What are you going to do to make your company better in 2013? Shooting for financial targets is hardly enough. Chasing financial goals is futile if the company lacks the human talent necessary to achieve such goals. In brief, making any company better depends on how leaders retain and leverage their human assets as a distinctive competitive advantage.
 
Research conducted by Dr. Ray Benedetto and Tom Walter, authors of It’s My Company Too! How Entangled Companies Move Beyond Employee Engagement For Remarkable Results, has shown how entangled companies sustain distinctive competitive advantages in various industries by building unique and enviable cultures that stimulate creative thinking, constantly generate new ideas, motivate high performance, and consistently delight customers. Leaders of high-performing companies view their business as a system that requires the synchronizing of key subsystems. Great leaders know that the future success of any enterprise rests on the strength of their leadership subsystem, which includes the current and future direction of the enterprise and their leadership pipeline — how tomorrow’s leaders are being developed today.
 
The leadership pipeline is a lot more than merely planning for leadership succession. The pipeline is a set of integrated steps that begins with having the right people on board, extends to daily reinforcement of right behaviors, and manifests itself in discretionary thinking and exceptional performance. If you want to do better in 2013 and beyond, assessing your leadership subsystem is a good place to start. The following questions spanning eight key areas can help you begin.