Our role at Alvogen is to inspire and achieve the impossible. To call management a job, position or title is to completely miss the mark. The truly great managers of the world have answered their calling to bring out the very best in people, maximizing every individual’s potential. These great managers count their successes by counting the people who thrive working with them—not for them—in the pursuit of a common cause.

We have set out on a challenging mission. Our goals are stretched and to succeed we need to perform way beyond expectations. An extensive leadership study conducted by Andy Hargreaves and Alma Harris in 2011 reveals that leaders who perform beyond expectations have a proper sense of urgency, but that they do not deplete their own and others’ energy or resources. They inspire the desire to continuously do better with less and to do more than has ever been done before. Leaders who perform beyond expectations know how to run against the grain and ‘bowl uphill into the wind’. They never give up.

But their greatest talent is identifying and selecting talented people who form a whole that is so much stronger than any individual. A good leader is like a good teacher. The greatest sign of success for a teacher is to be able to say ’the children are now working as if I didn’t exist’. In the end, leaders who perform beyond expectations fit the characterization made by Leonardo da Vinci – that ‘people of accomplishment rarely sit back and let things happen to them. They make them happen’. Yet, performing beyond expectations does not depend on a single leader at any given moment in time, with a single style. Leaders who perform beyond expectations do so through the fusion of many skills, styles and people. And remember, the intelligence of a leader can clearly be seen by looking at his/her team.

This is what Alvogen‘s leadership beyond expectations ultimately means.