Six Critical Leadership Activities: Their Source and Rationale

The following list identifies six activities that I consider “critical” to successful leadership. These activities have helped me become and remain a more effective and efficient leader here at Remote DBA Experts.

1. Strategize
2. Align
3. Energize
4. Enable
5. Actualize
6. Recognize

In my last post, I shared how I framed the meaning of the six terms I used to label these activities.  In this introductory post, I want to help you build a stronger foundation by describing the source, development process and the rationale for these activities.

A couple of years ago, I read a book that led me to the final consolidation of these Six Critical Leadership Activities.  This book, entitled The Breakthrough Company, is based on empirical studies of highly successful “breakthrough” companies.  The book is a GREAT read and I highly recommended it!   One of the key findings is that most of the top leaders of breakthrough companies focus a lot of their attention and time on three key leadership tasks:

1. Crafting and adopting strategy
2. Getting the most out of people
3. Ensuring execution

Reading this was highly revealing to me!  It has made a lasting impact on my approach to leading Remote DBA Experts.  I spent time thinking about these three tasks and I further developed them to fit my mental model and needs.  Thus, what emerged from this process was a further segmentation of the tasks resulting in the six sub-items I labeled and trademarked (a bad habit of mineJ) “Critical Leadership Activities™”.

To help execute the CEO role more effectively, efficiently and consistently, I developed a format that enables me to more easily plan and prioritize the six activities aligned with Remote DBA Experts’ top goals and priorities.  I use this form on a daily and weekly basis to help me remain highly aligned:

Note that the left column of the Effort Alignment Matrix™ contains the three tasks I learned from reading The Breakthrough Company.  My effort to make these three tasks more meaningful and actionable for my business led me to the addition of two activities for each of the three tasks.  The ensuing six activities emerged from prior leadership reading, observations and experiences. They took some time to precipitate from my thinking while I played with the model by putting into actual and regular practice:

• Crafting and adopting strategy involves strategizing and aligning
• Getting the most out of people involves energizing and enabling
• Ensuring execution involves actualizing and recognizing

These models work fairly well for me.  However, you may need to tune it to become most meaningful to your role, conditions, and circumstances.  Ultimately, you need some model to help you frame your role.  This is the one that works best thus far.

In the following posts, I will expand upon each of the Six Critical Leadership Activities in more detail by asking and responding to several questions related to the post subject.  I hope this introduction gave you a good sense of what my post series is going to cover and the sources/origins of the theory behind it.

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO