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Allan Leighton doesn't have time to do the ironing. He's got more businesses to run than most people have jobs in a lifetime. Appearing at Waterloo's iMax theatre for the London Business Forum (LBF), he wore a white linen shirt that was heavily wrinkled and buttoned low. Pale and grizzly, he looked as if he had just spent the night in his car.

Could his multiple chairmanships and non-executive directorships be taking their toll, we wondered, as he loitered at the foot of the stalls? Could it be that the man who famously checks his e-mails only twice a day, the poster-boy for Charles Handy's "portfolio career", has finally taken on too much?

As this review goes to press, Leighton is chairman of Bhs, the budget retailer of clothing and domestic goods; and of Race for Opportunity, a charity with 180 corporate members that promotes diversity in business. He's a non-executive director for BSkyB, the international broadcaster; and for George Weston Ltd, a Canadian food processing and distribution group. And he's the deputy chairman of Selfridges, the luxury department store.

Yet his most demanding job is the chairmanship of Royal Mail. Since 2001, Leighton has led dramatic performance improvements at the former postal monopoly, but he has also been in regular conflict with the Communication Workers Union. Indeed, during the run-up to this event, he faced the first national postal strike for over 11 years. Most of us couldn't handle the multi-tasking of his career, let alone the pressure.

His secret, it seems, is an ability to focus completely on what's important at any given moment. As he began to speak, it was clear he would never waste time trying to look like a leader, with flashy suits or preened presentation skills. Rather, this was someone who would devote all his energy to organisational effectiveness. The rough edges were also a reflection of his desire to treat front-line staff as equals - it was their performance, he pointed out, that would ultimately determine the overall performance of any organisation.

To begin with, he explained the raison d'être for On Leadership, his new book that uses interviews with various leaders from around the world, as well as his own experience, to dispense "practical wisdom". Most books on leadership, he pointed out, are written by people have have "never really led anything." They often try to turn leadership into "some sort of science, which it's not." Your most important job as a leader is to simplify your organisation so that staff can get on with their jobs more easily, he argued: "If [a new process] has a manual attached to it then it can't be anything to do with continuous improvement."

Execution is, ultimately, more important than strategy, Leighton argued. "The problem is that everybody thinks strategy is the most important because, over the last 10-15 years, that's what all the business books have taught people." If you visualise the typical organisation as a pyramid with strategy at the point and execution at the base then you realise why execution "really sorts the strong from the weak".

Leighton said that, when he started at Royal Mail, there were "hundreds of people with strategy in their title," because having the word strategy in your title meant you got paid more money. "Royal Mail had some of the best strategies in the world," he admitted, but it also had "one of the worst businesses in the world." Why? Because its ability to execute was poor. "For me, that was the final death knell of strategy and strategy departments," he said.

Good leadership means getting as close as possible to the people trying to execute your instructions, Leighton suggested. This means "managing by walking about," meeting as many people on the front line as possible on a regular basis; and creating a culture in which those people feel free to discuss their operational problems.In most boardrooms "there is not a single person who executes anything," he said. "In retail, it happens in the shops. In the mail, it obviously happens in the delivery offices... In manufacturing, it happens on the lines."

Leighton said the importance of getting a front-line perspective was brought home early in his career, while he was on a management development course at Mars, the confectioner. As part of this course, he was sent to Slough for two years to learn how Maltesers were made. The first day, he was asked to sweep up loose balls of chocolate from around the production line. "They're all over the place," he recalled. "I can't get them in one place. I'm shooting around the place for about an hour and a half. I'm sweating, looking stupid, and then a guy came up and said, 'You want me to show you how to do it?' And I said: 'Of course, what do you do?' And he said: 'You tread on them all first, then you sweep them up.'"

Since that day, Leighton said, he has held the view that "there ain't a single thing in a business where it is operational where the people who do the job don't know how to improve it... You can't have process improvement unless you understand that." He is "constantly in trouble," with the unions because, he said, because "I go direct to the operators... I gave up a long time ago thinking I'm gonna tell somebody, who's gonna tell somebody, who's gonna tell somebody, who's gonna tell somebody, who's gonna send a video, and everything's gonna be all right. Because years of experience say it don't work like that."

For this and many other reasons, the most important leadership skill is communication, Leighton argued. "Communication is not there to keep everybody informed," he added. "Communication is there to make things happen, to make execution happen. The test of good communication is: 'Did it happen? Did things change? Did it happen the way I wanted it to happen?" The style of your communication to staff is important in so much as it must not be a "choking" deluge of information and instructions. "So much communication I see in businesses is talking at people," he said. "For me, communication is about talking with people."

Many leaders fool themselves into thinking that something is being done if information about that something is being circulated widely and frequently via e-mail. That's one of the biggest fallacies of the modern workplace, Leighton suggested. "We've all got our Blackberries... so everybody e-mails everything to wide distribution lists with thousands of attachments," he said. "We have videos, we have meetings and we have manuals, and we think all those things are communication, and largely none of them are. They all choke the organisation rather than create ease of execution in the organisation." This is especially true, he pointed out, when every department that receives information insists upon adding to it before passing it on.

So, the ability to make communication meaningful is a vital. The other key leadership skills highlighted by Leighton included:

• Energy. "You've got to have high energy levels to cope with all the angst, anxiety, stuff that's coming through the media..." he said. "Anyone who says 'I can switch off,' [is talking] rubbish. If you ain't on it every day, 365 days a year... that's a problem. It goes with the territory."
• Charisma. Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, has a completely different persona from that of Tony O'Reilly, chairman of Independent News & Media Group, Leighton pointed out. "But when they walk into a room, people listen."
• Drive. "Business is about growing the sales, growing the earnings, growing the profit, growing the market share. It ain't about going around being nice to everybody. It's about winning, and to win, you need drive because lots of things get in your way along the way."
• Impatience. A certain degree of this "quality" is required because is encourages continuously improved performance, Leighton argued. All good leaders "think things can be done faster," he said, commenting that "speed and turnaround time is becoming one of the key competitive [advantages] in running companies."

Ultimately, the difference between leaders and managers is that "leaders do the right thing while managers do things right." Managers are the "execution bearers," and finding, developing and retaining good ones is therefore a vital exercise for any organisation that wishes to improve its performance. "Everybody wants to be a leader [but] you can't have that many leaders," Leighton pointed out. "And no great leader can exist unless they've got really great managers."

Leadership is both the best and the loneliest job in the world, Leighton concluded: "You are doing the right thing for the company for the future and you can't bullshit yourself in this because you know whether you are or you're not... That's the responsibility that you take. That's the integrity that goes with it."