In any walk of life, strong leadership can make the difference between success and failure.  Shared Services is no different.  Strong leaders have a way of making a difference in their organization and in the lives of the people who work for them.

The Shared Services & Outsourcing Network has an interesting article on the most important characteristics of a Shared Services leader.  The article is based on a survey of employees in Shared Services.  Finance is well represented, but so is HR and other areas.  The results are not surprising.  What are they? Glad you asked. 

Here's a summary of the five points along with my commentary.  The percentage of respondents who voted for that particular attribute are shown in parentheses.  I'll post a link at the bottom of this post to the full article.  It's worth your time to read in its entirety.

• Provides a clear vision of where we are going and leads by example. (92%)

Leadership gurus Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, in their book The Leadership Challenge, discuss the ability to craft and communicate a vision as one of the top traits of a leader.  Kouzes and Posner discussed the trait as the ability to be forward looking, but however it's phrased, people are looking for a leader that has a vision for the future and is able to communicate it in ways that are both challenging and reassuring.   So many times "leaders" spend time on everything but casting and communicating the vision.  If you're one of them, consider the results of this survey

• Empowers us / trusts us. (74.5%)

As a consultant, one of the things I hear from my client's personnel is that they want to be in a position where they can contribute and make a difference.  Very few people are content to show up at a cubicle each day, collect reams of data and issue a report that few people will read.  That life is death for most employees.  Effective leaders empower their employees to make a real difference.  Sure there could be some risk, but so what?  There is always risk.  As a leader, would you rather risk missing opportunities to make an impact on your organizations?  True leaders know they can't do it by themselves.

• Offer support and provide regular coaching (67.9%)

In most organizations and for most department heads (not I did not use the word Leader), the performance management process consists of a hastily prepared annual review which the manager then gets signed and submitted to Human Resources.  Whew!  Glad that's done!  Effective leaders understand that each day is an opportunity to provide meaningful feedback and enable employees to live up to their potential.  Waiting until the end of the performance year to Manage by Surprise is simply unacceptable.

• Keeping us informed of progress (55.4%)

No one likes to be kept in the dark.  Sometimes managers deliberately withhold information because they need to, but more often it's simply a matter of indifference or oversight.  They don't appreciate the importance of disseminating information on a timely basis.  Nature abhors a vacuum and in the absence of information employees will make their own conclusions.  Effective leaders communicate regularly and keep the employees apprised of progress.

• Manages performance fairly (49.1%)

Remember when you were in grade school and the teacher always called on Billy in the first row to go outside and clap the erasers?  Well, we hated favorites back then and we still do.  Most employees don't mind being judged, they only want to be judged fairly.  This means giving the criteria for performance before the beginning of the performance year and then reliably collecting information throughout the year.  It also means having realistic criteria to begin with.  Effective leaders use performance management as a way of reliably evaluating the strengths and development opportunities for each person in their group.  And they use it to provide frequent and fair feedback.

So there you have it, the Top 5 Qualities for a Shared Services Leader as described by the Shared Services & Outsourcing network.