Leadership Models and the Diamond of Excellence

It doesn’t take long to figure out that there are dozens if not hundreds of leadership models out there.  Some are focused on individual areas (like teams and teambuilding) while others are intended to be comprehensive.  Frankly, most of them are useless, and some are actually counterproductive.  But you’ve got to have one.

Why does anyone need a great leadership model?  For a number of very good reasons:

• There’s so much to think about that it’s extremely helpful to have a grid into which you can place new learning, ideas, material, and tools.
• It’s important to have a framework by which you can see if your approach is balanced or out of whack (like spending all of your time on one or two areas instead of the whole realm of leadership requirements)
• It keeps you focused as a leader on what’s really important and helps you avoid a thousand meaningless distractions
• It allows us to evaluate books, articles, seminars and other arenas where leadership teaching is offered
• It helps us – especially with decent assessments – to determine with great accuracy where our challenges and opportunities lie

Should an effective model be simple or comprehensive?  Absolutely.  It has to be simple enough that a leader can keep it easily in his or her head.  Complicated 7 to 10 models with lots of sidebars are just too much to be handy or useful.  But it also has to be comprehensive enough to allow everything that’s important to a leader to be incorporated.  Too many models are focused on just 1 or 2 aspects of leadership, or worse – or built around a gimmick (you can probably think of a few there).

You want a model that has elegant simplicity.  We spent 25 years distilling our experience with hundreds of organizations and tens of thousans of leaders down into a model that is both straightforward and robust.  We call it the Diamond of Excellence™.  It has 4 facets that are easily grasped but rich enough to cover everything a leader needs to know and do to be top-tier effective.  We’ve been challenging leaders for the past 5 years to name one important leadership situation or challenge that isn’t covered by the Diamond, and to date no one has been able to come up with anything.

The spirit of the Diamond is captured in our tag line, Building Passionate, Thinking, Pure-Performance Organizations™ – all based on a foundation of facing and defining reality.  Please take a few minutes and check out the Diamond on our website.  Whatever you do, find a model that works – for you personally as well as for your team or organization.

Models come in all shapes and sizes.  Make sure you use one that you can build on forever.

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