How Should Leaders Behave?

“As a CEO, you should realize that your greatest contribution is the behavior you cause or allow to thrive in the organization’s upper ranks,”  says Kevin Sharer, teacher in the Strategy unit at Harvard Business School.

In his article, “How Should Your Leaders Behave?”, published in the Harvard Business Review, Sharer advises that when choosing leaders for your organisation, evaluating candidates on behaviour rather than must-have character business ladytraits can lead to better results.

By emphasising behaviour, managers or candidates who fall short of what the best leaders can learn behaviours that they need to exhibit.  It offers the organisation also advantages of diversity.

Define the behaviours that the organisation needs, and expose your key managers to them. Then promote those behaviours as part of the culture, using evaluations, communications, and highly visible actions by leaders—including dismissal for consistent and significant violations.

So, how should leaders behave? It’s hard work to figure out how your managers should behave, he says, but that’s the behaviour everyone expects you to demonstrate; at the CEO’s level. His point simply is, the behaviour of persons in your top management is key to your enterprise’s success.

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