The AIIR® Leadership Framework is a powerful framework for understanding and developing the skills leaders need to succeed.
What is the AIIR Leadership Framework?
The AIIR Leadership Framework is a comprehensive taxonomy of the 45 cognitive, social, and emotional skills that all leaders need. The AIIR Leadership Framework organizes these skills into three foundational domains: Leading Self, Leading Others, and Leading the Organization. Each leadership domain contains four leadership dimensions, a cluster of leadership skills that describe the day-to-day behaviors leaders need to succeed in their role.
Leading Self describes skills that impact a leader on a personal level. Skills in this domain focus on how effectively a leader manages their time, energy, thinking, decision-making, and overall reputation and brand.
Self-Management
Self-Management involves a range of skills that include your ability to exercise self awareness, your ability to engage in self care, your confidence, your resilience, and your ability to manage emotions.
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.
The capacity to maintain composure through challenging times and to recover from setbacks.
Time and Energy
Time and Energy involve skills that optimize your ability to focus effort and attention, set priorities, manage time, and delegate to others.
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
Decision Making refers to the ability to seek out and synthesize information, solve problems, and ultimately make high-quality decisions.
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
Leadership Brand involves your ability to build a strong reputation in the organization, operate with executive presence, acquire job-relevant expertise, and proactively manage your career.
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
Building Trust refers to the capacity to lead authentically and 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
Social Acumen involves your ability to demonstrate empathy, engage in active listening, manage conflict, exercise influence, and cultivate strong working relationships.
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 conveying 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
Managing Performance involves a broad set of skills required to achieve performance objectives through others. These skills include acountabilty, coaching, and the ability to motivate, develop, and empower others.
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
Team Effectiveness involves your ability to collaborate effectively, lead a team, and maximize team performance by attending to a team’s productivity and culture.
Focusing on the efficiency and productivity of a team.
Investing in the team dynamics and interpersonal functioning of the team.
Effectively working with others to actualize a common purpose or achieve a shared goal.
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
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.
Introducting 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
Strategic Leadership deals with your ability to formulate and implement strategy, as well as manage important stakeholder relationships required for successful strategy execution.
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
Driving Change refers to your ability to execute on a vision by applying change management skills and dynamic leadership that adjusts based on situational demands.
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
Culture Shaping describes the skills required to build a healthy organizational culture that is inclusive and aligned with the organization’s mission.
Introducing intentional practices to grow an organization’s current culture to an ideal state.
Fostering an environment of connection, respect, involvement for all members of an organization to foster engagement and value creation.
1. Uncover the Skills Your Leaders Need
Leverage the AIIR Leadership Framework, AIIR can help you uncover the skills it takes to succeed in in a specific role and at your organization in general.
2. Understand the the Skills Your Leaders Have
Built on the AIIR Leadership Framework, the LD12 leadership skills assessment helps you understand the gap between the skills your leaders have and the skills they need.
3. Deploy Precision Coaching and Development
Use targeted coaching and leadership development to close the leadership skills gap and set your organization on the path to outperformance.
Ready to see how the AIIR Leadership Framework can Help You Build Better Leaders, Better Teams, and a Better Organization?
