Just like Yoga, a leadership framework is about aligning on a set of principles and practices. It is about simplicity - we fool ourselves with complexity all the time.


Recently, Yomento’s CEO Tom Hammar spoke at length about the opportunities and challenges of leadership frameworks in the #nyttänk podcast. To listen on Spotify (note: in Swedish), click here. For more information about the episode on Linkedin, click here (also in Swedish)

Listening to the conversation, and having recently worked on several leadership framework projects with both partners and clients, a few things stood out:

Common derailers and pitfalls
There are several challenges when creating a leadership framework and they all seem to stem from good intentions. Let’s walk through a few of them:
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“Crowdsourcing” and priorities
In our quest to include as many perspectives as possible on what great leadership looks like in our company, we invite - and receive - inputs from many parts of the organization. All of these perspectives are valuable, but how do you select what to keep and what to remove?

While perfection is often defined as “...not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away”, we tend to do the opposite in this process. It really is about prioritizing and cutting away - instead, we retain and add because we wish to include all perspectives on this important topic.

Vagueness and ambiguity‍

If everything is important, nothing becomes important. With the crowdsourcing approach, leadership frameworks tend to become broad and vague, rather than specific and concrete. Including too many opinions many times lead to conflicting messages, which creates confusion around expectations. For example, is it reasonable to ask our leaders to be agile and move fast, while also being 100% process-orientered and focused on compliance?

Broad statements also create room for subjective interpretation, which makes it difficult to create a shared understanding around leadership expectations. Unless big statements are defined and broken down - more times than we think!! - every leader will have their own perception of what different things invlve. We need to specify what we mean with statements like “Foster cross-functional collaboration”, or “Adopting a customer centric mindset”.

Outcomes instead of behaviors

In many frameworks that we have recently seen, many aspects are described as outcomes. For example, “Our leaders create a safe and inspiring work environment”. Apologies for getting slightly technical, but this represents the outcome of consistently applying several different good leadership behaviors (and from the inversion perspective, the absence of negative behaviors) over time. While we have an outcome in mind, our framework should focus on specifying how we expect leaders to behave to create it. If leaders consistently do the right things, the result will take care of itself.  

Our recommendation
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For what it is worth, our point of view (borowed from yoga) is that a leadership framework must be able to fit on one page and must be grounded in the company’s strategy. Think about it this way: given our current strategy, what type of leadership do we need to execute on it going forward?

The most important aspects of our answers to these questions need to be summarized and condensed into a few (typically 3-4) leadership principles that are critical for success.

Each principle then needs to be broken down into a few (typically 3) leadership practices that describe how the leadership principles are applied on a regular basis in the daily work. Finally, each principle needs to be broken down into specific and observable leadership behaviors - this creates an objective and common perspective around leadership expectations, which can then be measured over time.

To download our Blueprint for great leadership frameworks, click here. If you would like to learn more about the entire process of completing the framework, from strategy all the way down to behaviors, just reply to this email and we'll fill in the details.

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