All of the interviews I conducted for my book The Seven Strategies of Master Leaders: Featuring key insights from 32 of Canada’s top leaders and all of the studies I have read can be summarized in the seven strategies pictured below.

Mastery is being able to use the right leadership strategies combined with the right higher-order skills such as higher-order intentions, decision-making, risk-assessment, execution, commitment and follow-through for each specific leadership challenge.

You can use this leadership model to help you develop your own higher-order leadership skills, competencies and strategies, and in turn, to help others in your organization do the same by reading the subsequent entries into this blog.

For example, research by the Conference Board of Canada concluded that leadership development is more important than ever as we will need to accelerate the development of leaders in the private, public, not-for-profit and volunteer sectors as baby boomers retire in increasingly large numbers. One of the key strategies of Master Leaders is that they are master decision makers and this is a skill that takes not years, but decades to develop. If a Master Leader makes the right decision in the right way and at the right time, that decision becomes part of his or her legacy as the following examples point out.

• Louise Arbour indicting the world’s first sitting president of a nation for crimes against humanity;
• Canada Post’s decision to benchmark itself against the best postal systems in the world, then setting aggressive targets for improvement, and for the first time in its history paying its unionized members a bonus for achieving set performance targets, and
• Bombardier’s decision to build the C-Series jetliner during one of the worst downturns in aviation history. Not only will Bombardier be competing against its traditional rivals, the new 100- to 130-seat plane will compete directly with Boeing and Airbus ─ the world’s two largest manufacturers of jet airliners. 

The next series of blogs will look at the decision making processes used by Master Leaders in more detail.