What is leadership to you?
Reprinted from a LinkedIn article I first shared as we were getting used to working remotely in 2019
The other day, a friend and I got talking about leadership. Let's call her 'Fiona'. Fiona's done a top-ranking MBA programme, read lots of academic texts, been sent on various leadership development courses. She can articulate the difference between leadership and management, and describe what inspirational leadership is and why it is successful, and she can talk about empowerment until the small hours.
"And yet", said Fiona, "something's missing." She described to me how, in various workplaces, she had experienced lots of leadership 'theory', but actually felt like she was not getting the benefit of being well led. What could be going on?
We reflected for a bit on shared experiences, and also contrasted where our experiences had diverged. The conclusion I came to was fairly stark - only in a couple of organisations in my long and diverse career have I experienced high quality leadership - the kind that got the best out of me, and that enabled me to grow and develop while contributing strongly to the organisation as a whole. Fiona was similar. The thing that impressed, if not amazed, us was that this was not a contrast between empowerment vs direction, or 'hands-on' vs 'hands-off'. Nor was the great leadership we've both experienced a function of particular personality types, or charisma and inspiration vs more managerial styles for instance. No, what made our great leadership experiences were day-to-day behaviours that are easily captured and imitated, from individuals whom one is able to respect on a very personal as well as professional level.
This is not an exhaustive list of those behaviours, but here are some examples, and they are not the kind of things that academics or leadership skills trainers tend to bang on about:
1. Get to know your team
Get to know them personally - what makes each of them tick, their hopes and dreams, their fears and worries. You don't get this from a CV or interview. The best leaders I've worked for have reached out very early in our professional relationship to establish an informal, get to know you opportunity. The most common form of doing this is a meal together, but it could be a stroll outdoors, or travel time on a business trip. When Fiona looked back at a couple of disastrous roles she'd worked in, those leaders had her turn up for work, showed her a desk and then left her alone for a period of weeks or months. Some of the best senior leaders I've worked under, with large numbers of direct and indirect reports, would keep track of the personal information they gleaned in a filing system that would enable them to revise ahead of meeting someone. This was not a disingenuous trick to make the leader look good, but was borne out of deeply felt care for, and interest in, those colleagues. Senior leaders in Western Mining Corporation and BCG stood out for me on this dimension.
Meet every new team member socially within 1 month of their joining, and spend at least an hour getting to know them. Ask questions and listen, don't talk. Repeat this with existing team members annually
2. Establish how you work best...
...And what you need to do for your team to do likewise. A leader at London Business School once drew up a one-pager on ‘how to work with me’ and shared it with her entire department. Things like preferred hours and location of work, best methods of communicating, best time of the day for creativity or productivity, approach to good/bad news, attitudes to risk – your personal list might be considerably longer or shorter, but identifying and being transparent about your preferences will increase the whole team’s effectiveness. And reaching out to understand the preferences of other team members will not only help you lead them, but will aid their effectiveness in working with each other.
Write your ‘how to work with me’ one-pager. Share it in a discussion with your team – don’t just email it round, and encourage them to draft and share their own
3. Engineer opportunities for your team to get to know each other
Fiona recently worked in a dysfunctional organisation where employees divided into two camps – let's call them the 'bulldogs', and the ‘greyhounds’. Bulldogs referred openly to recent joiners as greyhounds, openly disparaged their lack of organisational knowledge, and spoke dismissively of ideas and suggestions they put forward. Greyhounds were perceived as not understanding the organisation, and not valuing the contribution bulldogs had to offer. Needless to say, this all caused personal hurt and anguish. But almost as importantly, it made it impossible to get the best out of teams. And surely the leader’s ultimate goal, organisationally, is to create and get the most out of their team. We contrasted this environment with our best team experiences, where leaders ensured teams spent time away from their tasks and even from formal ‘bonding’ sessions, just socialising and getting to know each other, as people. On remote locations in the mining industry, this was easy - after all there was nowhere else to escape to after work. But even in big city corporate jobs, we could both list workplaces like Bain, BCG and McKinsey and small entrepreneurial outfits like Lomond and Paymentshield where leaders made a special effort, often despite significant introversion, to get teams together purely socially on a regular basis.
Diarise at least an annual social get-together, with no work 'purpose'. Ensure you bring people together across any clique or tribal boundaries that may exist or be emerging. A dinner where people sit in one spot for a whole evening won't suffice
4. Spend time with your people
Fiona and I both noted a trend (if two people’s experiences over a 10-15 year period can justify this term) for leaders to be spending more time doing stuff, and less time leading their people. I can understand this. Being busy makes you feel important, and if you have to do the task yourself, presumably it is because no-one else is good enough to do it as well. But the impact on leadership is devastating. The ‘led’ can be left to their own devices for weeks, even months, on end. This is not ‘empowerment’, but abdication, or even dereliction. The leaders are not present to pass on direction, to provide the benefit of their vision and experience, or to coach and train team members to develop their own capabilities. And if you don’t practice something, you don’t get better – so the leaders themselves find their own leadership skills are not improving, letting alone developing and adapting as the world around them changes. Some leaders have asked me “how much time should I spend with my people?” Clearly, there can be no right answer, and it’s going to be highly contingent, but on the whole, I would say “more than you think”! McKinsey teams schedule frequent problem solving sessions to include the whole team and senior leadership weeks in advance, finalising the agenda for each a day or two before the session. And if they're not needed - cancel!
Diarise regular working time (up to a third of your week) with your team. Vary it between individual and collective time, but don’t wait to have a purpose to schedule a meeting. Work with the team in an agile way to figure out how you will use those hours each week. Pay as much attention to developmental issues as progressing tasks
5. Take pride in your team's success
CV and interview coaches constantly tell us to rewrite history, to take the team out of our work, to claim responsibility for even the most collaborative of successes, while shifting blame to the team or others when things do not go so well. This seems important, it may even work, when you are trying to land that important next job. But the best football managers teach us – "when we win the team gets the credit, when we lose, I shoulder the blame". For if you want to build a successful team, if you care about them as individuals, if you want to develop them for even greater success in the future, I don’t see there can be any other way.
Make a special effort to credit all successes to others, and shoulder blame for team failures. Enlist your team to give you rapid (if not real-time) feedback on this
6. Build flexible and frequent feedback loops
So you’ve got to know everyone, they’ve got to know each other, you are spending time with team members, both on tasks and on skills development. You credit them when things go well, and shoulder the failures to lighten the team’s burden. Surely that’s got this thing licked, right? Well, the only way you can know you are still on course, is by constant, or at least very frequent, feedback. The secret to driving a car fast is not, as many think, steering the right line around the corners. That’s how to crash fast. The secret to driving fast is a lightness of touch on the wheel, that enables it to wriggle and adjust in your hands as the car’s tyres scrabble for grip. This provides you with constant, visceral feedback on how much adhesion you have, how the weight of the car is balanced between each wheel, what minute adjustments you need make to speed, line and balance make to stay on your chosen course. The challenge the leader faces is making time and space to hear that feedback, however unwelcome and uncomfortable, from the team, and then creating the safe environment where team members know their honest views and opinions can be expressed without fear. With the right kind of open and transparent conversations, the door is opened for the leader to provide constructive feedback too, in the spirit of continuous improvement rather than judgement and scoring. Fiona and I have only experienced this feedback nirvana on a couple of occasions each, and in both cases we agreed that overly formal links to performance evaluation, remuneration or even official ‘lessons learned’ processes just get in the way of real honesty in these conversations.
Schedule weekly, 30 minute, 1:1 feedback with each team member (less frequent or shorter if your team is larger than 8). Focus on how they feel, what’s working well and what could be even better. In return, be transparent on these issues to them
7. Finally, let go
When I look back at some of the great teams I have led, the things I am most proud of are not actually the amazing amounts of shareholder value we created, the nudges to public policy to move it in the right direction, or the countless times we could say that time proved us right in the end, even if senior management was too male, pale and stale to take the right decisions at the time. Instead, they are the subsequent career steps taken by team members. In some cases these moves were within the organisation we were working in, but in many they were beyond its boundaries. I am extremely proud that the experience of being a member of those teams changed someone’s life in a meaningful way, and they went on to bigger, more rewarding, or just more enjoyable roles. Great leaders ultimately are great not just for the organisations or teams, but also the individuals within them – those interests will not always coincide. Once, and only once, you are known for putting your team members first, you will have a team that will give you their very best.
Plan to let go. Don’t focus career/development chats on opportunities just within the organisation. Challenge team members to open up about their aspirations, and help them identify the development experiences they need to succeed. Do this from their first day – seek to understand where they wish to end up and how you and the team can help
If you buy all this, how can you put it into practice? I suggest you translate these principles into simple rules, diarise those in Outlook (or whatever system you use to manage your time), and try your hardest to stick to them (perhaps engage others to feed back how successful you are?)
