Do your goals include outcomes that depend on people outside of your direct control?  It’s no secret that there are a lot more inter-dependencies in today’s work environment than in the past.  It’s hard to have any real impact without drawing upon people who you don’t formally lead. 

Yet, more often than not, leaders frame their role, goals, and efforts around those things that fall directly in their span of control.  While this might make things easier and more attainable, it also reduces impact.  More importantly, it distorts the leader’s view of his or her effectiveness. 

Many leaders measure their effectiveness based on their employees’ engagement or team productivity. It’s true that not everyone in a leadership position can manage their people effectively. But, using your team’s engagement and effectiveness sets the bar pretty low for assessing leadership effectiveness.  After all, if you can’t engage and enable the people for whom you have control over job assignments, rewards, recognition, feedback, support, resources, and goals, then you probably shouldn’t be leading.

Alternatively, some leaders take pride in their ability to hit all of their goals.  This could be a good measure of leadership.  However, they often define those goals so narrowly that it’s almost impossible to miss.  For example, a corporate quality team’s goals and accountability should be for the overall quality of an organization’s products and services.  However, in one case that I saw, the team wasn’t willing to elevate their goal to that level.  They argued that they didn’t control the people in the business units who actually had to use their processes, training, and tools (e.g., you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink).  So they watered down the goal to something that was “attainable” – making training, tools, etc. available and of high quality.  They hit their goal but had little impact. Delivering on goals that are entirely within your scope of control isn’t a measure of leadership effectiveness, it’s your job.  If you believe that you can’t get people to do things unless you “control” them, you may want to rethink your role as a leader.

As John Maxwell states, real leadership is about influence.  The best test of influence isn’t how well you compel action from those who report to you.  The real test is how well you influence those people for whom you have no direct control.

Chip and Dan Heath provide a compelling example of this type of leadership in their book, “Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard”.  The Heaths tell the story of Donald Berwick.  Berwick was the CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI).  In 2004 he saw a major problem in healthcare.  One of the greatest health risks faced by patients in hospitals was being in the hospital.  Medical error, infections, and inefficiencies were the fifth leading cause of death or injury in a hospital.  On average, two hundred and sixty-eight people died each day as a result of medical error.  That’s the equivalent of one jumbo jet crash, every day for a year.  Berwick decided that this was unacceptable. 

In 2004, in a speech before a conference of healthcare administrators, Berwick stated his goal of saving 100,000 lives in 18 months by improving safety, quality, and efficiency.  But, here’s the catch.  Berwick had no formal authority over any of those hospitals or administrators.  He was not a regulator or government agency.  They certainly didn’t report to him.  He was just a guy with a staff of seventy-five people who knew that a change had to be made.

Berwick could easily have stated the challenge to the administrators but then confined his personal goals to those things that he and the Institute for Healthcare improvement could directly control such as developing white papers or training or gathering data and best practices.  However, had he stopped there, most likely his impact and the outcome would have been quite small.

Instead Berwick stated the challenge and assumed responsibility for the goal.  This forced him to change his focus and role as a leader.  He still had to produce training and white papers and collect best practices.  However, he also had to actively and constantly engage the administrators and find ways to motivate them and influence their actions.  He met with them regularly.  He brought them data.  He showed them what others were doing.  He went as far as introducing administrators to families who lost loved ones due to medical error.  In other words, he focused his energy outside of his immediate span of control and had to rely on influence, communication, vision, and informal accountability.

Eighteen months later Berwick once again appeared before the group to report the result.  Based on their calculations, the hospitals that participated in his “100,000 Lives” campaign prevented approximately 122,000 deaths. 

Think about the difference in Berwick’s impact between defining his world in terms of what was in his direct control versus including that which wasn’t.

Leadership in an interdependent world is quite different from leadership in a discrete world.  If you define your role and goals only around what you can directly control, you probably won’t see much impact.  Leadership isn’t only about what you do with the resources you control.  It’s increasingly about how you influence those you don’t.  Set your goals around real change and real impact.  Then, figure out how to rally, support, and enable the people who you don’t control.

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Brad Kolar is the President of Kolar Associates, a leadership consulting and workforce productivity consulting firm.  He can be reached at brad.kolar@kolarassociates.com.