Best Practices for Effective Leadership: The Top 6 to Get Right

Great Leaders Don’t Wing It: Best Practices for Effective Leadership That Make the Difference
Research published by Harvard Business Review found a sobering leadership gap: only 8% of leaders were rated highly effective at both strategy and execution. That should concern any organization relying on leaders to translate ambitious plans into meaningful results.

Leadership simulation assessment data confirms that the problem is rarely a lack of intelligence, experience, or technical expertise. Knowing the business is not the same as knowing how to lead it.

Best Practices for Effective Leadership: 6 Proven Ways to Lead Better

The best leaders deliberately create the conditions for people to perform at their peak. Based on our action learning leadership development programs, six practices consistently separate stronger leaders from the rest.

1. Create Team Clarity Before Expecting Accountability
   You cannot hold people accountable for expectations that are not clear.Effective leaders ensure their teams have a shared understanding of where they are going, why it matters, what matters most, who is responsible for what, and how success will be measured. That sounds obvious. In practice, however, leaders frequently mistake communicating priorities for creating genuine alignment and commitment around them.

   Our organizational alignment research found that strategic clarity accounts for 31% of the performance difference between high- and low-performing organizations. When people lack clarity, even talented teams can waste enormous energy second-guessing priorities, duplicating work, debating decisions, and pursuing competing agendas.

   High-performing leaders continually create clarity around:

   — Purpose: Why does our team exist, and what value must we create?
   — Priorities: What matters most — and what matters less?
   — Roles: Who owns which decisions, deliverables, and outcomes?
   — Interdependencies: Where must we collaborate to succeed?
   — Success measures: How will we know if we are winning?

   Creating team clarity does not mean eliminating healthy debate or uncertainty. It means ensuring that once decisions are made, people have enough shared understanding to move forward confidently and cohesively.

   The leadership test: If you privately asked every member of your team to name your top three priorities, their individual accountabilities, and how success is measured, would their answers match?

2. Build the Team Culture Your Strategy Requires
   Strategy defines what you want to accomplish. Culture determines how people think and behave while trying to accomplish it.Effective leaders do not leave culture to chance. Once strategic goals, and accountabilities are clear, they explicitly define the mindsets, behaviors, and ways of working required to execute them.

   That means identifying which behaviors should be rewarded, challenged, tolerated, and eliminated. Then leaders must model those behaviors themselves and align hiring, performance management, decision making, and rewards accordingly.

   The leadership test: Does your team culture accelerate your business and talent strategies — or undermine them?

3. Make Change Worth Following
   Announcing change is easy. Creating genuine commitment to change is not.Effective leaders recognize that employees rarely resist change simply because they dislike change. Resistance often grows when people do not understand why change is necessary, what it means for them, or whether leadership can successfully navigate it.

   Strong change communication creates a compelling rationale for change, involves those most affected, clarifies expectations, and equips people with the capabilities required to succeed.

   The leadership test: Are people merely complying with the change — or actively helping to make it successful?

4. Stop Having All the Answers
   One of the most dangerous leadership traps is believing that seniority equals superior judgment.Research on psychological safety by Harvard professor Amy Edmondson has shown the importance of creating environments where people can speak candidly, raise concerns, admit mistakes, and challenge assumptions.

   Effective leaders therefore facilitate more than they dictate. They seek honest feedback, ask incisive questions, invite dissenting perspectives, and encourage constructive debate.

   The leadership test: When people disagree with you, do they speak up — or stay strategically silent?

5. Manage the Behaviors That Produce the Results
   Lagging indicators tell you what already happened. Effective leaders focus on the behaviors and leading indicators that determine what will happen next.

   Instead of simply demanding higher revenue, better engagement, faster execution, or improved quality, they identify the few critical behaviors most likely to produce those outcomes.

   They then create the clarity, capability, commitment, and accountability required to make those behaviors repeatable.

   The leadership test: Can your people clearly identify the behaviors that matter most to achieving your most important goals?

6. Protect the Important from the Urgent
   Weak leaders allow their calendars and inboxes to determine their priorities. Effective leaders allow their strategy to determine where their time goes.

   They understand that setting strategic priorities requires making difficult trade-offs. The objective is not squeezing more activity into every day. It is ensuring that the work with the greatest strategic value receives sufficient attention.

   Research by Michael Mankins and Eric Garton reinforces this principle: organizational performance depends not merely on managing financial capital, but on deploying scarce time, talent, and energy where they create the greatest value.

   The leadership test: Does your calendar reflect your strategic priorities — or your latest interruptions?

The Bottom Line
Great leadership is not defined by how much authority you have, how many answers you provide, or how busy you appear. It is defined by the conditions you create for others to succeed. The best practices for effective leadership require aligning talent, and culture with strategy where it matters most. If your leadership development does not measurably improve performance and engagement, it may be developing leadership knowledge — but not better leaders.

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by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.