Of course strategy is important. You have to have the right strategy to be successful but ultimately it is your culture that will determine if your strategy is successful.

I’ve witnessed the power of culture first hand and the impact it has on the performance of sports teams, schools, hospitals, and businesses such as Hendrick BMW.

Turns out the same culture that fuels NASCAR champions Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon also helps sell more cars.

When I visited Hendrick BMW in Charlotte to speak to their company I could tell they were different the minute I walked in the door. The receptionist and first person you meet is clearly the CEO of the company–Chief Energy Officer—and she dispenses smiles and positive energy to all who enter.

As you look around the showroom you notice that all the employees are wearing uniforms with classy blue shirts and the Hendrick logo on them. You get a sense that this is a professional group and unified team. You can also feel the energy in the showroom just as you can feel the energy when you walk into a great restaurant. I believe great cultures share great energy.

I also see a car featured in the middle of the showroom with a bunch of words on it.

When I ask the GM of the store what the words mean he explains that they read my newsletter about creating a power word for the year and each employee came up with their word. They then put all the words on the car for their employees to see when they come to work each day and for their customers to see what drives them to be their best.

Leaders at Hendrick BMW, similar to the great school cultures I’ve witnessed around the country, post positive messages around the building reinforcing their beliefs and principles. They celebrate their past success and make it very clear they expect future success. They are a culture that believes in developing champions who serve others.

In the offices it’s also obvious how they feel about negativity and what they do about it.

Hendrick is also extremely selective in whom they hire and only those who fit their culture and possess a high level of professionalism are added to the team. They also invest a lot to train and develop their people in order to sustain success and retain their talent. Like all great organizations I’ve worked with, Hendrick knows what their culture stands for and they hire, develop and grow those who will thrive in their culture.

When I asked the Hendrick leaders if all these initiatives to invest in their culture and people have made a difference I was given a resounding YES. Turns out Hendrick BMW is the number one BMW dealership in the country.

Culture not only beats strategy it also fuels it and drives you and your organization to record growth and performance.

What are you and your organization doing to build a great culture? We want to hear about it? Share your thoughts below.

1. Focused
To lead a team to success, leaders must possess an extraordinary amount of focus. It’s important to eliminate distractions from the work area and to hone in on the key issues at hand. While leaders are often pulled in numerous directions simultaneously, they must be able to retain clear minds and focus on the things that matter.

2. Passionate
It’s possible to teach someone to be a leader, but truly effective leaders are already passionate about what they do. Your enthusiasm and level of commitment can inspire your team members and motivate them to do better work. Modeling the attitude you want each person to have is one of the most effective ways to lead your team toward a successful destination.

3. Assertive
As a leader, you have requirements for your team and goals that must be fulfilled. When team members aren’t meeting expectations, a leader must feel comfortable being assertive. Assertive leaders are firm and bold, unafraid to go after what they want. Such a level of certainty and confidence will serve both you and your team well as you tackle larger challenges and go after new goals.

4. Decisive
Leaders are often called on to make big decisions, so it’s also important for you to be decisive. Of course, a decisive leader should never be confused with an impulsive one. A decisive leader carefully weighs the potential effects of each option and chooses the opportunity that works best for his or her team. To be decisive, you must also feel comfortable taking responsibility for the results of your choice.

5. Empowering
Supporting your team is one of the best ways to encourage members to perform well. Empower each individual by making it clear that you trust his or her judgment. Give people the authority they need to do their jobs well and show them an appropriate level of respect.

6. Confident
Successful leaders are confident in their own abilities and decisions. If you want other people to believe in your capability as a leader, you must first believe in yourself. While you should make sure your confidence isn’t perceived as arrogance, there’s nothing wrong with feeling a strong sense of certainty about your choices.

7. Communicative
Always keep your team informed about what’s going on. All too often, leaders leave their team members out of important discussions and meetings. A lack of communication promotes the spread of false information and resentment among your team members.

8. Self-Aware
It can be tough to retain a strong sense of yourself and the way you appear to others, but focus on being self-aware. Consider your strengths and weaknesses as objectively as possible and don’t be afraid to ask for feedback on your performance.

9. Humble
Effective leaders are down-to-earth and easy to relate with. People feel more comfortable connecting with a leader who is humble and compassionate. Strive to understand where other people are coming from and keep a healthy, grounded perspective on your own achievements.

10. Honest
Finally, effective leaders are honest. Be upfront with your team members and trust them enough to communicate openly and authentically together. It’s important to build a level of mutual trust within your team so that each person feels comfortable addressing his or her concerns with you.

All people in positions of authority might be able to call themselves leaders, but effective leaders are those individuals who seek to emulate these ten essential traits. If you’re looking to improve the quality of your leadership style, choose a few key traits to focus on initially and watch as your impact shifts with time. Your team will achieve new levels of success as your leadership style evolves and becomes more well-defined.

Please share any additional ideas you have for effective leadership traits in the comments below.

Answer this question: If you were able to focus the attention and efforts of everyone on your team on one set of goals that would drive significant results for your company, what would you use as the one metric to measure progress? How would you know you were on the right track? What would be the rallying cry for your team?

Transformational leaders need a focused metric for progress: What are the “squats” for your organization?

A colleague who runs a large financial services company figured it out. He visited with the head athletic trainer of the Houston Texans and posed that same question, “What is the acid test for fitness?” The answer came back as a single word, “Squats.” The athletic trainer said, “If a player can squat twice his body weight, I know that the other aspects of training (cardio fitness, drills, discipline) are all in line.”

Seasoned leaders like that come to understand which measures reveal the most powerful indications of progress and health.

I believe that the same approach works for business. Transformational leaders—the ones who can make the biggest impact on forward momentum—know what to look for and know how to focus their colleagues on what matters most. They know the secret of the “squat” for their business—that single metric that proves they’re on exactly the right track.

I’m lucky. My life is spent walking through the doors of organizations in virtually every industry from consumer goods to technology to manufacturing to healthcare to energy, entertainment, hospitality, financial services, and nonprofit or government agencies. Over time, I’ve become convinced that every leader needs to master the skills that an outsider brings to capture the essence of the strategic equation:

1. Create a movie trailer. Look at the company where you work with fresh eyes and challenge yourself to develop the equivalent of a movie trailer—a short synopsis of the plot of your organization. Synthesize the complexities of the important issues into a basic strategic story line that describes what it takes to hit the next level of progress.
2. “Net up” your insights. Construct a single metric that reflects the impact of the core business drivers. How will you measure progress? What are the squats for your business?
3. Develop a focused rallying cry to nail the squat. Connect the dots from the squats to the aspects of operations, marketing, product innovation, talent development and financial management that will drive most powerfully toward your goal.

The squat for business provides a powerful focal point to drive results.

Within the past few months, I’ve worked with teams who have defined their “squat” question in a variety of different ways:

Energy company: “At the end of the day, it’s all about a triple-A bond credit rating.”

Restaurant company: “We need to get our current guests to return to our restaurant one more time.”

Financial services company: “More than anything else, we need to increase penetration into our current book of business by 6%.”

Computer security company: “The focus needs to be on increasing the number of transactions that flow through our customers’ credit card purchases by 5%.”

Municipal government: “Increase the number of patents issued within the region by 33%.”

When leaders clear the clutter and stop to reflect on what it really takes to get to the next level of performance, they bring clarity to the process of transforming their organizations.

Better than mission statements, charters, visions, and tag lines, a single metric that is truly the main indicator of health can drive rallying cries to everyone in the organization as they figure out what they need to do to accelerate progress toward that metric.

I’ve experienced light bulb moments at every level of an organization once people understood what was required to hit the mark:

• The driver of an 18-wheeler at a large food distribution company realized that he could preplan the load more efficiently to shave time off of his route.

• The marketing director of a restaurant chain drove customer satisfaction scores right down to the ground level, focusing on how each server could get each guest (at every day part) to come one more time.

• The head of manufacturing at a large chemical plant understood that asking a customer when they needed a shipment would result in less rework.

• The manager of a technology company focused her attention on reducing the customer complaints on modem shipments, putting customer callbacks front and center of their attention.

• A mayoral candidate built a dynamic plan for education into his platform to drive economic development in the region.

Transformational leaders at every level of an organization need to understand what matters most and how to measure it.

What are the “squats” for your organization?

This post is by Andrea Kates, author of the the bestselling business innovation book, Find Your Next: Using the Business Genome Approach to Find Your Company’s Next Competitive Edge. Learn more about the book, review a sample chapter and more at www.BusinessGenome.com. Order Find Your Next now from Amazon.

Think about it. Ask any group of leaders if humility is important, and almost every one of them will nod their heads and tell you that the world needs more humble leaders in every field, from business to politics to, well, everywhere. Ask that same group if they would like an opportunity to be humbled, and virtually every one of them will decline.

But I suppose it’s hard to blame them. After all, being humbled is, by definition, always uncomfortable and often painful. No one enjoys seeking out discomfort and pain. And yet there is no getting around the importance of experiencing those difficult moments in life when we are reminded that we are more fallible, broken and human than we’d like to think we are.

One of the best opportunities that I’ve found for being humbled is in my role as a parent. Some people might think I’m referring to the unglamorous work of changing diapers, cleaning up spilled milk and picking up dirty clothes. While those are certainly humbling experiences, I find that the most profound instances of parental humility occur for me when I am disciplining my children. Or more accurately, when I’m criticizing their behavior.

See, when I’m scolding any one of my four sons (it’s not that I’m unwilling to scold my daughters; it’s just that I don’t have any) I often find myself wondering why he acts the way he does. Being an extravert, I usually verbalize my thoughts and say something to the effect of “where did you learn to act like that?” And that’s when, if I’m being honest with myself, I realize that the answer to my semi-rhetorical question is that my son likely learned it from me (it’s not that I’m unwilling to include my wife in this example; it’s just that I’m afraid to).

Of course, I don’t really teach my sons to misbehave. It’s not like I sit down and give them instructions on how to provoke their brothers, break the dining room chairs or talk back to their parents. But I must have done something to give them the idea that it would be okay to do those things, or more likely, that the consequence for doing so wouldn’t be significant.

And it’s in that moment of realization that I have a choice: I can either be humble enough to acknowledge that the first person I need to be addressing if I want to change my son’s behavior is me, or I can go on venting about how ornery he is and watch the orneriness continue.

The same thing happens to me – and to all leaders – at work. On a bad day we often find ourselves complaining about something that people in our organizations are doing. So we turn to our colleagues on the leadership team – or our spouses – and we vent.

“The mid-level managers in this company are terrible at giving constructive feedback to their employees.” That’s just one of the common complaints I hear from executives.

Now, if we’re lucky enough to have a colleague on the management team, a consultant, or a spouse who is up front with us, or if we are somehow struck with a blinding ray of humility in that moment, we will come to the realization that the person we’re ultimately complaining about is ourselves. As a consultant, my favorite way to remind leadership teams of this inescapable conclusion is to ask them the question, “how many of the people that you’re complaining about report to someone outside of this room?”

Of course, the answer is ‘none’. Some executives quickly understand the point I’m making and accept the humble lesson that they are ultimately responsible for the behavior of employees. But many push back. “Wait a second,” they argue. “Most of these mid-level managers work two or three levels below us. We can’t micromanage them and force them to give their people feedback.”

After I acknowledge the limited validity of their point, I usually ask “Okay, so how good are you at giving constructive feedback to your direct reports?” If the leaders are humble enough to acknowledge that they’re not particularly good at it themselves (most are not), and that they can’t expect people to do something that they don’t do themselves, then my point has been made.

But many will claim that they give plenty of feedback to their people, and certainly much more than the mid-level managers they’re criticizing. For these most stubborn leaders, the next question I ask, and the most important one yet, is this: “So how diligent and painstaking are you about making your direct reports give their people feedback?”

Before I give them a chance to answer, I like to remind them about the concept of a “sin of omission,” which is the idea that many of the mistakes people make are not a function of what they’re doing wrong, but rather what they’re not doing right. See, in most organizations, the biggest problems arise not because leaders are actively promoting the wrong behavior, but rather because they’re passively doing so by allowing people to get away with this behavior without impunity.

The most common reason that leaders commit sins of omission is simply because they just don’t feel comfortable confronting people about what they are or are not doing. Instead, they look the other way and hope that the problem goes away. And so, when they see that the problem has spread throughout their organization, they really have no one to blame but themselves. This is a moment of great humility. And a moment of truth.

Great leaders, like great parents, will grit their teeth and accept the painful reality that they are almost always the reason that something is awry in their organizations. They’ll accept the pain of being humbled and set themselves on a course of correction. In the end, their egos may be temporarily bruised but the organizations they lead will improve. Poor leaders, on the other hand, will try to protect their egos by continuing to blame others. Ultimately, their organizations will suffer, and their egos will get much bigger bruises, the kind that last a long time.

What all leaders, and for that matter, parents, need to do is seek out opportunities for being humbled, as painful as they may be. It is only within that humility that we will discover the reservoir of improvement and progress that we’re looking for, and that our organizations, our families, and our society so desperately want.

Regardless of whether times are Up, Down, or Sideways, we too easily get off track when we chase success as a futurist. So rather than focusing on what might happen, focus on what you can do now to ensure you’ll be successful regardless of what happens. Rather than trying to predict the future, prepare for it.

You can prepare for it in a number of ways, but one of the most important is through learning. And while we might approach each day as a presentologist, we can still learn in the future tense. That’s not easy, because there’s so much out there to learn and a limited amount of time each day in which to learn it. What we choose to learn is critical, because the successful person isn’t the one who learns the most stuff the best — it’s the person who learns the most important stuff the fastest.

When you consider all the options for what to learn today that will prepare you for tomorrow, start by looking at the options with three pieces of glass — a mirror, a telescope, and magnifying glass.

• Look in the mirror. Be honest with yourself about your skills, talents, goals, strengths, weaknesses, time, et al.

• Look into the telescope. What can you see in the distance that’s coming your way? How will marriage or a new child shape your future? How will life change as an empty-nester? What changes seem likely (if not 100 percent predictable) within your industry, your company, or your career?

• Look into the magnifying glass. What’s happening at the gritty level of now? What do you need to learn to succeed today, tomorrow, this week, this month?

Wisely investing your learning time will provide the leverage you need to succeed in the present and in the future.

This post is by Mark Sanborn, the author of the new release Up, Down, or Sideways: How to Succeed When Times Are Good, Bad, or In Between. You can download a sample chapter at http://www.marksanborn.com/up-down-or-sideways/. Order now from Amazon.

Why so elusive? In part, because great leadership is shot through with contradiction.

A great leader is selfless — and has a healthy ego. A great leader is by definition unitary, singular, unique — and somehow inspires thousands to emulate him or her. Great leaders have their heads in the clouds and their toes firmly in the dirt.

Here are five descriptions of what great leaders do, what we call “Five Keys to Legendary Leadership.” The first four are all essential — and are completely contradicted by the fifth. Yet somehow, the first four don’t seem to work without the fifth.

They are the four fingers and thumb of leadership.

Finger #1: Hold the Vision
Building a business takes skill, work, and capital resources. But those are details. More than anything else, building a business—really, building anything—is an act of faith. Because you’re creating something out of nothing. You are moving into the future on invisible wires, without a net.

It’s easy to say, “Hold a vision.” The hard part isn’t the vision. Anyone can come up with a vision. The hard part is the holding.

The single biggest challenge to any organization is the constant cloud of fear and doubt that swirls around the heads of the people involved. As a leader, your job is to hold fast to the big picture, to keep seeing in your mind’s eye, with crystal clarity, where it is you’re going—that place that right at this moment exists only in your mind’s eye. And to keep seeing that, even when nobody else does. Especially when nobody else does. Your people count on you to do this. It’s the biggest job you have.”

Finger #2: Build Your People
Time was, people in a business were often viewed as “workers,” as if, out of the entirety of a person’s being, that which was relevant to the business could be reduced to a single function. Not anymore. Increasingly we’ve come to realize that people are people, and every person in a business is a universe of talents, skills, and potential value. Good businesses look to hire competent employees. Great businesses hire people and then commit to bring out their latent greatness through continual investment.

Finger #3: Do the Work
Great leaders don’t expect anyone else to do anything they haven’t done themselves. They get dirt under their nails and mud on their boots. Abraham Lincoln knew law. He’d practiced it in freezing-cold, bare-floored small-town courtrooms. So did Gandhi. They both emancipated millions—but only because they knew the feel of the craft in their hands. Before he was a great general or the nation’s first (and arguably greatest) president, George Washington worked as a land surveyor. He knew the land he would later govern. As a boy, Sam Walton milked the family cow and sold the surplus milk to neighbors. Bill Gates spent thousands of hours as a teenager programming computers.

This is one of most great leaders’ greatest success secrets: whatever field they are in, whatever business empire they run, the chances are excellent they have done it at some point with their own hands, learning it nuts and bolts, from the ground up.

Finger #4: Stand for Something
Leadership is not something you can put on and take off, like a set of clothes. Your capacity to influence is not something you can rehearse, like a speech in a play. People, contrary to popular belief, are not fools. No matter what front you put on, they will read you, consciously or unconsciously—the you behind the words.

It’s not that what you say isn’t important. It is. That’s just not where the source of your power lies. What you have to give, you offer least of all through what you say; in greater part through what you do; but in greatest part through who you are.

Competence counts—but character matters more. If you want people to follow you, they need to trust that you know what you’re doing. But that’s the smaller part of it. Competence is simply the baseline, the thing that puts you in the game. Character, though, is a precious gem, and anyone who possesses it is worth a great deal to the world around him.

You can lead only as far as you grow.

Thumb: Pass the Mantle
So there you have it. Leaders hold a vision. Leaders care about their people. Leaders get their hands dirty and their boots muddy, do the work and make the tough decisions. And leaders stand for something.

It’s about all those things. But at the same time, it isn’t about any of those things. Because you can hold the biggest vision, care about all your people, do all the work, and stand for something until the end of days — and it’s still you, you, you.

Here is the heart of the contradiction that is great leadership: great leadership isn’t a place you arrive, it is a place into which you disappear.

Great parenting is not about the parent; great teaching is not about the teacher. And great leadership? Whatever it truly is, it’s not about you.

This post is by Bob Burg and John David Mann, the coauthors of the new release It’s Not About You:A Little Story About What Matters Most in Business. You can download two sample chapters at www.INAYBook.com. Order now from Amazon.

What goes wrong? In surveys and focus groups with thousands of executives, researchers at Indiana University’s Kelly School of Business identified some common reasons why new leaders can run off the rails. Some of the top derailers are:

• Ineffective communications skills
• Weak relationships
• Failure to clarify expectations

Fortunately, there are three simple things that new leaders can do to increase the odds of success. The successful executives that I interviewed for The Next Level recommend that newly promoted leaders do these things in their first month on the new job:

1.Meet and Greet: A top priority for any new leader is to get to know the key players in the organization. Leaders need to be multi-directional early and:

• Look up and down the chain to top management and direct reports.
• Look left and right to the peers on the leadership team.
• Look diagonally to the people recognized as the experts and influencers in the organization.
• Look outside the organization to key customers and other stakeholders.

2.Listen More, Talk Less: Those early conversations should be dedicated to asking some common questions of the stakeholders. The new leader’s goal should be to learn the organization as quickly as possible. That can be accomplished by listening more and talking less. By asking a set of common questions, leaders can begin to see the patterns about what matters most in their new job. Some good questions to ask include:

• What are the key outcomes that will make this year successful for you and your team?
• What kind of support would you like to see from me and my team to support your success
• What is working well that my team should keep doing?
• What would you like to see my team start doing or stop doing to be more effective?
• What do I need to know about my new job that people are unlikely to tell me?

3.Find Out What Success Looks Like: The most important question that new leaders need to ask is this:

What do you think success looks like for my team six, twelve and twenty four months from now?”

By comparing and contrasting the different answers to this question, a new leader can sort through what’s expected and begin to identify who can help.

Do these three suggestions sound like common sense advice? Sure they do, but the high rate of new leader failure suggests they’re often not implemented.

If you want to succeed at a higher level, you’ve got to build a strong foundation for success. These three basic ideas provide a proven process for getting started.

“To build a winning a team and a successful organization you must create a culture of greatness.”

It’s the most important thing a leader can do because culture drives behavior, behavior drives habits and habits create results. In the words of leaders at Apple, “Culture beats strategy all day long.”

When you create a culture of greatness you create a collective mindset in your organization that expects great things to happen—even during challenging times. You expect your people to be their best, you make it a priority to coach them to be their best and most of all you create a work environment that allows them to be their best.

A culture of greatness creates an expectation that everyone in the organization be committed to excellence. It requires leaders and managers to put the right people in the right positions where they are humble and hungry and willing to work harder than everyone else. A culture of greatness dictates that each person use their gifts and strengths to serve the purpose and mission of the organization. And it means that you don’t just bring in the best people, but you also bring out the best in your people.

If you are thinking that this sounds like common sense, it is. But unfortunately far too many organizations expect their people to be their best but they don’t invest their time and energy to help them be their best nor do they create an environment that is conducive to success. They want great results but they are not willing to do what it takes to create a culture of greatness.

A culture of greatness requires that you find the right people that fit your culture. Then you coach them, develop them, mentor them, train them and empower them to do what they do best. As part of this process you develop positive leaders who share positive energy throughout the organization because positive energy flows from the top down. You also don’t allow negativity to sabotage the moral, performance and success or your organization. You deal with negativity at the cultural level so your people can spend their time focusing on their work instead of fighting energy vampires. And you find countless ways to enhance communication, build trust and relationships that are the foundation upon which winning teams are built.

If creating a culture of greatness sounds like a lot of work, it is, but not as much work as dealing with the crises, problems and challenges associated with negative, dysfunctional and sub-par cultures. While most organizations waste a lot of time putting out fires you can spend your time building a great organization that rises above the competition.

Greatness Resources:
Download a free “I Am Willing to Pay the Price” poster.
One leader at Volvo Construction equipment posted one of our Training Camp posters on his door that said “I Am Willing to Pay the Price that Greatness Requires.” Then he had everyone on his team sign the poster so every time they went to his office they saw the poster and their signature. Click the poster image to see a larger view.