For any organisation to be profitable, productive, innovative, and to be a great place where employees desire to work, there must be good leadership. 

However, many organisations lack just that, and it is costing them dearly; the difference between good and bad leadership can be as much as a 50 percent return over five years. So what is leadership and what exactly is the role of a leader in an organisation? Sometimes, it seems as if there are as many leadership definitions as there are stars in the night sky. The traditional, and perhaps most widely recognised, model of leadership today is usually associated with strength, decisiveness, empowerment, influence and other personal and technical attributes; but these are personal traits, and don’t really get to the heart of what a leader is for. There is also a myth that leadership should only reside at the very top of an organisation. Unfortunately, that misses the point of leadership altogether. These definitions, models and myths are too simplistic and fail to fully encompass what it really takes to be a successful leader – because not all leaders are.

Why is the current leadership model broken? Many organisations operate under an archaic leadership model that grants authority to only a handful of very senior individuals. They are expected to have technical know-how and insight into the company, its products and customers, and to predict future trends. However, because these individuals are so far up the hierarchy, they work in relative isolation from the rest of the business, seeing only a fraction of its intricacies – usually as manifested in business performance. This creates a culture of short-termism which puts an organisation’s long-term health at risk because employees with useful information and ideas are overlooked, leaving leaders making ill-informed decisions.

A second issue is that of engagement. With power concentrated in so few, other employees, including less senior managers and directors, are not encouraged to follow their intuition, which stifles innovation. Employees want to work for an organisation that is performing well, but also one that hires the best talent, challenges and stimulates their intellect, communicates well and honestly, and values their input. Studies have long supported the notion that an engaged workforce achieves greater improvements in performance and talent retention in the long-term. Business leaders must re-evaluate their roles, and to do this they need a simple yet effective model that highlights what the role of a leader, regardless of their position or pay grade, should be to an organisation. 

Let’s start by postulating what leadership needs to accomplish, rather than what a leader should be: Leadership, maximizes the efforts of others, towards the achievement of a goal. – Kevin Kruse, New York Times Best Seller, serial entrepreneur and CEO. If leadership is about influencing those around you to perform to the best of their abilities, then leaders must seek out opportunities that add value to the organisation and match them with those that have the talent to see it through. That’s surely something with which everyone can agree, and it is equally applicable to leaders at every level.

Leaders who actively work on building such “value opportunities”, who grow and develop talent that can spot, execute and exit those opportunities again and again, set up infinite cycles of improvement in talent, performance, and organisational health. These “infinity leaders” recognise that taking their foot off the pedal could risk the organisation’s ability to adapt to new challenges and opportunities in the marketplace.

To ensure this doesn’t happen, leaders at all levels must develop and hire the best talent and task that talent to execute value opportunities that bring not just financial results, but tangible long-term value to the organisation. Many businesses are aware of the talent gap within their ranks; many have even established plans to deal with it in the short-term. However, to safeguard the future health of an organisation leaders have to make the brave decision to act on value opportunities that will shape the company’s future, and to match these opportunities to the talent pool in the form of a team of people able to execute and exit when necessary.

The idea is to be forward-looking, safeguarding the organisation’s long-term health, instead of fixating on short-term gains. It is vital that leaders see themselves as role models because employees mirror the behavior they see their leaders exhibit. This means the importance of that leadership role modeling behavior in coaching employees to develop the habit of looking out for value opportunities cannot be overstated. It will quite literally and directly contribute to ensuring the company remains competitive in the long run.

For instance, Kodak, once a household name, misread the advent of digital cameras despite, ironically, inventing it; one its employees came up with the idea and designed a working prototype in 1973 but the idea was dismissed by bosses who did not see its full potential. While it may be impossible to predict the future, leaders can make calculated guesses when they are well informed and are forward thinking. This means (amongst other things) listening to feedback from employees – especially those with direct relationships with your customers: they are your best gauges for what new trends are shifting the market dynamics. 

The evolving nature of the workplace is changing the notion of leadership, and leaders must themselves evolve and adapt to this paradigm. Gone are the days where leadership resided only at the helm of organisations. The entrepreneurial spirit of an engaged workforce should be harnessed because that is the only way to keep an organisation innovative and productive in the long run. Consider that neither Google nor IBM would be where they are today without the vision of infinity leaders at all levels throughout those enterprises – leaders who were encouraged to pursue value opportunities that have changed both of their respective industries almost beyond recognition.