The 16 Mundane Leadership Tasks that Deserve Your Relentless Attention
Great leaders focus on perfecting unsexy fundamentals to drive success.
A few years ago, I attended a basketball seminar with my son.
I had never heard of the speaker — basketball coaching legend Dave Hopla. He coached Kobe Bryant, Dirk Nowitzki, and Carmelo Anthony. (I don’t know who the second two are, but the first name caught my attention.)
Dave spent the 2 hours shooting basketballs and telling stories about his coaching escapades and biggest learnings.
He didn’t miss one shot the entire time while never losing his storytelling momentum. That was enough to keep my attention, but it wasn’t what made this seminar memorable.
Towards the end of the session, Dave shared a story about a reporter who was writing a story on Kobe Bryant’s routine to stay in top form.
The report walked over to Kobe after a game to confirm their interview appointment. The report asked, “So what time shall we meet tomorrow?”
Kobe, who was packing up, didn’t look up and said, “4 — it’s when I always start.”
The reporter said, “Sure, sounds good.” He knew that Kobe had a game the next day at 8 PM, so 4 PM sounded reasonable. So he confirmed, “Ok, I’ll come by after lunch then.”
Kobe pause and looked up, “Lunch? I start at 4 AM every day.”
The next day, the reporter was bleary-eyed and a bit foggy as he watched Kobe Bryant run through what looked like basic physical education drills that kids did at school. Dribbling, pushups, jumping jacks, shooting from every position on the court. It felt rudimentary.
It was.
And it wasn’t.
Kobe did hundreds, if not thousands of basic exercises. He did them day after day after day. He did it when he was a rising star. And he continued to do it long after he was recognized as one of the very best in the sport.
Even as a legend, he was still doing basic drills.
When the reporter asked Kobe, “Wait, you do this every morning? This seems like what kids do in high school at practice?”
Kobe’s answer was simple, “Yes, it’s exactly the same.”
Dave Hopla shared this story because, too often, all we see on the outside is the highlights reel. We make the wrong assumption that that’s what the job is about — the highlights.
It isn’t.
Anyone who wants to be great knows that they need to hone their ability to execute the fundamentals. This is true in sports, in the arts, and it’s true in business.
This story stuck with me, and I’m not even an athlete or basketball fan.
You don’t get to the sexy, exciting, and memorable moments without going through the paces and doing the boring, the mundane, the unsexy work.
Only when you focus on getting the basics right day after day will you achieve the outcomes you and your team are capable of.
The 16 Mundane Leadership Tasks that Create Magnificent Outcomes
There are an infinite number of areas you can focus on as a leader, but these are the core essentials. Get these right, and you’ll have a far better chance at creating a strong organization that can capitalize on opportunities, attract and retain top talent, and navigate uncertainty and choppy times.
They aren’t sexy and more often than not, when done well, you won’t get acknowledgement for getting them right. But if you miss the boat, you will feel the effects and they will be wide-reaching and potentially long-lasting. So take the time to work on getting these basics done well — again and again and again.
1. Strategy & goal setting
Your most critical responsibility as a leader is to set the direction for the organization. If you’ve heard the example of “everyone rowing in the same direction” and have ever tried to kayak with another person, you know what I mean. You can have the best talent in the world, but if your people aren’t aligned, they will be at best not helping each other and at worst actually working against each other.
This means having a clear rationale for your strategy and goals and doing an excellent job of communicating in clear and in as simple terms as possible where you want your teams to focus their attention.
Assess Yourself:
Ask your direct reports and some skip levels to explain the company strategy. If they come back with the same answers or very similar, you are on the right track. If you are hearing conflicting or varying answers, it’s time to revisit your approach.
2. Customer relationships & understanding
Customer-centricity should be at the heart of every organization. For leaders with teams that directly interact with customers this might feel obvious, but it sometimes goes by the wayside for other functional leaders. That’s a huge missed opportunity.
Every leader within an organization should understand your customer — their attributes, their pain points, how your organization helps them, and why they choose you.
Without this focus, it’s easy to get mired in other details that are less important than attracting and delivering value for your customers. When this is priority #1, the entire organization will know to orient all of your work in a way that leads to customer success, which leads to revenue and financial success — the lifeblood of any organization.
Assess Yourself:
How well do you understand your customers and their needs?
Do you understand the customer journey as it pertains to your organization (how they hear of you, why they choose you, why they stay)?
Do you know what customer needs your organization doesn’t address? Who does?
If you’re not feeling close enough to your customers, ask to shadow sales people or customer success teams. Read survey results, join customer research initiatives, and trade press about trends. Do everything you can to get closer to your customer. Even if you work in back office operations or other parts of the business that doesn’t directly touch the customer, when you understand your customer intimately, you will be in a far better position to make strategic decisions that will improve customer satisfaction and therefore, business health long-term.
3. Performance reviews & rewarding results
Once your direction is clear and pervasively understood across the organization, how you measure everyone’s performance to the targets is how you’ll ensure that you have the right people to realize your strategy and goals.
Performance reviews in most organizations are bureaucratic nuisances at best and a complete waste of time at worst.
How do you avoid the pitfalls? Spend the time to understand why you do them and align each step and requirement to that why. If you don’t have a good reason for a particular element, eliminate it.
Assess Yourself:
Set up time to have honest dialogue with your HR team and your leadership team, as well as skip-level conversations to find out if your teams feel that your reviews are helping you reward strong performance, address weak performance, and do so efficiently. Pinpoint where you are missing the mark and make a plan to improve it.
4. One-on-one meetings
These are the bedrock of any people manager’s work, but they are often the most poorly leveraged because they are the most poorly managed.
Anything that is recurring is ripe for mismanagement. Why? We assume that because we will get multiple bites at the apple, we can be less diligent. This isn’t just a bad assumption, it’s wasting one of the most powerful tools we have as managers.
One-on-one meetings are where you build trust, discuss sensitive topics, provide game-changing coaching, and help your direct reports stay on track. Used judiciously, you can transform B players into A players, you can identify your next successor, and accelerate the resolution of gnarly issues that might not have surfaced if it wasn’t for the quality of the relationship you build in these more intimate conversations.
Assess Yourself:
Ask your team and yourself how well these meetings are going on the following dimensions: level of preparedness for each meeting — your direct report and you, quality of discussion based on the impact it has on strategy and goals, level of trust, the depth of the topics you are covering — surface level or more intricate and nuanced.
5. Team meetings
Your team meetings are an opportunity to regularly align on priorities, resolve conflicts, and unblock your teams. Use them wisely and you’ll identify what matters most and accelerate progress. Use them inappropriately and they will become a giant waste a time at best and a source of drama and distraction at worst.
Be disciplined on the purpose, the agenda, and how you and your colleagues show up. Take the time align on these elements because going slow at first will help you go fast later.
Assess Yourself:
Ask yourself and your team if you are spending time on critical topics that deserve live attention from the entire group that is gathering. If you are not using the time well, pause these meetings, and try asynchronous communication. Even if they are going well, consider changing up the format throughout the month or the quarter to keep everyone attentive and to allow for different purposes like team-building or learning and development to be addressed.
6. Conflict management
If you have people in your organization, you are bound to have conflict. Conflict has become a negative term, but not all conflict is bad. The most innovative organizations have learned how to harness conflict to source new ideas, challenge established norms, and experiment with concepts that others might never consider.
As a leader, you need to be skilled at navigating conflict so that you can maximize productive outcomes and reduce negative ones like personal offense and distracting confrontations that are not generative. You also need to develop individuals and a team culture that understands how to make manage conflict effectively.
If this is an area of distraction, you would do well to invest in coaching and training to upskill yourself and your team. You are likely wasting time and energy when you could be channeling both into more effective outcomes.
Assess Yourself:
Find a moment of quiet and reflect on the types of conflict that you and your teams navigate each week. If you are having trouble identifying any, that can be a sign of deeper issues — you and your team aren’t bringing up the conflicts you are experiencing. If you are able to identify some, think about how you or your team addressed them.
Were you able to transform them into productive outcomes?
Did they drain you or your team?
If you’re finding that conflict is taking up too much time, it’s likely a signal to invest in leveling up your skills.
7. Hiring
Every team needs to hire talent at some point. Either to replace talent or to augment and grow your team. Even if it isn’t a full-time hire (e.g. perhaps a contractor position), how you identify your needs and then go about the hiring process is a critical component of how you set your team up for success.
The main elements you want to nail include: outlining your needs and a job description, the process for approving a new role, sourcing candidates, assessing candidates, making offers and handling negotiations and onboarding new hires. You likely have an HR team or a recruiter helping you with these, and that means assessing the quality of their work and outcomes as well as yours. Even if you aren’t hiring, this can be a worthy area to address so that when you need to start hiring again, you are well-positioned to get started without delay.
Assess Yourself:
Do you and your team understand your hiring process?
Do they know who to go to at each step and what good looks like?
Have your recent new hires performed well?
Do you know what is the cause for their performance?
Answering questions like this will help you determine if hiring is an area to prioritize improvement. I’ve never met a team that has hiring down because it is a workstream naturally fraught with challenges. If it isn’t the process, then it’s the training and alignment across the team. If your team understands how to hire well, they may still struggle with elements like consistency in their approach or the level of rigor they are applying. Digging in a little will likely present you with a number of opportunities for improvement.
8. Handling underperformance
Few leaders spend time clarifying how they address underperforming staff . It’s a shame because too many organizations retain staff who are no longer a fit for their role, which reduces the efficacy of the entire team
They keep them out of loyalty or because they want to avoid the discomfort of letting someone go. Or because they don’t want to do the work to explore roles in the organization that may be a better fit. They fear the work necessary to execute this well, but they also don’t calculate the cost of staying with the status quo.
Don’t be one of those leaders who avoids addressing underperformance and sabotages their team as a result. Create a monthly checkpoint to effectively identify bottom performers and develop a process to determine the appropriate next step.
Assess Yourself:
Do you wait until annual reviews to assess if you have people on your team that should be put on performance improvement plans, moved into different roles or exited from the organization?
Are you or your people managers avoiding dealing with underperformers? Do you have a strong assessment process in place?
If you don’t get satisfactory answers to each of these questions, it’s time to take a harder look at your approach to underperformance and make improvements before the negative impacts cascade and spread.
9. Restructuring teams
In market downturns, it’s easy to assume that restructuring is only useful when you are cost-cutting. But restructuring functions and teams is a far more powerful concept when applied strategically. In fact, restructuring can help your organization grow when you create a new design that allows for more seamless operation and for your team to focus on innovation areas.
The key to skillful restructuring is an understanding of your organization’s goals, existing operational flows, and where there is opportunity to streamline and drive efficiency. Another key consideration is whether you need to build new functions or departments that augment or deliver value in entirely new ways.
Assess Yourself:
Do you understand how your organization currently operates and where there are bottlenecks and efficiencies to improve?
Are you allocating sufficient resources to areas of innovation or growth?
Are you equipped to understand the financial and operational implications of a restructuring and when and how you should execute one?
If you aren’t clear on some or all of the above, you might want to dedicate the time of someone on your team or an outside consultant to help you gain more clarity. Determining if a restructuring could be valuable for your organization can be one of the most effective ways to accelerate progress towards a new, better way of operating.
10. Securing financing
Funding is often viewed as more of a CEO or CFO level activity. This isn’t wrong, but every senior executive can benefit from a deeper understanding of when you need to secure financing and how to do so. For example, you might better anticipate when financing will be easier to obtain because of the trajectory of the company, or you might be more attuned to proactive cost-cutting as a way to avoid needing outside financing.
There are many ways to fund your company and each has pros and cons. Understanding how different forms of financing work (the terms, the benefits and pitfalls) will help you navigate these decisions or support the leaders who lead this workstream with more confidence and less stress.
Assess Yourself:
Do you have an understanding of the different forms of financing available and the attributes of each?
Do you know what the existing capitalization structure of the organization looks like and what drove the design?
Who do you consult when you have questions around funding? Do you have a trusted advisor, internally or externally?
This can be one of the more opaque parts of running a business, but if you are a C-level executive or hope to one day become one, you will set yourself up for far more success if you study up early and find ways to learn about and contribute to how to secure funding for your organization.
11. Navigating market dynamics
Even if you haven’t gone to business school or taken a strategy course, you need to understand what factors impact your business. Everything from competitors to political policies can transform the playing field. You might not be affected directly by international tariffs, but you might be indirectly impacted as partners or suppliers have to respond.
The goal isn’t to capture every scenario possible, but to understand those elements that have the highest impact. This allows you to focus, create trackers, and anticipate change instead of being caught by surprise.
Assess Yourself:
Do you have an understanding of the factors and players that most impact the health of your business?
Do you have ways of tracking trends or noting changes as they happen?
Have you created any scenarios and walked through responses as a leadership team?
If you have the broad strokes mapped out, that might be more than sufficient. But if you haven’t considered what factors matter most and how you track changes to their status, you might want to take some time to clarify these scenarios so that you and your team can be more strategically responsive if and when the time comes.
12. Disruptive technologies (AI)
So much has changed in the last 30 years (e.g. the internet, cloud-based computing, smartphones, and now AI), and the pace of change is only increasing. It’s easy to fall into the trap of being overwhelmed by it all.
But it’s a leader’s job to stay ahead of the curve, to anticipate what is coming and how it will impact your business. You don’t have to do it alone. You can hire consultants and staff your team with people who are focused on disruptive technologies.
Whatever you do, don’t ignore them. Putting your head in the sand, won’t make them go away, it’ll just ensure that you are setting up your business for a setback.
Assess Yourself:
Do you regularly review what disruptive technologies are worth considering and how competitors, customers, and partners are making use of or being impacted by them?
Have you invested in testing new technologies and incorporating them into your offering and operations?
If you aren’t making space for new technologies in your business, you are likely setting the stage for you to fall behind. Instead, work with your team to find a way to set aside funding and staffing to invest in new technology innovation.
13. Succession planning
The best leaders are the ones who ensure that the organization can operate well without them. Your greatest legacy isn’t what you did while you were there, it’s what happened after you left.
Sadly, succession planning is rarely on the list of priorities for organizations beyond the very largest, and even then, generally only the C-suite get the level of attention needed to ensure a smooth transition.
Start planning what you need long before you are ready to step away. Identify the attributes of the next leader needed based on the evolution of the organization. These might be very different from what you brought to the table because goals and strategies have shifted.
Assess Yourself:
Have you anticipated where the organization is headed and what skills and attributes the leader taking over your position will need to be successful?
Have you started to identify a potential replacement and how you might groom them for your role?
Do you know who you need to collaborate with to anticipate the above and get the wheels in motion?
It’s never too late to get started on succession planning. Even if you leave faster than you anticipate, the groundwork you set in place will help the people remaining at the organization set the next leader up for success.
14. Organizational values and culture
How you lead and show up every day is the model for others in your organization. There is a difference between stated values and culture and lived values and culture. How you behave is how your team experiences the organization.
The statement that “culture each strategy for lunch” highlights how important culture is to the experience of your employees and therefore, how well they are set up to succeed.
Organizations with a strong, productive culture attract and retain stronger talent, and it’s that talent that ensures you have what it takes to achieve your goals.
Assess Yourself:
Do you have a clear set of values and cultural attributes you aspire to?
Are you only stating your values and culture or are you living them?
If you were to ask your team, would they describe your values and your culture the same way you do?
Take the time to clarify what type of culture and value system you want to operate under and then challenge yourself and other leaders to model that behavior and hold their teams accountable to it. Only with alignment and a commitment to consistently uphold these attributes will you realize the values and culture environment you aspire to create.
15. Decision-making
How you make decisions drives much of how you and your teams operate. If you are purposeful and structured, your team will be able to operate with more predictability and less stress.
If you are more ad hoc and less structured, your team will likely be left guessing about how you will react to their proposals and not be able to prepare well.
In addition to your own style, how your organization handles decision making across leaders and functions either helps your teams operate more consistently and with efficiency or requires more insider-knowledge of each leader and department, leading to asymmetrical information and inefficiencies.
Assess Yourself:
Do you have a decision-making approach?
Has your approach led you to better decisions? Could you adjust it to lead to even better outcomes?
Could you make your approach more structured and predictable?
Is your team well-informed of your approach and able to navigate it well?
Start with your own approach but as you clarify it, optimize it, and standardize it, work to help other leaders do the same. It will help your organization make better decisions over time and simplify the process across leaders and teams.
16. Stakeholder management
Last but certainly not least, you need to understand your stakeholders. For most organizations, this will be your investors and your board. These are the people who have a fiduciary interest in the health of the business.
Good board management and investor relations are a science and an art. You want to make sure they understand how the business is doing and the overall strategy sufficiently to continue to give management the leeway to lead as you see fit. In addition, you need to stay compliant on what you share and with whom during key financial cycles. This is more highly regulated for publicly traded companies, but it is no less important for privately held organizations.
Learning how to do this well means that you’ll create the alignment you need to make bolder moves and realize longer-term visions.
Assess Yourself:
Do you have an understanding of good board and investor management?
Are you able to execute your stakeholder management to your stakeholder’s satisfaction?
Do you have a trusted advisor on how to stay compliant and effective?
If any of the above feels murky to you, it’s a good opportunity to seek out a trusted advisor who can guide you on how to navigate these elements with skill and in a compliant fashion. Even if you aren’t the CEO or CFO, if you ever hope to run your own business, understanding these elements ensures you will know how to find the people who can support you when you do.
Leadership fundamentals aren’t complicated, but they do require skill and finesse.
You should have a grasp on all of the above areas if you want to play well at the executive level.
There isn’t one right way — most of these areas are specific to the culture of the organization and industry. Company size, stage, and strategy impact what version you should deploy. And over time, as conditions change, you should change your approach.
Experiment and learn what works — don’t get too hung up if your first tries aren’t right. Even the pros have to switch up their strategy at times.
Rotate where you focus as you gain proficiency. Start with one or two areas and then transition to other areas to build up your skillset.
Importantly, just like top athletes have people who help them — coaches, trainers, nutritionists, and therapists — you don’t have to do this alone.
Get a coach, hire a consultant, ask for help from your team.
Delegation is fine, but you want to learn enough of the details so that you know how to fish. Don’t stay surface level. Get into the nitty gritty if you want to get to the next level.
If you get bored, know that you’re doing the right thing.
Did Kobe want to run drills thousands of times? Probably not, but he knew that if he didn’t, he’d never have the chance to perform like a magician on the court during a game.
If you want to be a daring, bold leader who creates an organization with a lasting, significant impact, focus on the basics relentlessly and reframe the boring as the essential.
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ridiculously helpful. bookmarking this as a reference guide. I particularly like that you left stakeholders to the end because sometimes they are honestly "forgotten" when you try to focus your attention on all of these other things. I find that making sure that stakeholder check-ins are baked into your norms/routines you end up solving problems before they even happen. :)
Great article Kathy. The level of detail of your knowledge is incredible.