Understanding Your Leadership Mandate
“Michigan has won every game against Ohio I’ve ever seen.”
That was my five-year-old son’s reflection on Saturday after Michigan’s upset win in college football’s most important game. Because he’s never seen it happen, Big Time can barely even imagine Ohio winning the matchup. To him, it’s an entirely one-sided rivalry. “Maybe they won in the olden days, like when Pops was a kid.”
By almost every definition, Ohio’s coach, Ryan Day, is a good football coach. His program is a national championship competitor nearly every year, and his team has won 87% of its games. In the Big Ten conference, his team’s record was 47 wins against one loss heading into Saturday’s game, with the one loss coming to the #1 ranked team in the country. Pretty good stuff, and enough to make you a legend at most schools.
Yet, if I were a betting man, I’d put money on Day getting fired by the end of the year.
Why? Because his Big Ten record of 47-1 was against everyone except for the school’s biggest rival—Michigan. Against Michigan, Day is 1-4, with four straight losses. He’s successful, but not in the one game his fanbase cares about. If you asked Ohio fans if they preferred an 11-1 season with a loss to Michigan or a 1-11 season with a win versus Michigan, you’d hear an irrational number favoring the latter. Day’s job performance is judged on this one game—and very little else matters.
Coincidentally, before the game, I read The Journey of Leadership: How CEOs Learn to Lead from the Inside Out, a new book by McKinsey senior partners Dana Maor, Hans-Werner Kaas, Kurt Strovink, and Ramesh Srinivasan. The authors describe a similar job performance dynamic with CEOs. “As a CEO, nobody tells you exactly what you should do, so it’s your job to figure out your mandate,” they write. Beliefs about that mandate vary across employees, customers, investors, and stakeholders, but none of them would state the mandate as “achieve generically good results.” Instead, there are specific outcomes each group cares about and will use to judge performance.
When I start working with executives, the “only a few outcomes matter” conversation is one we have the first we talk. When discussing how we’ll collect 360-degree feedback, I tell them we won’t use instruments that try to identify one’s general leadership strengths and weaknesses. It’s not about whether they are good leaders—most are or wouldn’t be in their roles.
Instead, success in terms of development is about whether they can deliver on their mandate—the small handful of things that matter to those who will judge them. Hence, the feedback we collect aims to answer the questions, “What’s going to get you promoted?” and “What’s going to get you fired?”
Most executives I work with completely get that rationale. However, more junior leaders often have a view of success that is internal to their company and a belief that developing competencies is most important to their advancement.
Maor, Kaas, Strovink, and Srinivasan counsel that this internally focused approach should change as one elevates in their organization and ultimately to the CEO office. They write, “The best leaders take the time early in their tenure to ask ‘What is my mandate?’ and get input from a broad set of stakeholders—even if they’re an insider who’s been with the company for years and think they know what needs to be done.” Moreover, those leaders ensure they keep talking to stakeholders because they understand that “mandates evolve over time.”
The performance standards of today are not necessarily the performance standards of tomorrow.