A Simple but Powerful Formula for Leadership Success

Nowadays it almost becomes a risk to write a book on leadership: you may easily descend into the pitfalls of clichés or impossible missions, and leadership consultancy seems a profession accessible to whoever has a blog of several articles.

Fortunately, Power Score: Your Formula for Leadership Success is worth a place on your bookshelf. Smart’s, Street’s and Foster’s experience at ghSMART has allowed them to draw on rich data gathered from numerous interviews with leaders from different perspectives, revealing an incredibly simple but extremely insightful formula for team performance.

Why you should read this book

First of all, it is an easy and pleasant read: not only is the whole book organized as an intuitive Q&A dialogue with the readers so that it reads truly fluently, but it is also interwoven with a great number of histories of famous or less famous companies and organizations, all of which are strongly vivid and extraordinarily inspiring.

My favorite account is that of Joyce Russell from Adecco Staffing US (p. 109), which demonstrates perfectly the power of integrity and modeling, while adding a touch of suspense to the story. The history of Razor Suleman from Achievers (p. 98) is also very impressive – believe me, everybody can learn from how others rose from their failures. You might also enjoy reading about the experience of the ghSMART team (p. 19), which is inspiring and full of courage, as well. And then there are the anecdotes on Aeron Kennedy from Noodles & Company (p. 29), Maynard Webb from eBay (p. 33), Kent Thiry from DaVita (p. 102), Jim Donald from Extended Stay Hotels (p. 116)… many other tales within the tale to be discovered and thought over.

Secondly, Power Score is a comprehensive and practical guide for leadership, putting forth the startlingly simple but powerful formula: P x W x R = Power Score, which invites leaders and their team members to ask themselves three questions:

·         Do we have the right Priorities (goals)?

·         Do we have the right Who (the people contributing to the achievement of the goals)?

·         Do we have the right Relationships (leading and managing the people)?

Meanwhile, three criteria are specifically defined to measure each element:

·         Priorities: connected, correct and clear

·         Who: diagnosed, deployed and developed

·         Relationships: coordinated, committed, challenged

After scoring each element with its corresponding criteria from 1 to 10, the remaining task is much simpler: just multiply them to get a power score that reflects the performance of the team. The full score 1,000 (=10 x 10 x 10) is idealistic and infeasible, but a score of 729 (=9 x 9 x 9) should be the minimum objective for each team.

At the end of each chapter is a small quiz for readers to apply these methods and measure their power score on their own, and the last chapter described how several companies and organizations executed this formula and improved their performance, giving readers a more concrete idea of its application. Furthermore, the criteria are specifically made short and easy to remember. Applying the principles of effective communication, the authors summarize and repeat key messages to enhance readers’ working memory of these concepts.

Last but not least, this book is based on facts, which makes it quite plausible compared to some other books in the same category. The authors and their research teams claim to have conducted “in-depth interviews (four hours in length) of more than 15,000 leaders, producing more than 9 million data points over the past 20 years,” from which they have distilled into the simple formula of power score.

In addition, these data also present in which aspects leaders are strong or weak in general, constituting an insightful reminder for readers to be more aware of their own strength and weakness. For instance, do you know what the most and the fourth common weaknesses of leaders are? Find out the answer in Page 45!

What else you should know before reading this book

The book is practical and fun to read, but one might find it goes straight into practical applications too quickly to spend enough time on theoretical clarification. For example, the authors do not explain their statistical methodology in detail to prove a direct and strong correlation between the application of the power score and the success of the organizations. Neither does it define what can be viewed as “successful organizations:” does success mean growing revenues, increasing profits, rising headcounts, improving employee and/or client satisfaction, contributing to social welfare, or a combination of all?

One might also note an ambiguous (or lack of) definition of leadership in the book. The beginning  gives a comprehensive list of the assessed leaders: “CEOs, their direct reports and other senior executives, nonprofit leaders, military generals, school principals, and head surgeons,” which may leave the impression that “leaders = decision-makers.” Consequently, if you are picky about all the leadership definitions and the differences between leadership and notions such as management and power, or if you are a big fan of debating whether an incompetent or unethical team head should be viewed as a leader, you might occasionally feel confused when reading the different stories in the book. However, those who view practice and objective as king don’t need to worry at all!

Finally, Power Score deserves the complement that it could serve as “the new go-to guide for leadership” by covering a wide range of subjects, from establishing goals to recruiting, from motivating to respecting ethics at work, while it does not go into depth on each subject. On recruitment, for instance, the authors give some tips concerning dos and don’ts during the interview, which are extremely insightful, but too short. Maybe it is to compensate for this factor that the authors have recommended other books for further reading at the end.

After all, you still should read this book

All in all, a few debatable points can’t mask the strong points of the book: the dialogue-like writing style makes it very intuitive and fluent to read, and the storytelling reinforces its plausibility and readability. Based on a huge amount of factual data, the power formula is simple, insightful, easy to remember, quick to implement, and the key messages are strongly delivered.

Herbert Spencer said: “The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.” Leadership books are likewise. If you don’t intend to take action and implement the power formula, then except for its fun and inspiring stories, you probably won’t benefit much from the book. As the authors write at the end: “We don’t want you to leave this conversation merely feeling differently about leading your team or just thinking new thoughts. We want you out there, doing things differently!”

About this book:

Title: Power Score: Your Formula for Leadership Success
Authors: Geoff Smart, Randy Street, Alan Foster
Publisher: Ballantine Books (June 16, 2015)
Hardcover: 192 pages
Find it at Amazon

Jeanne Yizhen Yin