

The Simple, Effective Leadership Framework

Part I

Chapter 1: Individual Direction—Personal Vision

Chapter 2: Individual Alignment—Authentic Action

Chapter 3: Individual Capability—Personal Strengths

Part II

Chapter 4: Team Direction—Team Purpose

Chapter 5: Team Alignment—Operating Rhythm

Chapter 6: Team Capability—Team Composition

Part III

Chapter 7: Organisation Direction—Strategic Clarity

Chapter 8: Organisation Alignment—High-Performing Culture

Chapter 9: Organisation Capability—Evolving Capability

Acknowledgements

Notes

About the Author

For Colleen, Jonty, and Hugo

This book provides a useful roadmap for leaders to be more effective. Comprehensive, yet easy to read and simple to apply. A valuable growth tool for leaders.

Alinda Nortje - Executive Chairperson, Free-To-Grow

Effective Leadership is about taking people to places they haven’t been before. Its making the complex simple and the simple inspiring so that people want to perform above and beyond. In the Barefoot Leader, James Carolin provides a refreshing and easy to use framework to help you develop into a more effective leader.

Peter (Pod) McCloughlin, HR Director, Coca-Cola Amatil

The Barefoot Leader contains the simple truths of leading organisations on journeys to better outcomes. The simple framework combined with PEA measurement brings appropriate structure to chaos and helps leaders focus on differentiating thought and action. Simple read – big impact.

Otto Pretorius - Managing Director, QBIT

James Carolin brings a refreshing take on leadership development with this book. The Barefoot Leader is designed as a useful and interactive tool. The real and practical examples will not only shift individual perspectives but also have immense potential to bring about authentic change within organisations.

Linda Ronnie - Senior Lecturer, Graduate School of Business, UCT

Finally, a straight-forward and proven framework for new and seasoned leaders to apply to their organisations to achieve the pinnacle of success - sustainable business growth. All to often leaders know the factors they ‘should’ or ‘could’ be concentrating on to drive better performance in individuals, teams and the wider organisation but they don’t know ‘how’ to take action; to pull the levers to create the people and operating rhythm needed to engage and produce the necessary outcomes, both for the short and long term. The Barefoot Leader is the essential guidebook for ‘how’ to build and more importantly, sustain, business growth and high performance in any business.

Emma Walsh, CEO Changing Places HR and leadership development expert

James has created a simply useful decision-making framework from lessons hard learnt through experience for other leaders to leverage.

Saxon Marsden-Huggins, Managing Director, Recruitshop

Introduction

How to Get the Most from This Book

This book is written for current and aspiring leaders within organisations. The organisation might be your own start-up, a mid-size corporation, a global multinational, a not-for-profit, or a government department. The principles in this book are derived from human behaviour and therefore transcend organisational structure, size, and industry type. Where any group of people gather together to achieve an outcome, this book will help the leaders in that group achieve a better outcome.

The book has three parts, each with a slightly different focus:

• Part I covers topics that are relevant to anyone interested in being a better leader.

• Part II focuses on leading teams, providing guidance to those that are currently leading a team or those who wish to do so.

• Part III focuses on leading organisations and the approaches required by those who have this level of responsibility and accountability or those who wish to attain it.

In short, if you are interested in being an effective leader and in making an impact through leading an organisation or a group of people, this book will be useful.

Each of the three parts has three chapters. Together, these nine chapters outline a holistic roadmap for simple, effective leadership based on nine key factors.

The detail in each chapter will:

• help you understand each factor

• outline the research supporting each factor

• enable you to diagnose your PEA score in each of the factors (more on what this means in the next section)

• identify the core challenge of each factor

• outline the value of addressing the challenge

• share five simple, effective exercises to show you how you can meet the challenge.

The book includes five exercises per challenge, and in reality, there are thousands more. The examples here are those that have worked for real organisations and leaders. These are proven activities that have made a positive difference to leadership effectiveness.

Diving In

Before we dive into the nine factors in detail, there are two further introductory sections. First, I’ll introduce you to the Barefoot Leader and provide you with a better understanding of what that actually means. Second, we outline the blueprint for the simple, effective leadership framework—a high-level overview that will enable you to dip in and explore the parts of the book that are the most relevant and useful to you today.

Why Read On?

Drawing on years of action research, academic study, and insight gained through real-world application, the simple, effective leadership framework is a framework and a roadmap to enable business leaders to achieve better results through their people.

The results achieved in working with a wide range of organisations while using the simple, effective leadership framework tell a compelling story: for one organisation, a three-year profit target hit in the first year; for another, sixteen times revenue growth in four years; many organisations using the framework have reduced employee turnover and absenteeism and improved employee engagement and productivity.

The usefulness of the simple, effective leadership framework becomes apparent to anyone who learns about it. Reading this book will help you to make positive changes using this simple, effective framework.

Support

Finally, each of the nine chapters in this book is supported by a webinar. Each webinar is approximately twenty minutes, and in each one, the author describes the nine leadership challenges and how to address them. The recorded webinars contain images, videos, and diagrams that help bring the challenges to life. You can find the webinars at www.thebarefootleader.com/self-webinars.

Meet the Barefoot Leader

The purpose of leadership is to get better results. Leaders are most useful when they are improving outcomes. Everything else that a leader does is an input to this final output, and everything shared in this book is based on this idea. Better results can be defined in a magnitude of different ways—for example, market share, share price, profit, revenue, headcount, safety, employee engagement, community participation, environmental impact, GDP, or social equality. The list could take up a full page, depending on what you lead and the level at which you lead. Similarly, better results can be obtained through various means—improving decision-making, improving the quality of capital, increasing employee engagement, improving executive team dynamic, influencing the market, or seeking to understand customers or society.

Regardless of the definition of better results, or the means to achieve them, the nine factors and PEA scores described in this book hold steady as a roadmap to better results.

Each of the nine factors outlined in the book represents a challenge, and the PEA scores denote how well that challenge is being met. This book is arranged around a series of challenges for a reason—being a Barefoot Leader is a challenge. It requires focus, determination, perseverance, discipline, and flexibility.

The Barefoot Leader is a pragmatist. He or she rigorously applies simple, effective ideas that have been proven in organisations to produce the maximum value out of them.

The closer you get to being a Barefoot Leader, the better you and your team performs. Similarly, the more Barefoot Leaders you have in one organisation, the stronger the performance of the entire unit. This book will provide you with examples and case studies of how this has played out in the organisations that have applied the simple, effective leadership framework to date.

For the moment, let’s explore the characteristics of the Barefoot Leader a bit further.

One Step at a Time

Leaders get us from A to B. The ancient origins of the word lead are a combination of ‘to travel’ and ‘to go forth’. When you are leading, you are taking people on a journey. The Barefoot Leader approaches this journey one step at a time. Barefoot Leaders get further by putting one foot in front of the other rather than by taking giant and unrealistic leaps. They understand where they are, where they are going, and what it takes to go forth with their people so that they don’t leave them behind. They balance the need to travel and get to a better place with the need to take a measured approach.

Neil Armstrong didn’t dive head first out of the lunar lander.

Removing the Unnecessary Extras

The Barefoot Leader understands that it is your feet that take you on the journey rather than your shoes. We can dress up in the brightest and best footwear around, but even rocket boots would be useless to us without feet. The Barefoot Leader seeks to declutter and simplify, to strip back and strip away the unnecessary extras and understand the core. Simple doesn’t mean simplistic, and often you need to go through enormous complexity to arrive at simplicity. Consider how Einstein arrived at E = mc². This striving is a virtue. The Barefoot Leader strives to understand things well enough to explain them simply.

Community and Humanity

The Barefoot Leader can feel the ground beneath his or her feet. Barefoot Leaders are connected and human. In an environment of quarterly reporting, short-term incentives, and rampant CEO remuneration, the Barefoot Leader reminds us that we are all humans and, as such, members of a community. Barefoot Leaders achieve sustainable long-term results when they remain connected to their communities and the ground they are walking on.

Eyes on the Prize

Leaders go forth and travel. The Barefoot Leader travels with a purpose and a destination in mind. The route can change at any time as can the mode of travel. (Hand me my rocket boots!) Once in a while, the destination might change and the purpose might evolve, but for the Barefoot Leader, the focus on the outcome remains. Often, this includes a view on sustainability. The Barefoot Leader is a three-horizon thinker, who considers the short-term, medium-term, and long-term impact of decisions and actions on achieving the desired result.

Simple Truths

Leadership theorists, leaders, and the people that support them are constantly in search of ‘the silver bullet’—that one idea, method, or approach that will forever alter the landscape and reduce the plethora of problems that leaders face into a simple one.

The unfortunate reality of the twenty-first century is that the rate of change is so intense on so many levels and the number and complexity of problems so overwhelming that we are awash in silver-bullet solutions, none of which deliver the desired result.

The Barefoot Leader finds the melody in all this noise—the central, core truths that have stood the test of time and proven to be effective. Many of the approaches or methods presented in this book are based on existing wisdom. The Barefoot Leader identifies pragmatic approaches that are useful, that improve the probability of better results, and ensures they are applied for maximum effect.

Now more than ever, we need our leaders to see through the clutter and look past distractions in order to become and remain effective. And it’s important they remain effective because in an increasingly affluent and commercialised world, organisations and corporations are the primary vehicles for positive change.

Leaders drive change in organisations, and organisations drive change in the societies and communities within which they operate. We need Barefoot Leaders to simplify, declutter, find patterns in the chaos, and drive through the walls of complexity to build a better future for humanity.

This might seem like a tall order. It is a challenge, to be sure, but it’s a worthy challenge. The following chapters will help you to meet that challenge head on.

The Simple, Effective Leadership Framework

Developed by combining over a decade of research with practical application in real organisations and by incorporating thought leadership from all over the globe and rigorously tested by leaders with everyday challenges, the simple, effective leadership framework is a robust and pragmatic framework for leadership effectiveness.

A Corporate Health Check

The simple, effective leadership framework not only supports effective leadership, it acts as a diagnostic for the health of leadership in