Louis CarterFounder and Chief Executive Officer, Best Practice Institute · Founder and CEO, Best Practice Institute - Most Loved Workplace® | Organizational Psychologist | Creator of AI Workplace Intelligence and Employer Branding Platform

7 Key Strengths of Task-Oriented Leadership & What is Task Oriented Leadership

14 Jan 2020 · 2 min

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1:44

In this coaching segment, the speaker recounts a client who was blamed for lacking strategic vision. The root cause was discovered to be a misalignment between the CEO’s clear, comprehensive goals (covering finance, strategy, operations, and customer focus) and the team’s understanding, leading to poor communication. To address this, the speaker facilitated a goal‑setting exercise that shifted the organization’s leadership approach from a broadly transformational style to a more task‑oriented style. By translating vague, high‑level objectives into concrete, specific tasks, managers could give clear directives to employees. The speaker cites iconic leaders such as Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs as exemplars of task‑oriented execution: they paired a compelling future vision with disciplined, rapid task implementation, achieving timely results for stakeholders. The core message is that a great vision must be coupled with task‑oriented execution to drive rapid, effective outcomes.

Chapters

I recently got a question from a client that said, "Everybody else is blaming me for not having great strategic vision." I said, "Let's look further into that." So we dug in and we found out that people's goals were vastly different than that of the CEO, who knew exactly what needed to be done, not only in finance and accounting and strategy and operations, also for the customer. For some reason, it wasn't getting communicated properly to the team. What we did was an exercise around goal setting. We moved from being more transformational-oriented in leadership style to more task-oriented leadership style. When we did this, we took things that were nebulous, in the air, and made them specific so that we could be direct with our employees about what tasks they had to accomplish. Look at any leader: Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, the leaders that you know got things done on time, quickly and rapidly for their constituents, their stakeholders, their board, their customers, most importantly for themselves because they had an awesome vision of the future that they know they need to implement. And they did it without abandon. With impunity, they moved forward and were task-oriented. If you have a great vision, when you have that great vision, Implement it with task orientation because you know that people need to get things done rapidly. Execute with task orientation and I know you'll win.