Today, leaders and their organizations face challenges unlike anything they faced in the past. The AIIR Leadership Framework defines the leadership skills they need to overcome these challenges and succeed today, and tomorrow.
We leverage the AIIR Leadership Framework to help our clients build better leaders, better teams, and better organizations.
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We’ve spent more than a decade working with organizations across industries and around the globe. So many have asked the same two questions: (1) What skills do the leaders at their organization need to succeed? and (2) How can they help their leaders develop those skills?
We analyzed decades of research and development goal data from hundreds of executive coaching and leadership development engagements to create the first complete framework of the skills leaders need to succeed.
Using this framework, organizations can understand what successful leaders look like at their organization and across their industry, help leaders develop the skills they need, and build a powerful leadership pipeline.
Leadership is the act of realizing a clear and compelling vision through others. Leadership requires a broad set of skills that fall into three categories: Leading Self, Leading Others, and Leading the Organization.
Leading Self describes skills that impact a leader on a personal level. The skills in this domain focus on how effectively a leader manages their time, energy, thinking, decision-making, and overall reputation and brand.
Self Management involves how an individual responds to stress, their ability to regulate their emotions, their ability to focus, and other internal processes that affect nearly every aspect of their work.
Actively attending to one’s own mental, emotional, and physical well-being personally and professionally.
Conscious knowledge of one’s own character, feelings, and motives that guide behavior and decision-making.
A feeling of self-assurance and personal efficacy arising from an appreciation of one’s own qualities.
The ability to be aware of and constructively manage positive and challenging emotions.
Time and Energy measures your ability to effectively focus effort and attention, set priorities, manage time, and delegate in the interest of efficiency.
Effectively concentrating one’s attention and effort on the most pressing needs to complete tasks and deliver on responsibilities.
Capacity to organize tasks and actions based on level of urgency and importance.
Planning and exercising conscious control of time spent on specific activities to increase effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity.
Getting work done by sharing responsibility for outcomes along with the agency to do what is needed to produce results.
Decision Making refers to your ability to seek out and synthesize newly-acquired information and use it to make sound judgements in balance with intuition.
The tendency to recognize and seek out novel and challenging information, ideas, and experiences.
Synthesizing diverse data sources, analyzing cause-effect relationships, and engaging in critical thinking to make accurate assessments and implement effective solutions.
Making good judgments by balancing data, experience, and intuition.
Leadership Brand deals with your ability to play an active strategic role in your ongoing career development, acquisition of job-relevant knowledge, exert executive presence, and champion your own reputation and visibility in the organization.
Identifying and implementing strategies for career growth.
Acquires new job-relevant knowledge and experiences that facilitate being an expert on the industry, company, product, or technical domain.
Demonstrating self-confidence, poise, and authenticity that inspires confidence in others to believe in and follow your leadership.
Cultivating one’s reputation at work by making visible one’s identity and distinctiveness as a leader.
Leading Others involves achieving results with and through others. Skills in this domain involve the ability to build and maintain effective relationships, manage performance, and drive team performance.
Building Trust refers to your capacity to lead authentically in alignment with your values and in doing so instill faith and followership in those you lead.
Capacity to be true to one’s own personality, own one’s limitations and mistakes, ask for advice, and receive constructive feedback.
Conducting oneself in a way that demonstrates to others reliability and intention to do the right thing.
Social Acumen describes your ability to demonstrate empathy, actively listen, manage performance, assert influence, and engage in other elements of leaderlike relationship management.
Capacity to understand and relate to another’s emotional state and see things from their perspective.
Taking time to see another’s perspective in a way that makes the other person feel understood and without interjecting one’s own beliefs or opinions.
Working to build relationships with people who may be helpful in achieving work-related goals and establishing advantages.
Proactive investment in developing and maintaining relationships over time.
Constructively addressing disagreement to achieve an optimal resolution that minimizes negative impact and leverages positive conflict.
Clearly conveys thoughts, feelings, ideas, and expectations verbally and nonverbally across methods.
The ability to have a motivating effect on others without exerting power and control.
Managing Performance refers to your aptitude for holding yourself and others accountable, coaching, motivating, and developing your team; and empowering others to take ownership of their performance.
The willingness of an individual to account for their actions, accept responsibility for them, and share results in a transparent manner.
Helping others improve performance by posing probing questions that guide them toward learning, development, and finding their own solutions.
Efforts that foster learning, employee engagement, and employee development to drive productivity and organizational performance.
Inspiring others’ commitment to their work and organizational excellence.
Providing others with a sense of ownership and the means to achieve something.
Team Effectiveness involves your ability to collaborate with others, lead teams, and champion both team culture and team productivity.
Effectively working with others to actualize a common purpose or achieve a shared goal.
Focusing on the efficiency and productivity of a team.
Investing in the team dynamics and interpersonal functioning of the team.
Team Leader skills that enable others to work together in a way that produces results and value beyond what could be achieved individually.
Leading the Organization involves skills that shape the organization’s future. Skills in this domain involve a leader’s ability to set a vision, think strategically, manage change, and build a great culture.
Visioning concerns your ability to innovate, set a vision, and inspire buy-in from others.
Establishing and communicating a clear and compelling future state, usually connected to organizational advances, and reinforcing it over time.
Introducing a new idea or concept, or advancing an existing idea or concept, in order to derive a novel solution to an existing problem.
Communicating and living the organization’s values and aspirations.
Strategic Leadership deals with your ability to develop and manage big-picture strategy as well as manage stakeholder relationships and outcomes for implementing new strategies.
To understand the bigger picture of the organization’s current state, where it needs to go, and devising a plan for how it will get there.
The ongoing process of setting goals, making plans, and adapting to realities in order to execute on a strategy.
Managing relationships, expectations, and information sharing with the key people who are crucial to the success of a project or initiative.
Driving Change refers to your ability to execute on a vision by way of agile, flexible leadership and navigating change at the organizational level.
Effectively introduces and manages organizational change with clear communication and an ability to lead others through ambiguity and resistance.
Capacity to bend and flex one’s leadership style to match the situation.
Successful actualization of a strategy or set of objectives through collaboration, planning, coordinated action steps, and measuring results.
Culture Shaping deals with your ability to build an organizational culture wherein members feel engaged via inclusive leadership.
Introducing intentional practices to grow an organization’s current culture to an ideal state.
Fostering an environment of connection, respect, and involvement for all members of an organization to foster engagement and value creation.
