How Should Your Leaders Behave?

by Kevin Sharer

Anyone with responsibility for the performance of a large organization knows the value of effective leaders. Most of us are more than happy to invest in developing them. But even a cursory review of the management literature shows that there’s no consensus on how to do that. When fast growth pressured us at Amgen to bring along the talent in our leadership pipeline, we had to figure it out for ourselves.

Here’s what I learned: We had to put the focus on the behaviors we expected leaders to display, and those had to be spelled out by a top team that was highly engaged, intellectually and emotionally, in the process. First we discussed at a headline level what a leader in our organization should do. Even at that stage, our debate was impassioned, but we arrived at a list: Consciously act as a role model; deliver strong results in the right way; build, develop, and lead empowered and diverse teams; and motivate others with a vision for the future that can be implemented.

The discussions got livelier when we sought to describe each behavior with enough specificity to inform selection, training, and evaluation. Take, for example, acting as a role model, which challenges leaders to bring their best selves to the job day after day. We came to agree that leaders should work to gain self-awareness, seek and accept feedback, grow and improve continually, and embrace Amgen’s cultural values (which, by the way, we defined through a separate, similar process). Descriptors under every heading had to be precise, real, and action-oriented. The words mattered.

We could have styled these must-haves as character traits or attributes. By casting them instead as behaviors, we underscored two messages: It isn’t worth much to have an attribute that you don’t display; and if you fall short of what the best leaders do, you can close that gap.

Emphasizing behavior over traits also opens the door to style differences. An organization doesn’t benefit when all of its leaders ape some icon-of-the-moment’s style. That’s a failure to capitalize on diversity, like trying to improve an orchestra’s performance by asking every section to sound more like the woodwinds.

I said that this exercise should be undertaken by the top team. Let’s put a finer point on that: I mean not by consultants, facilitators, or how-to books. Enterprise leaders must value, at their core, each behavior that they expect others—and themselves—to exhibit and be judged on. The only way to capture their authentic beliefs and benefit from their collective experience is to get them working from scratch.

Don’t stop there, however. Put the behaviors, as defined by the enterprise leaders, in front of your top 100 people. We hosted sessions where we asked folks to push back on language they couldn’t live with, add new items, and become true partners in the overall process. Then we found ways to foster the behaviors using evaluations, surveys, communications, and highly visible actions by leaders—including the occasional dismissal for consistent and significant violations.

Does this sound time-consuming for a CEO? It is. But as a CEO, you should realize that your greatest contribution is the behavior you cause or allow to thrive in the organization’s upper ranks. It’s hard work to answer the all-important question “What do we expect leaders to do here?” But at your level, it is precisely the behavior everyone needs to see.

Kevin Sharer was the CEO of Amgen for 12 years. He now teaches in the strategy unit at Harvard Business School.