The purpose of this article is to help organizations to develop a robust leadership standard relative to their mandates and dynamics of modern complex world. Leadership standard is a set of best practices that guide leaders on how to implement and sustain excellence. The importance of having a leadership standard is to avoid unstructured leadership behaviour where leaders in the same organization display different patterns of behaviour that may impede organization performance and frustrate stakeholders. Usually, organizations have two types of leaders: hesitant and confident leaders. Hesitant leaders are those that recognize that they have been given authority to lead but do not know how to use it to influence employees in doing the right things that delivers results. They avoid delegating authority, and tasks for fear of losing control and sometimes they hide behind the policies, they are not decisive and creative. A leader like this lacks the charisma and influence required in making things happen. On the other side there are confident leaders who are inspiring, decisive and performance focused. They believe in the power of collective intelligence; they enjoy delegating authority to build more leaders and they foster teamwork and creativity.

Leadership standards can be built from personal, operational, and organizational leadership dimensions. There are many dimensions and depending on the current leadership gap or need, organizations are advised to choose a maximum of five dimensions to develop a clear and realistic standard. Factors that should be considered when selecting dimensions that establish Leadership Standard are the leadership competency framework, organizational vision, mission, organizational culture, business strategy, Organization performance maturity level, employee’s maturity level, stakeholder dynamics and the business environment. In addition to the above, there are three drivers that should drive the organization leadership standard and the first one is alignment. All the dimensions that form the standard should be aligned so that they complement each other in producing the desired results (Excellence leadership). The second driver is measurement, and this implies that each dimension should be prioritized and allocated value points as well as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

The following paragraph indicate how a standard can be developed. The first thing to do is to look at the organizational leadership gap or need. Currently, many organizations are having leadership gap and that is substantiated by ineffective implementation of strategic plans, poor service delivery, low profitability, high operational cost, low employee’s motivation, and lack of business sustainability. The first dimension selected to form the leadership standard is f authenticity which is from personal leadership. Authenticity should be dissected down into forms of behaviour or actions that leaders must demonstrate. Authenticity requires every leader to be human being, accept that they do not know everything and ask for help when needed, seek and learn from employees’ ideas and share power to create more leaders, own and learn from their mistakes. These actions need to be allocated wights and points. The second dimension is continual improvement which emphasizes operational leadership. It requires leaders to pursue excellence in everything they do, and this means they must adopt a mindset of understanding that good is not good enough, therefore, everyone must commit to improve by 1% every day. 

Furthermore, this dimension requires leaders to adopt at least a problem-solving model(s) and use them to solve their problems. In addition, they must adopt performance measurement culture to identify performance gaps and close them and lastly, they should empower employees to be at forefront in building a continuous improvement culture. The third dimension is to embrace humanity and that means respecting employees and all stakeholders, adopt Ubuntu and make it part of the management philosophy, provide employees with work-life balance and build trust in relationships, have empathy and express it often.  These are some of the examples that can be used to formulate leadership standards. Organizations are advised to use facts and encourage full participation of employees when developing their standard.