Leadership isn’t just about the inspirational and visionary CEO. Leadership is about people, says Jane Sunley in the latest instalment of her exclusive serialisation for AMBITION
To the person on the frontline, their manager is the leader, exemplifying what the company is all about. To have any chance at all of getting the people stuff right, organisations must create leaders at all levels. And if you don’t have the resource to do this for everyone, start with those who directly influence the most people – which, for many – may well be the middle management layer.
According to The Millennial Leadership Study (Virtuali/Workplace Trends), while millennials aspire to lead, they define this leadership as “empowering others to succeed” and when asked what their biggest motivator was to be a leader, 43% said “empowering others”, while only 5% said money and 1% said power. When asked about the type of leader they aspire to be, 63% chose “transformational”, which means they seek to challenge and inspire their followers with a sense of purpose and excitement.
Millennials therefore want to work more collaboratively and be less accountable for personal contribution. They are less concerned about being a leader as a position of power and status, and more about getting the job done. They wish to acquire and use strong leadership skills because they want to make a difference and have impact. This is very healthy and underpins the need to develop leadership capabilities at all levels from the get go.
This is why the elitism of a ‘talent pool’ is such a bad idea.
Role model behaviours
If you think about leadership you will often see a cascade effect – great leadership breeds great leadership. Business owners and senior people in companies need to make sure they are exemplifying the company culture and displaying role-model behaviours as well as excellent leadership qualities to ensure their managers – and the managers of the future – understand and exert what the company needs.
Weak managers used to be able to hide behind their status. These days, information flow is freer, expectations are higher and people aren’t going to ‘put up and shut up’. People expect, and have a right to, decent leadership. And they will demand it if they don’t receive it. Or good people will leave you.
Of course, we all mess up sometimes,
though that’s about admitting
it, dealing with
it and moving on – this is
actually an attractive leadership trait. If, hand on heart, your leaders (at
all levels) aren’t up to scratch, it’s time to take action.
Developing leaders is a life-long process and something for which I believe the leader, or potential leader, should take their own responsibility. Yes, you can go off to Harvard, Tsinghua or London School of Economics and study leadership – and that’s all great stuff – but not everyone has that opportunity and anyway I know from experience, it’s only half the story.
University of life vs. highly educated
During one enterprise conference at which I spoke in Singapore, the delegates seemed to fall into two fairly distinct groups. The entrepreneurs (many vastly wealthy, having built large, highly successful enterprises) with few or no qualifications other than the ‘university of life’. Let’s call them the As. And the Bs – highly educated and working within large corporations.
It was interesting to listen to them discussing what makes a successful organisation and how their leadership styles had impacted this. It transpired that many of the Bs were completely confounded by the approach to business of the As, where much was done on gut feeling and what you might term ‘common sense’, with relatively little analysis. That people would follow them towards their vision was not in question.
The Bs had become increasingly concerned about attracting and retaining great people and how many they were losing to more entrepreneurial businesses. The As wondered how the Bs were ever able to get anything done! One commented: “By the time you’d analysed, evaluated and debated that opportunity and decided how you would deliver it, I’d already be doing it and, you would have lost out to me!” (Lots of laughter and a few uncomfortable shuffles.)
It made me consider how differently each had acquired their leadership skills, with many of the As learning in a practical way at their father’s knee while many of the Bs were exceptionally well-qualified, but had learned the theory first and then put it into practice. Ideally you’d want a combination of theory and experience, which is why starting early, equipping everyone (managers or not) with basic leadership skills and experience in this area makes sense. Then top it off with the bigger stuff as and when you need to.
What makes a great leader will vary from organisation to organisation, culture to culture.
This is why organisations need to define their core leadership principles. You can use the same process as for defining and embedding values. Your leadership principles will then form a basis for development, assessment and review, continuous development.
This is why sending people on standard leadership programmes is not always the best use of investment in this area. Of course, leaders need basic skills such as communication, organisation and planning, decision making, proactivity and so on. However, they need to know how it is done in your organisation, not in someone else’s. And unless you define this, who knows how leadership should work in your business? Omitting this vital step is how inconsistency happens.
This is particularly pertinent in light of the increase in collaborative working and flexible teams.
There are many ways to acquire these skills – from mentoring to self-study. So while you shouldn’t completely discard classroom training, make it facilitated, tailored and involve real business issues. Those days of ‘sheep-dipping’ everyone in the same sessions are well and truly gone.
The most important thing is that leaders in the making must have access to this development on the way up – once they’re there it’s too late.
One of the simple daily self-assessment tools leaders use is to ask themselves: ‘If there were a leadership election today, would I win?’
A 10-point plan for growing your own leaders
- Define these core traits by behaviour – what great ‘looks like’.
- Embed these leadership principles across the leadership population.
- Recruit new leaders against these criteria.
- Assess leaders against these principles which will form their development plans.
- Base core leadership development around what great ‘looks like’.
- Have robust talent management in place so succession planning is always up to date and you can identify future leaders.
- Provide internal challenges and projects to test ability and inspire.
- Access external secondments, mentoring and experiential learning to keep things fresh.
- Check aspirations, development plans and personal circumstances regularly – things change.
It’s necessary to import skills from time to time but it makes for a healthy culture and better engagement if people know they can fulfill their aspirations with you.
Leadership and productivity
When business people talk about productivity, they often mean that employees need to work harder.
Perhaps this is because they believe people aren’t working hard enough already (or possibly as hard as they perceive they did, or do, themselves).
The leader’s role in productivity is to help people to do their jobs more easily and therefore effectively. People do generally want to succeed and, unless they are disengaged and no longer care, they want to put in a good performance. Good leaders know this and therefore view getting rid of the unnecessary stuff as a priority. This requires organisation and thinking skills, and/or the ability to ask the right questions, determine what needs to be done and get someone else to do it. Leaders can cut through the red tape by looking for the easy route to getting things done.
It seems that it’s human nature to complicate things. This is apparently true of many business environments. If every project, challenge or discussion were to start with “what are we setting out to achieve?” and “what’s the simplest way we can reach the objective?”, the outcomes would undoubtedly be better. It might take longer to do the thinking, but the execution would be faster (and probably cheaper). Communication would be clearer with less complexity to explain. By looking for the points of least resistance – the least complicated ways – and encouraging the team to ask “why are we doing this?” And “how could we make it simpler?”, the leader can inspire the team to become more productive.
Good leaders can positively influence productivity by:
- making things simple, easy and clear
- providing purpose and meaning
- accepting that people will have different capacities and work in different ways
- deploying them in optimal ways
- influencing behaviours
- coaching and nurturing talent.
Overall, they become the conductor, not the principle violinist and certainly not the one who pounds the big bass drum.
Don’t just take it from me
“We empower our staff to define problems in the marketplace and solve them. Our competition could be entrepreneurs working from home with no rules at all – we have to allow our staff this freedom so they can compete.
‘We can’t have a corporate free-for-all so there has to be some rigour and structure, but there is nothing more powerful than inclination, and we allow staff to have this.
TIM MORGAN, CEO, MINT DIGITAL
