Why a Leadership Checklist

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By Michael Useem, Author of The Leader's Checklist

Consider the executive who briefed his top management team on the company's plans for the coming year, referencing products launches, pricing pressures, and analyst concerns. The off-site presentation proved engaging and stimulating, with vibrant graphics to bolster it and strong applause to end it. Yet the moment felt strangely incomplete, an opportunity unfulfilled.

Managers in the room learned little more than they already knew about the executive's personally. They heard nothing about how he or she viewed them collectively or what was expected of them individually. Even worse, they learned much about the tactics of the moment but little about where they were going.

Perhaps, because such elements could have been so readily added, their absence felt like an unforced error. The executive wove-in many of the essential threads of the leadership fabric but seemed to fall short of spinning the whole cloth.

The lapse is predictable, almost commonplace. My work on leadership development in the U.S. and abroad confirms that meetings like this take place all the time, in a multitude of languages, to the universal consternation of those present.

But my work and that of an array of other researchers and observers tells me that the absence of a serviceable checklist is one of most correctable lapses in leadership. Through the simple step of creating and consistently applying the equivalent of a pilot or surgeon's checklist, many of a leader's unforced errors can be mitigated, I believe, if not eliminated.

From witnessing leaders facing a range of critical moments, I have concluded that their experience points to a core of just 15 mission-critical leadership principles that vary surprisingly little among companies or countries.

I have also become convinced that with leadership, as with much else, brevity is the soul of wit. Albert Einstein once described the calling of modern physics as an effort to make the physical universe as simple as possible -- but not simpler. The leader's checklist is likewise at its best when it is as bare-bones as possible -- but not more so.

That is why I wrote The Leader's Checklist. It is intended to offer a complete set of vital leadership principles that are tried, tested, and true. And for actively applying the checklist, six learning avenues are essential, including receipt of regular feedback on their application.

Had a coach attended the ill-fated presentation above, the executive would learned that he had fallen short on three of the essentials; communicating the strategy, the expectations, and the presenter's character.

Michael Useem, author of The Leader's Checklist, is the Director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management and William and Jacalyn Egan Professor of Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Leadership Moment, Investor Capitalism, and The Go Point, among other books. The Leadership Moment was included in The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, written by the business book experts at 800-CEO-READ, and listed as one of the 10 best leadership books on the Washington Post's "Leadership Playlist." Useem's articles have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Fast Company, Financial Times, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, McKinsey Quarterly, New York Times, U.S. News & World Report, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere.