Leadership Stewardship™
Leadership creates success.
Stewardship creates endurance.
Leadership is measured not only by the results achieved today, but by the strength of the organization left for tomorrow.
Leadership Stewardship™ is a practitioner philosophy for delivering performance today while building the organizational capability required for tomorrow.
Performance Today.
Capability Tomorrow.
Every leader carries two responsibilities.
Deliver the performance the organization requires today.
And build the leadership, capabilities and organizational disciplines it will require tomorrow.
These responsibilities can sometimes compete for attention.
When an important decision needs to be made, it may be faster for the experienced leader to make it.
When a critical customer relationship is at risk, it may be safer for the CEO or founder to step in.
When execution slows, personally driving the organization may produce faster results than building stronger management disciplines.
Each intervention may be entirely rational.
Collectively, however, they can create an organization that performs well today while becoming increasingly dependent on a few highly capable individuals.
Leadership Stewardship is about holding both responsibilities:
Two Dimensions of Leadership
Leadership effectiveness can be considered across two dimensions:
Performance Today — the results the organization is delivering now.
Capability Tomorrow — the strength of the organization being built for the future.
Heroic Leadership
Strong results, but with significant dependence on the founder, CEO or a small number of exceptional individuals.
Leadership Stewardship
Strong current results while deliberately building the leadership and organizational capability required for future success.
Decline
The organization is neither delivering sufficiently today nor building what it needs for tomorrow.
Good Intentions
Investment in people, culture or future capability without sufficient current performance.
Leadership Stewardship does not ask leaders to choose the future over the present.
It asks them to build both.
The Indispensability Paradox
Strong leaders make good decisions.
They solve difficult problems.
They build trusted relationships.
They carry institutional knowledge.
They know how to get things done.
These capabilities are enormously valuable.
But they can also create an unintended consequence.
“The more capable the leader becomes, the easier it can be for the organization to become dependent on that capability.”
This is not necessarily poor leadership.
At particular stages of an organization's development, strong founder or CEO involvement may be exactly what the business requires.
The challenge arises when what was necessary at one stage becomes the operating model for the next.
As the organization grows, the leadership question therefore changes.
How can I become more capable?
How can my capability become the organization's capability?
The leader's capability should become the organization's capability.
Leadership Stewardship asks leaders to do more than apply their own judgment, relationships, knowledge and experience to the organization.
It asks them to progressively convert those personal capabilities into capabilities the organization can carry forward.
This is where Leadership Stewardship moves from philosophy into practice.
From Personal Capability to Organizational Capability
This conversion rarely happens automatically.
It requires leaders to rethink where their value comes from and to progressively build into the organization capabilities that may once have resided primarily with them.
Eight transitions are particularly important.
- 01Making good decisions→ Building decision-making capability
Move beyond making the important decisions yourself to developing judgment throughout the organization.
- 02Solving difficult problems→ Building problem-solving capability
Move beyond personally solving difficult problems to building teams that can diagnose, solve and learn from them.
- 03Driving execution→ Building execution discipline
Move beyond execution powered by leadership energy to organizational rhythms, accountability and operating disciplines that sustain performance.
- 04Holding key relationships→ Institutionalizing relationships
Move beyond relationships concentrated with individuals to trust and connectivity carried by the organization.
- 05Carrying critical knowledge→ Building institutional knowledge
Move beyond knowledge residing with experienced individuals to judgment and context transferred through the organization.
- 06Setting direction→ Building strategic alignment
Move beyond a leader who knows the direction to an organization that understands the strategy well enough to make aligned decisions.
- 07Developing followers→ Developing leaders
Move beyond people who execute the leader's decisions to leaders capable of exercising consequential judgment themselves.
Move beyond organizational dependence on a particular leader to an organization capable of performing beyond any one individual.
What Is Becoming Stronger Because You Led?
Performance tells us what leadership has achieved.
Stewardship also asks what leadership is building.
- Is the leadership team stronger than it was three years ago?
- Can consequential decisions be made without everything escalating to the CEO?
- Are critical relationships becoming institutional rather than personal?
- Is institutional knowledge growing?
- Are management systems keeping pace with organizational complexity?
- Can the organization execute without extraordinary intervention from the top?
- Are we developing leaders capable of making consequential decisions themselves?
- Would the organization continue to thrive if today's leader left tomorrow?
These questions do not replace the performance scorecard.
They complete it.
Performance Today.
Capability Tomorrow.
What Will You Leave Behind?
Every CEO tenure ends.
Every founder eventually hands responsibility to someone else.
Every generation of leadership is temporary.
The organization does not have to be.
Leadership Stewardship asks leaders to think differently about legacy.
Legacy is not primarily about being remembered.
It is about what remains capable after we are gone:
- the judgment,
- the leaders,
- the relationships,
- the disciplines,
- the institutional knowledge,
- and the organization's ability to create its next success.
“The ultimate measure of our capability as leaders is not only what we are capable of achieving. It is what the organization becomes capable of achieving because we led it.”
Leadership Stewardship Perspectives
Leadership Stewardship is an evolving body of practitioner thinking about how leaders deliver performance today while building the organizational capability required for tomorrow.
Leadership and Stewardship: Why Great Leaders Build Organizations That Outlast Them
A perspective on why enduring organizations require leaders to think beyond today's results.
Leadership Stewardship: Performance Today. Capability Tomorrow.
Leadership is often measured by what we deliver today. Stewardship asks a second question: what are we building for tomorrow?
The Indispensability Paradox
The qualities that make leaders indispensable can also create organizational dependency. Leadership Stewardship asks how personal capability can progressively become organizational capability.
Building an Organization That Endures?
FORJ partners with founders, CEOs and Boards to strengthen leadership, build organizational capability and create the disciplines required to scale with confidence.
Start a ConversationLeadership Stewardship™ is a leadership philosophy and practitioner framework developed by FORJ Growth Partners.