The Purpose of Leadership

IEDP: Your new book, What Leadership Is For, has just been published by Novaro Publishing. Can you tell us what the book is all about?

Patrick Faniel: The book is about the danger of spreading leadership focus and organizational attention too thinly. Its central message is that leadership is about making choices, and that leaders must adapt their approach to focus on the choices they make and the directions they decide to prioritize.

In our complex and highly pressurized business environments, leaders are constantly being pulled in multiple directions. Effective leadership depends on finding the right focus and realizing that doing everything—or asking your team to do everything—will dilute your efforts, and lead to failure.

Leaders are called upon to pursue many competing drivers beyond the basics of profit and impact. Growth, customer service, inclusivity, environmental sustainability, social responsibility, and more, are all demanded of today’s leaders. The most successful can deliver all these things, but only if they first identify and emphasize a few key drivers of performance—and then work to ensure that these are where the organization focuses its energies. The full title of the book is What Leadership Is for: Identifying the Three Drivers for Stand-out Performance—the idea being leaders should concentrate on a maximum of three drivers and set these to cascade down through the organization.

What gave you the idea to write this book?

At Management Centre Europe (MCE)—the world-class management development company I lead in the EMEA region—we have discussions every day with leaders of organizations about the challenges they face. From these interactions we have realised that, in the fast-changing, competitive landscape organizations are currently in, many leaders are struggling to adapt, to set strategies that resonate through their organizations, and to align their employees to execute them effectively.

I found that our typical conversations about leadership were somehow missing a key point. When speaking about their leadership, people spoke about their leadership style, their underlying standards—such as communication, giving feedback, motivating their people, and so on. These are all important, but why? What was their leadership for? 

While the underlying standards a leader brings, might be the same wherever he or she is working, each organization’s circumstances are different. Different approaches are needed.  Taking account of this and speaking both to participants in MCE’s workshops and programmes and to the many high-profile leaders interviewed for the book, about the specific variable factors that can drive strategy—from customer service to innovation to strategy implementation—things became much clearer.

You include many examples in the book

Yes. We had the chance to interview top leaders. Most of the people contacted immediately accepted the interview. We chose the companies based on their ‘identified’ drivers—MSC Cruises is namely about growth; Porsche namely about brand; Alan Healthcare namely about digitization; Knauf namely about innovation; Kurita namely about diversity and inclusion. And there are many others, where the key drivers are clear.

Why do you think these ideas are needed today?

We all speak about the numerous crises and changes we are going through: the Covid pandemic, the geopolitical situation, the impact of AI and rapid technological change, shifting demographics, climate change, and more. Most of the time, we take the perspective of the impact on the organization—what the organization has to do to adapt, to survive, to prepare for an uncertain future.

I believe it is just as important to understand the impact of disruptive change on people and their behaviours. Today’s managers and leaders are faced with the consequences of multifaceted change on the behaviour of their teams and organizations—their reactions to developments such as generative AI, hybrid working or flatter hierarchies. Yesterday’s leadership approaches no longer apply. They need a new leadership model.  

Many leadership models, as I’ve said, are based on the style of the leaders and the standards they apply. In my book, I am suggesting a different model, one that adds a new dimension: the driver.  If a chosen driver is innovation, the culture of the organization has to be very different from that of a company where the main driver is efficiency. Hence leaders must make a choice about the drivers they prioritize and adapt their leadership accordingly.

Can you talk more about the model?

I make no judgement on the ideal choice of the drivers—the choice depends entirely on each organization’s situation, purpose, and resources—but I believe pursuing more than a maximum of three is counter-productive.

I have identified twelve potential drivers, which can be split into four quadrants: Business, Process, People and Market. Each driver must be taken into account, but a leadership choice needs to be made about which ones will really drive the organization. As a leader, you need to manage all twelve areas, but not equally—you need to choose which to prioritize, selecting a maximum of three. 75 percent of your time, energy and attention should then focus on these and ensuring they are central to how you act as a company.

In the book, I analyze twelve drivers in depth, under the four quadrant headings: Under business I look at growth, innovation, and partnerships; under process I consider strategy execution, effectiveness, and digitalization; under people, employee experience, diversity and inclusion, and inspiration; and under market, customer focus, brands, and personalization.

It seems that first it is really about a strategic decision

Yes and no. If the choice of drivers is obvious at the organization’s top strategic level, this is the ideal situation. But the concept also works if applied at the level of the business unit or at team level. The leader of a team must be very clear on which drivers to focus on and communicate this to team members. If team members are all focusing on different drivers, performance is bound to suffer.

If the three chosen drivers are growth, strategy execution, and inclusivity, for example, it does not mean all other aspects are totally ignored—it means that throughout the team or organizations the three are the overriding focus of attention.  And that people, at any level, know exactly what that means for them and what is expected from them.

Are some drivers or some combinations better than others?

This is a question I get asked regularly when I am speaking at conferences and workshops. The answer is no—you can get extraordinary performance in a company which is not focusing at all on its staff, or in one that is spoiling its staff. It is just different. If the leadership is adapted to the drivers and if the drivers cascade down appropriately, performance will be boosted. The idea behind the choice is just different. What should be considered is the history of the organization, its strengths and weaknesses, the strengths of the competition, and capacity of the team or organization to do justice to each chosen driver.

It seems easy to recognize the drivers for some companies

Indeed. When you get into the idea and the model, it is very easy to ‘classify’ companies which are led by clear drivers, the one’s which are not, and the one’s where it is unclear from the outside.  Just by the way the company communicates, deals with its clients, its staff, … How the CEO is presenting the strategy; the way the website is organized.  Many elements, when well done, go into the same direction and confirms the choice that the company has done. 

How can Management Centre Europe (MCE) support managers, leaders and companies in developing effective leadership models?

MCE is supporting leaders and managers at two levels. At the individual level, through public workshops in 35 major cities across Europe, as well as virtually. At these workshops, as well as learning from MCE experts, you get to meet your peers, interact and share experiences. Secondly, at company level, MCE delivers customized learning solutions. Increasingly the ‘What Leadership Is For’ topic is becoming the top priority for the leaders we meet—because they want to see an impact and not just do ‘training for the sake of it.’

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Partick Faniel is Managing Director of Management Centre Europe (MCE). Spanning over 25 years his career has been spent transforming businesses of all sizes, from startups to global enterprises—leading American companies in Europe, and business schools in Switzerland and in the UK.

As part of the American Management Association, MCE is a key player in leadership and management development across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, offering both open programmes and tailored learning solutions for executives and teams.

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‘What Leadership is for: Identifying the Three Drivers for Stand-out Performance,’ Patrick Faniel. Published by Novaro Publishing, 2024, ISBN 978-1-7398640-6-4