Supercharged Leadership – Unleashing Your Untapped Potential for Real Impact

Over more than 40 years developing leaders in military, business and government, I have repeatedly seen the same problem: leaders with too much work and too little time.

They are usually clear about what they need to achieve because they’ve been told,but often haven’t been shown how to deliver it effectively.

Research from organisations such as the Chartered Management Institute, combined with my own studies, suggests up to 80% of leaders have never been given some of the fundamental leadership skills they need to the depth required to be fully effective.

Even when they have developed individual skills, those skills are often disconnected and so deliver limited impact.

From Individual Skills to Supercharged Leadership

That is why I developed my Supercharged Leadership approach.

Most leadership development treats individual skills separately: delegation, engagement, communication, strategic thinking, innovation and leading change.

Each, if implemented effectively, can improve performance.

But leadership is not a series of disconnected activities.

Get the key elements working together as an integrated system — from the most granular task optimisation through to strategic thinking, entrepreneurial leadership and building the organisation of the future — and the total impact can become significantly greater than the individual parts.

A powerful multiplier effect.

• Better delegation gives leaders more time.
• More time allows greater focus on high-value activity and people.
• Better people leadership increases engagement and discretionary effort.
• Greater engagement improves execution.
• Strategic alignment focuses that effort on what matters most.
• Entrepreneurial thinking identifies new opportunities.
•  Collaboration enables those opportunities to be seized.
• Together, those elements help build the business of the future.

That is Supercharged Leadership.

Leaders Need the “How”, Not Just the “What”

The underlying driver of Supercharged Leadership is my Accelerate Your Success roadmap: six integrated steps taking leaders from optimising business as usual to building the business of the future.

1. Optimise task delivery

A leader’s most fundamental role is to get things done — but often skills to deliver this aren’t optimised. Take delegation. Leaders should do the work only they can do rather than work others could deliver. But often they do work they shouldn’t be doing. That wastes vital leadership time.

In my keynotes I run a five-minute delegation exercise. Audiences regularly identify, on average, around half a working day each week that could potentially be redirected towards higher-value activity.

That is hidden performance potential for almost every leader already sitting inside the organisation.

2. Get the best from people

The next step is creating an environment where people want to give their best.

Making this happen isn’t complicated. But leaders need help on reflecting to reveal the answer.   

Ask any group of leaders to remember what a great boss did that made them perform at their best and, within minutes, they will identify the fundamentals: good feedback, recognition, development, support, trust and genuine interest in people.

Then once leaders have that their, and they are always the same, making it happen in relatively easy. And it can get up to 30% more effort from 60% of people.

3. Align effort to the big picture and collaborate

We have all seen teams working hard while producing little strategic value.

Activity is not output, and output may not be impact.

People need to understand how their work contributes to the organisation’s objectives. Once teams share the same big picture, collaboration across organisational silos becomes significantly easier. This can get 35% more effort from most people.

At UBS this was central to creating a more integrated organisation, “ONE” UBS. The integrated business model we developed went on to become part of a Harvard Business School case study and delivered significant new revenue in subsequent years.

Get these first three elements working together and business as usual will move towards excellence.

But in a world of relentless change, that is no longer enough. Leaders must also build the future.

4. Grow entrepreneurial leaders

Once current activity is performing effectively, further value can only come from identifying new opportunities, organic growth.

To achieve this leaders need to develop a more entrepreneurial mindset: understanding the whole organisation, focusing on the end customer, constantly looking for better ways to operate, acting as brand ambassadors and keeping things as simple as possible.

5. Seize opportunity

But identifying the opportunities is not enough. Leaders need to evaluate them effectively, collaborate across boundaries and focus resources on the opportunities most likely to create significant value.

In simple terms: minimum effort for maximum ROI.

6. Build the business of the future

The final step brings everything together. Excellent day-to-day delivery combines with engaged people, strategic alignment, entrepreneurial thinking and the ability to identify and seize opportunities creates the supercharge effect.

That is how organisations move from managing today to creating tomorrow.

The Real Opportunity

There is no magical new way to easily be a good leader. Good leadership is timeless, fundamentally getting the best from humans.

Supercharged Leadership is about giving leaders the fundamental tools they need to be effective and integrating them into one practical system so each reinforces the others.

It provides a roadmap leaders can use every day to turn:

Mindset → Behaviour → Action → Results

When the individual elements reinforce one another, leadership stops being a collection of disconnected skills.

It becomes a multiplier of organisational performance.

That is where significant hidden performance potential exists — for leaders personally and for their organisations.

That is Supercharged Leadership. And that is what leaders experience in my keynotes.