The 8 Leadership Secrets of Santa Claus

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Vol 5, Number 20

2007 Holiday Edition

December 18th, 2007

The 8 Leadership Secrets of Santa Claus

How I deal with increasing demands, competing
priorities and ever-growing performance
expectations and still remain jolly

by Santa Claus

Think your job is tough? Mine would definitely strain my sanity and drain my ego if I let it. Everyone wants a piece of me, yet many of the people I serve don’t believe in me at all!

The biggest challenges come from two roles that people rarely associate with me: Santa the Manager and Santa the Leader.

Some people think I use magic to bring everyone and everything together to complete our mission, but there is no magic about it. What’s my secret? Actually, there are eight of them – eight practical strategies for leading others and getting big things done all year long – and they are my gifts to you.

Build a wonderful workshop.
How do I keep everyone, including myself, on track and motivated throughout each long year? With an unwavering and uncompromising focus on our mission.

First, I make sure that all the elves and reindeer know what our mission is (“Making spirits bright by building and delivering high-quality toys to good little girls and boys”) and why it’s important. I spend time with individual employees discussing how their respective jobs specifically contribute to the accomplishment of our mission. I keep the mission in front of folks, and I make it a core component of our decision-making and work planning processes. If an action we’re considering doesn’t support our mission, either directly or indirectly, we don’t do it.

Choose Your Reindeer Wisely.
Because employees ultimately make our mission happen, staffing is my single most important responsibility. The time I spend on hiring the right way is nothing compared to the time I’ll have to spend dealing with the wrong reindeer.

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Make a list and check it twice.
As the sign on our workshop says, “If we want to hear jingle bells ringing on the 24th, we need to set and live by goals … all year long!”

We begin by breaking down our one huge annual goal – our mission – into a series of manageable, bite-size sub-goals. Because staff “buy-in” and commitment is so important to achieving our objectives, I make sure that everyone has input in the goal-setting process.

Once our goals are identified, we move into the planning (making “the list”) phase. Plans provide us with the direction, focus and organization we need to stay on task..

Listen to the elves.
Involving workers in running the operation – and in making decisions that affect them – is a key strategy for leadership success. Pay attention to how you are perceived. Whether it’s through formal surveys, hotlines, informal discussions, or invitations to employees to drop you anonymous notes about your leadership, you must find ways to ask for feedback and act on the information you receive.

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Get beyond the red wagons.
The only constant in life and in business is change. For those of us who live and work at the North Pole, nothing exemplifies that more than red wagons. The elves were a happy little bunch of “wagon masters” until the day I had to tell them that, based on the letters I was receiving, the demand for wagons was way down.

Share the milk and cookies.
One afternoon, as we were loading the sleigh for our big run, one of the elves asked a very profound question. “Hey boss,” he said, “good little girls and boys get all these toys. What do good elves and reindeer get?” I thought about those words all eve long. By the time we returned to the North Pole, I realized that I had failed to apply one of the basic premises of our business to my employees: Good performance should be reinforced with positive consequences.

Since that experience, I’ve worked hard at developing one of the most important characteristics of effective leadership: an “attitude of gratitude.” I’ve learned that recognizing employees – doing right by those who do right – is one of the best things I can do for my elves and reindeer (and for myself as well). I feel good when I do it; they feel good when they receive it; and they’re more motivated, and therefore more likely, to repeat the performance I want and need in the future.

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Find out who’s naughty and nice.
Confront performance problems early. Since occasional problems are inevitable, and since it is the leader’s job to address them, this is an area that I’ve really worked on.

Don’t ignore superstars, either. I used to think the best thing I could do for my top performers was to leave them alone and let them do their thing. But like everyone else, great performers don’t like to be ignored or taken for granted. Even though some may not admit it publicly, in private most realize that they need to be worked with, involved, recognized and rewarded.

Be good for goodness sake.
Model the behaviors that you expect from others. Make sure that your team is well-versed in the laws, rules and procedures that apply to them. For guidelines to truly matter, they must be backed with accountabilities and consequences. Just as most children know that failing to be good can result in Santa skipping their house, everyone here at the workshop knows that doing wrong will result in a coaching session from Santa…or worse.

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