Top 8 Leadership Tools. Part 1.

 

If you want to stand out from the crowd, the best leadership tools are not the classics that everyone knows. So, you won’t find transformational or servant leadership in this list, for example.

 Instead, you want to focus on tools for today. Over the past year I’ve shared many such tools, some my own, some from others. For The Strategic Leadership Playbook, I’ve curated a list of the 8 tools that you liked most. Together, they received 3.5 million impressions and 60,000 engagements. Here they are:

1. Three Types of Leadership

• Leading from the Front: Visionary type of leaders that lead by example.
• Leading from the Side: Mentoring type of leaders that guide their people.
• Leading from the Back: Servant type of leaders that support their people.

2. Which Type of Strategist Are You?

A matrix based on approach (Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up) and mindset (Conservative vs. Progressive):

• Regent Strategist: Top-Down + Conservative.
• Servant Strategist: Bottom-Up + Conservative.
• Joker Strategist: Top-Down + Progressive.
• Player Strategist: Bottom-Up + Progressive.

3. Six Questions to Boost Meeting Effectiveness

1. What is the topic?
2. Who should be there?
3. What is the desired outcome?
4. How long will it take?
5. What needs to be provided?
6. When is the next meeting?

4. 10 Principles of Strategic Leadership

These include distributing responsibility, being honest about information, creating the right to fail, developing multiple paths to victory, and hiring for transformation.

5. Nice Leaders vs. Strong Leaders

• Nice Leaders: Humble and leading from behind; serving, attending, and coaching; soft-spoken, thoughtful, and kind; vulnerable and showing weaknesses.
• Strong Leaders: Visible and leading by example; decisive, sturdy, and daring; sharp and making tough choices; strong and leverages their strengths.

6. 7 Types of Negativity to Kill

1. Controlling everything.
2. Perfectionism.
3. Judging.
4. Complaining.
5. Blaming.
6. Self-doubt.
7. Expecting the worst.

7. Humble vs. Vulnerable Leadership

• Humility is the recognition that you don't know everything.
• Vulnerability is the willingness to admit mistakes and weaknesses to your team.

8. The Five Principles of Engaged Feedback

Focused on providing feedback that is constructive, growth-oriented, and maintains the dignity of the employee.

There are three types of leader. Those that stand in front of their people, those that stand behind their people, and those that stand next to their people. Which type of leader are you?

 

In the volume of leadership typologies, it is hard to see the forest for the trees. There’s visionary leaders, transformative leaders, servant leaders, transactional leaders, humble leaders, and so on and so forth.

 

To simplify things I’d like to divide leaders into three broad categories: leaders that lead from the front, leaders that lead from the back, and leaders that lead from the side.

The "Three Types of Leadership" tool by Jeroen Kraaijenbrink focuses on where a leader physically and psychologically positions themselves relative to their team.

Rather than choosing just one, a "complete leader" is agile, switching between these positions based on the specific needs of the situation and the maturity of the team.

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1. Leading from the Front (Visionary)

This style is about being highly visible and taking charge at the forefront of challenges.

• Approach: You lead by example, directing and "paving the way" for your people.
• Key Benefits: Powerful for driving innovation, creating a strong sense of alignment, and providing decisive direction during crises.
• Risks: Can become overly dominant, potentially making team members feel "unsafe" to speak up or creating followers who are too dependent on the leader.

2. Leading from the Side (Mentoring)

This is a peer-to-peer approach rooted in equality and collaboration.

• Approach: You stand alongside your team members, offering "hands-on" guidance and frequent feedback.
• Key Benefits: Fosters high openness and a collaborative culture where everyone's voice feels valued.
• Risks: The leader can become "invisible," which may lead to legitimacy issues or unclear decision-making processes.

3. Leading from the Back (Servant)

Often compared to a shepherd tending a flock, this style emphasizes support and empowerment.

• Approach: You focus on your team's needs, facilitating their work from behind the scenes to let them take the lead.
• Key Benefits: Highly people-centric; it builds team confidence, independence, and long-term resilience.
• Risks: Can be perceived as "weak" or passive; if not balanced, it can lead to a lack of clear vision or "pampering" that stalls progress.

As we can see, all three have their pros and cons. This means that there is no single best or worst way. But, we can have preferences. My personal preference is leading from the side: standing (or sitting) next to people rather than in front or behind them.

Most founders assume they must always lead from the front.
But the best leaders switch styles depending on the moment.

Great leadership isn’t about the spotlight.
It’s about knowing where to stand.

Which type of leader are you?

Which type of leader do you prefer?

 

The "Which Type of Strategist Are You?" tool is a 2x2 matrix designed to help leaders understand their natural strategic style based on how they approach change and how they interact with their organization. A strategist is a person with both the responsibility and the skill to formulate and implement an organization’s strategy.

This tool categorizes leadership into four quadrants based on two primary axes:

The Two Axes

1. The Vertical Axis (Hierarchy):
• Top-Down: Strategy is driven by the leader's vision and direct instructions.
• Bottom-Up: Strategy is collaborative, drawing ideas and execution from the frontline employees.
2. The Horizontal Axis (Mindset):
• Conservative: Focuses on stability, risk mitigation, and proven methods.
• Progressive: Focuses on innovation, disruption, and taking calculated risks.

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The Four Strategist Types

1. The King Strategist (Top-Down + Conservative)

• Style: Authoritative and traditional.
• Characteristics: This leader values order and established systems. They make the decisions at the top and expect the organization to follow a "tried and true" path. Having a clear vision of where to take their organization the next couple of years. They are capable thinkers and forward-looking.
• Best for: Turnaround situations or highly regulated industries where safety and compliance are paramount. This type know everything about the organization and they are strong and independent Chief Executive.
• Weakness: They can lose touch with the rest of the organization. Too far ahead and expect too much of others, thereby creating frustration.

2. The Servant (Bottom-Up + Progressive)

• Style: Supportive and steady.
• Characteristics: They focus on empowering their team to improve existing processes. They listen to the needs of the staff but prefer to make incremental, safe improvements rather than radical changes. Has democratic approach to strategizing. Instead of defining the strategy themselves, they prefer to keep their own views to themselves, and rather want to hear what others in the organization are saying.
• Best for: Maintaining high-performing, established teams and optimizing internal culture. This strategist is strong in creating harmony, engagement and commitment. They are able to create a shared strategy of which many people in the organization feel ownership.
• Weakness: Because they hardly share their own vision and let others do this, they may easily be seen as weak and indecisive.

3. The Elder Strategist (Top-Down + Conservative)

• Style: continuity and following traditions.
• Characteristics: likes to keep things as they are. They often have been decades with the organization and have been in a leading position for a long time. They appreciate continuity and are hesitant in embracing new developments. In their view, tomorrow’s strategy should largely be a continuation of the past.
• Best for: strong sense of history and continuity. Rather than jumping on hypes, they embrace what the organization is already good at.
• Weaknesses: can be defensive and with their focus on tradition can lose touch with internal and external developments.

4. The Prince (Bottom-Up + Progressive)

• Style: Collaborative and agile.
• Characteristics: This leader encourages everyone to be an innovator. They create a culture where the best ideas win, regardless of where they come from. They are full of creativity and enthusiasm and see opportunities for change everywhere.They are able to share their enthusiasm and motivate others to be innovative too
• Best for: Tech companies and creative industries where rapid, team-led innovation is the competitive advantage.
• Weaknesses: make the organization jump from one idea to the next, change strategy regularly and never get into delivery mode.

3. The Joker

• Style: Impulsive, non transparent, chaotic.
• Characteristics: The Joker Strategist is in fact a non-strategist. They have few, clear ideas about where to take their organization, and they have limited abilities to make decisions or enforce action.To hide their lack of ideas and abilities, some of them heavily use strategy concepts and tools to pretend. Or they do exactly the opposite, downplaying the importance of strategy and saying they rely on their gut feeling and that strategy is waste of time anyway.Like to joke around and stay popular.
• Best for: their weakness may trigger others to step up and take their role as one of the other four types of strategist.
• Weaknesses: the lack of clear strategy and the lack of execution, as well as their general ineffectiveness.

 

https://tinyurl.com/3jh9yt6y

AI Strategy Frameworks. Part 1.

 

How can teams bridge strategic ambitions with practical steps to deploy, scale, and govern AI effectively? Our AI Frameworks presentation brings together strategy models that define direction, value creation approaches that pinpoint impact, execution blueprints that drive delivery, scaling frameworks that sustain adoption, and governance systems that ensure accountability. Use this toolkit to sharpen your decision quality, accelerate innovation cycles, and avoid wasted experimentation.

Introduction

How can teams bridge strategic ambitions with the practical steps to deploy, scale, and govern AI effectively? Our AI Strategy Frameworks (Part 1) presentation provides the toolkit to turn opportunity into organized execution. It brings together strategy models that define direction, value creation approaches that pinpoint impact, execution blueprints that drive delivery, scaling frameworks that sustain adoption, and governance systems that ensure accountability. Each framework sharpens decision quality, accelerates alignment across business and technical teams, and reduces wasted experimentation.

Grounded in current industry practices, these frameworks help teams achieve faster innovation cycles, stronger collaboration, and higher returns from AI investments. Strategic consistency replaces fragmented experimentation, while governance discipline mitigates risk and builds trust. As these effects compound over time, early AI projects progress into scalable engines of performance, resilience, and long-term competitive differentiation.

Strategy

Organizations exploring AI's potential often face a fundamental question: where should they focus first? The Gartner AI Opportunity Radar maps use cases across customer, product, and operational dimensions. Rather than treating AI as a blanket solution, it reveals which opportunities drive front-office differentiation and which strengthen internal efficiencies. By distinguishing "everyday AI" from transformative bets, the radar reframes AI not as a single initiative but as a portfolio of impact horizons. Each horizon demands different degrees of ambition, investment, and change readiness.

Technical maturity alone rarely predicts AI success. The Technology vs. Business Readiness (TRL vs. BRL) model exposes how organizational capability often lags behind innovation. A breakthrough algorithm means little if governance, integration, or user trust are missing. Plotting initiatives by both technical progress and business adoption readiness helps teams time their scaling decisions with better precision.

Amid market turbulence, uncertainty can derail AI strategy. The AI Strategy Levers (Impact-Uncertainty) framework identifies which technological, process, people, and market variables shape long-term advantage. Decision-makers can use it to separate controllable factors, such as automation scalability, from volatile ones like vendor stability or regulation. This prioritization creates focus around high-impact levers while encouraging resilience planning where risk is high.

Value Creation

Once the direction of AI initiatives is clear, the next question is where and how value actually forms. The Enterprise AI Value Creation Framework assesses how individual use cases perform across data, architecture, and impact variables. The framework's comparative format allows teams to contrast use cases based on data quality, model performance, regulatory sensitivity, and adoption potential, ensuring that resources are directed toward high-yield initiatives. In environments where AI adoption is uneven across departments, this approach prevents overextension and highlights where incremental investment produces compounding benefits.

Complementing that diagnostic view, AI Value Pools quantify how AI potential distributes across functional domains. It identifies which business areas hold the deepest reservoirs of untapped value. At a time when many organizations are under pressure to justify AI budgets, value pool mapping supports more disciplined capital allocation, sharper communication with stakeholders, and better sequencing of AI deployment across the organization.

Execution

At the execution stage, the challenge is not identifying opportunity but operationalizing it into build decisions, technology choices, and coordinated rollout plans. The Enterprise AI Decision Pipeline determines whether to buy, build, or pursue hybrid approaches. Its logic moves beyond cost analysis to consider strategic importance, technical complexity, and time-to-value. This consideration is particularly relevant when rapid advances in Gen AI tempt overinvestments in bespoke systems before foundational capabilities are ready.

Human capability remains the defining variable in AI execution. The Gartner AI Agency Gap illustrates how machine autonomy must coexist with human oversight. By comparing deterministic systems, LLM-based assistants, and human decision-makers, it reveals where automation adds value and where judgment must remain human-led. The model helps teams calibrate the balance between efficiency and accountability, a balance that regulators and boards increasingly scrutinize as AI influences critical operations.

To close the loop, the AI Rollout Roadmap offers a time-based coordination model that aligns centers of excellence, business units, and developer teams under shared milestones. It highlights that AI adoption succeeds when governance, ethics, and user enablement progress in parallel with technical delivery.

Scaling

As AI systems evolve beyond pilots to become integrated into daily operations, the AI System Performance Journey ensures that technical progress and user experience advance together. By tracing the lifecycle from model development through tuning and performance assessment, it demonstrates how human feedback and system logic must stay in sync. This framework helps organizations institutionalize iteration without chaos. It shifts the mindset from one-off optimization to continuous performance governance.

Quality evaluation becomes the next frontier once systems reach scale. The Gen AI Quality Evaluation framework operationalizes performance measurement through metrics that go beyond accuracy. It considers dimensions – such as readability, precision, similarity, and privacy compliance – that reflect the multi-faceted nature of generative AI output. AI quality evaluation safeguards against reputational, ethical, and regulatory risk. It ensures that AI quality aligns not only with technical benchmarks but also with organizational trust and user value.

Governance

As organizations expand AI use across business functions, governance provides the mechanisms to manage both behavioral and systemic risk. AI Change Adoption Management maps the emotional and behavioral progression that teams undergo as AI becomes embedded in workflows. It highlights that resistance is not a failure of communication but a predictable response to transformation. By recognizing phases such as skepticism, frustration, and experimentation, leaders can design interventions that move employees toward informed adoption rather than forced compliance.

Complementing the human side of governance, Key Risk Indicators (KRIs) translate ethical principles into quantifiable metrics. By tracking fairness gaps, explainability coverage, and human override rates, KRIs bring objectivity to areas often treated as qualitative. This allows boards, regulators, and AI councils to assess performance with the same rigor as financial reporting.

Conclusion

A mature AI organization is built on structure, not spontaneity. These AI Strategy Frameworks (Part 1) turn scattered experimentation into a coherent system of progress, where strategy defines purpose, value creation directs investment, execution drives delivery, scaling ensures reliability, and governance sustains trust. The result is disciplined innovation that endures beyond technology cycles.

https://tinyurl.com/yd6hsx6v

Why Your Account-Based Strategies May Not Be Focused On the Right Customers

 

Source:  Shutterstock

Key Takeaways

• A growing number of companies are adopting account-based programs that treat customers differently based on their perceived value to the company.

• Most companies determine the value of accounts based on current revenue and future growth potential, but most don't track account profitability or use it to judge the value of individual accounts.

• The lack of accurate account profitability information creates a dangerous blind spot. Without it, account-based programs can result in winning more business from unprofitable customers.

The Rise of "Account-Based Everything"

The widespread adoption of account-based marketing is as one of the landmark developments in B2B marketing of the past two decades. The use of ABM has been growing rapidly since it was introduced by ITSMA in 2003. While the early adopters of ABM were primarily large B2B technology and business services firms, it's now used by a wide variety of B2B companies.

About seven years ago, several marketing industry analysts, consultants, and technology vendors began to argue that companies should adopt an account-based approach in other customer-facing business functions, including sales, sales development, and customer success/customer service.

This broader application of account-centered techniques soon came to be called "account-based everything." ABE (or sometimes ABX) is usually defined as "the coordination of personalized marketing, sales development, sales, and customer success efforts to drive engagement with, and conversion of, a targeted set of accounts." (Gartner)

The most rigorous and thorough discussion of this broader use of account-centric strategies and tactics can be found in Account-Based Growth:  Unlocking Sustainable Value Through Extraordinary Customer Focus by Bev Burgess and Tim Shercliff. In this book, the authors provide a detailed explanation of how B2B companies can use account-based strategies and programs to drive profitable revenue growth.

The premise underlying all account-based methodologies is that all customers are not created equal. In most B2B companies, a small percentage of customers account for a disproportionate share of the company's total revenue and profit.

The essence of the strategy described in Account-Based Growth is to identify those "vital few" customers, and then design and implement coordinated marketing, sales, customer success/customer service, and executive engagement programs that are specifically tailored for those high-value customers.

Burgess and Shercliff include an in-depth discussion of how to identify and prioritize high-value customers, how to develop effective account business plans, how to leverage data and technology to gain deep customer insights, and how to bring about the leadership and cultural changes that are necessary to succeed with an account-based growth strategy.

Perhaps most importantly, Burgess and Shercliff emphasize that many companies will need to "radically" reallocate marketing, sales, and customer success resources to effectively support an account-based growth strategy. When you adopt the kind of strategy described in Account-Based Growth, you are essentially placing a large bet on the growth potential of a relatively small group of customers and prospects.

In the balance of this article, I'll adopt the Burgess/Shercliff terminology and use the term "account-based growth strategy" to refer to a go-to-market approach that involves identifying high-value customers and prospects and using coordinated marketing, sales, and customer success/customer service programs to manage relationships with those high-value customers and prospects.

Customer Profitability Is "Missing in Action"

Companies that implement an account-based growth strategy segment their customers into multiple "tiers" based on the perceived importance and value of each customer. Then, they use different marketing, sales, customer success/customer service, and executive engagement techniques for customers in each tier.

In general, companies will invest more time, energy, and financial resources to develop and execute high-touch and highly customized engagement programs for customers in the "top" tier, compared to those in "lower" tiers. This approach means, of course, that company leaders must determine, early in the implementation process, which customers to place in each tier.

As part of the research for Account-Based Growth, Burgess and Shercliff surveyed 65 B2B companies. Ninety-two percent of the survey respondents reported having some kind of "top account" program.

When Burgess and Shercliff asked survey participants what criteria they use to select accounts for their top account program, 87% of the respondents said the future growth potential of the account, and 76% said the current revenue from the account. These were the two most frequently used criteria by a wide margin.

Customer profitability wasn't among the top five selection criteria identified by the survey respondents. In fact, only 45% of the respondents said their company tracks gross profit at the account level, and only 20% reported tracking net profit by account.

This absence of customer profitability information results in an account selection/prioritization process with a major blind spot. As Burgess and Shercliff put it:  "Without this information, decisions about how much to invest in these top accounts and where to allocate resources are being made in the dark."

To make matters worse, many companies that do track some form of profit at the account level still aren't getting an accurate picture of customer profitability.

When company leaders adopt an account-based growth strategy, they will be investing substantially more in some customers than others. It's simply not possible to make such investment decisions on a sound basis when they don't have an accurate view of customer profitability. They can easily find themselves in the unenviable position of successfully winning business from customers that aren't profitable.

Why Customer Profitability Matters

If all your customers were equally valuable to your business, there would be no reason to implement an account-based growth strategy, and measuring the profitability of individual customers wouldn't be very important. But the reality is, some customers are far more financially valuable to your business than others. There are three main reasons for this "value disparity."

The Pervasive Pareto Principle

The 80:20 rule (also known as the Pareto Principle) states that 80% of effects come from 20% of causes. One business application of the rule states that, in most companies, 80% of total revenue comes from 20% of the company's customers.

In Account-Based Growth, Burgess and Shercliff argued that the 80:20 rule is nearly ubiquitous, and my experience supports their argument. During my career, I've analyzed sales data from dozens of B2B companies operating in a wide range of industries. In the vast majority of these companies, I found that the largest 20% of customers accounted for about 80% of total company revenue.

The 80:20 rule has important implications because it is fractal, or at least "fractal-like." By this, I mean that the 80:20 distribution pattern repeats itself as the breadth of data analyzed narrows, like a set of Russian Matryoshka nesting dolls.

To illustrate, the rule states that 80% of a company's revenue comes from 20% of the company's customers, but it further states that 64% of total company revenue (80% of the 80%) comes from only 4% of customers (20% of the 20%).

The implications of this aspect of the rule are profound. Suppose that your company has $100 million of annual revenue and 1,000 customers. The 80:20 rule indicates that only 40 of your customers are likely producing about $64 million of your annual revenue.

When it comes to company profitability, the 80:20 rule doesn't go far enough because the distribution of profit is even more skewed than the distribution of revenue. Companies that have an accurate picture of customer profitability frequently find that all of their annual profit comes from a small percentage of their customers. (More about this later.)

The bottom line:  In most companies, a small number of customers have an outsized impact on company financial performance.

Customer Profitability Varies Greatly

The second reason for the value disparity is that customer profitability varies greatly. When company leaders measure customer profitability accurately, they frequently find that their company earns a great deal of profit on its most profitable customers and sustains significant losses on its most unprofitable customers.

The following diagram depicts the kind of customer profitability distribution that exists in many B2B companies. In this diagram, the horizontal axis depicts the percentage of total customers, with customers arranged (left to right) by profitability. The vertical axis represents customer profitability. The horizontal line across the middle of the diagram is the profit breakeven point (in other words, $0 profit). The red curved line in the diagram depicts the typical distribution of individual customer profitability.

What this diagram illustrates is that, in many B2B companies, a relatively small percentage of customers produce attractive profit levels, and a small percentage generate significant losses.

The most sobering point is that customer profitability is not always strongly correlated with customer sales volume. In other words, when company leaders measure customer profitability accurately, they often find that they have large customers at both ends of the profitability spectrum. This explains why basing an account-based growth strategy solely on account revenue is a risky proposition.

Customer Profitability Impacts Company Profitability

The third reason for the value disparity is that customer profitability has a major impact on overall company profitability.

The following diagram illustrates how the dynamics of customer profitability affect overall company profit. Once again, the horizontal axis in the diagram shows the percentage of total customers, and again, customers are arranged (left to right) from the most profitable to the least profitable. The vertical axis depicts the percentage of total company profit. The red horizontal line across the diagram is the actual annual profit earned by the company.

When companies start to measure customer profitability accurately, many find that their most profitable 20% to 40% of customers actually produce between 150% and 300% of total reported company profit. Customers in the middle of the profitability spectrum more or less break even, and the least profitable 20% to 40% of customers actually consume between 50% and 200% of profit, leaving the company with its actual reported profit.

So, all of the profit falling above the red horizontal line in the diagram is unrealized profit - profit the company earned and then gave away. For obvious reasons, this diagram is often called "The Whale Curve of Customer Profitability," and it dramatically illustrates why customer profitability is so critical to your company's financial performance.

A Final Word

As I noted earlier, companies that are using (or plan to use) an account-based growth strategy segment their customers into multiple tiers based on each customer's perceived value. Then they develop and use more high-touch and highly customized engagement programs for customers in higher tiers compared to those in lower tiers. One fairly typical approach is to use three tiers, with Tier 1 customers being those with the highest perceived value.

One primary goal of measuring the profitability of individual customers is to provide business leaders with information that will help them make better decisions about where to place each customer in the value hierarchy.

In Account-Based Growth, Burgess and Shercliff recommended that companies prioritize their accounts based on two factors:

1. The "attractiveness" of each account; and
2. The competitive strength of their company in/with each account.

The research by Burgess and Shercliff clearly showed that an overwhelming majority of companies use current revenue and growth potential to determine the attractiveness of each of their accounts.

This article demonstrates that business leaders should also consider customer profitability when evaluating account attractiveness.

https://tinyurl.com/3w6n2zbe