MANAGERIAL SKILLS
Accountable leadership
- See leadership as more than a position, and something that is earned each and every day
- Foster critical perspectives and empowering your staff
HOW TO
Making it to the top doesn’t say much about what to do once you’re up there. Breathe pure oxygen
and plant a flag? Indeed, the process of achieving a position of leadership
tends to obscure the purpose of being in that role: people head an organization
because they founded or inherited it, campaigned brilliantly in a competitive
selection process, imposed themselves cunningly, or simply came of age with the
required qualifications. The problem is that what makes you good at climbing
into that seat doesn’t necessarily translate into effective exercise of that
privilege.
Many thriving
leaders end up offering little mantras for their distinctive system: Sleep
much, read lots of books, work hard and play hard. Succeed by saying no to
everything that doesn’t spark a “hell, yeah!” Or, to take an example from the
tech world, always dress in the same way, to preserve your decision-making
powers for bigger things. There is an almost infinite number of (surprisingly
serious) articles unveiling this secret of Steve Jobs’ efficacy.
Such formulas
don’t help much, because good leadership is anything but formulaic: on the
contrary, it is much like walking a tightrope, demanding careful and constant
balancing among a set of competing imperatives.
Be the busiest and
most available.
The first paradox
of leadership resides in seemingly impossible time management. On one side, you
must work more than anyone else within the organization, not just to meet your
responsibilities and deserve your prerogatives, but to lead by example: you can
only ask of others as much commitment as you display yourself. On the other,
you must remain the most available person, if you don’t want to become a
bottleneck holding back the collective workflow; an unapproachable boss losing
touch with staff; a shortsighted director failing to detect problems; or merely
a nervous wreck. Virtually all the essential virtues of leadership—vision,
decisiveness, imagination, empathy—require an intellectual clarity that
disappears when you allow yourself to become overwhelmed.
What makes you good at climbing into the seat doesn’t translate into effective exercise of that privilege
Productivity tools
and assistants are at best part of the solution, and at worst a guarantee that
your days get jam-packed to the point where you have no time to think. Instead
of trying to get more things done in less time, a better starting-point can be
summed up as “purposefulness”: never do anything unless you are convinced it is
useful. Proscribe meetings devoid of agenda. Skip conferences that serve no
identified purpose. Ignore email and other exchanges—including from
colleagues—that do not plainly require your intervention. And replace chitchat
with meaningful moments to connect on a personal level.
A large part of
being available consists, ironically, in batting back everyone and everything
that comes at you without good reason. Having done so, you must devote your
undivided attention to the person approaching you or the issue at hand. In a
leadership position, our focus is constantly shifting, inevitably, but it
should always be intense.
Do most by enabling others.
Another paradox of
leadership is that, as a rule, it is the least overtly productive position
within the organization: the actual work that leaves traces to justify revenues
usually happens much lower down the food chain. A good boss is one that gets
the best out of others—an overseer of collective productivity. Quite obviously,
protecting one’s availability is key to understanding what part of the overall
workflow requires involvement at any point in time, but there are other
qualities that must come into play.
First is good listening.
You’ll only be able to support staff if you genuinely understand their
activities, perspectives and impediments. Misunderstandings and inhibitions
being at the heart of many professional malfunctions, strong communication is
indispensable.
Second comes
problem-solving. Leadership consists not in doing things oneself, but in
lifting any obstacles preventing others from getting the work done themselves.
Consequently, the
third quality boils down to equipping staff with everything they need to fulfill
their functions. The list includes self-confidence, a clear sense of direction,
well-defined tasks and expectations, constructive criticism, productivity
tools, deadlines and so on—which is why delegating is a time-consuming
investment. In a sense, the boss is there to kit staff out adequately and send
them packing. In so doing, we put them on a productive loop where they can
manage on their own, until new problems arise that bring them back to us for
guidance, decisions, or the occasional admonishment.
Give the trust you
must earn.
The question of
trust brings up yet another paradox in connection to leadership. Contrary to
what hierarchy would suggest, the higher you find yourself within a team, the
more you must trust your subordinates, and the less they owe it back to you.
Any inclination to doubt your staff will bring the worst out of them, creating
a paranoid and confrontational relationship. By the same token, any assumption
that they will follow you unquestioningly based on your position of authority
will only increase their skepticism or suspicion. We build faith in our
managers based on evidence that they deserve it.
In this unequal
arrangement, trusting staff means much more than keeping a benevolent eye on
their performance until we have good cause to fault them. It entails giving
them responsibilities slightly beyond their abilities, and providing them with
just enough autonomy to make mistakes you won’t scold them for. We learn by
facing and overcoming problems. Thus, leadership must make space for others to
fail in ways that contribute to a collective sense of empowerment and progress.
By encouraging staff to build confidence in themselves, you will best earn
their trust in you—a faith that can survive errors of your own.
Strive for
stinging criticism.
Leaders, almost by
definition, bask in the wrong kind of feedback: distinctive perks; unmissable
signs of status; a sense of belonging to a club of successful individuals; and
a professional surrounding of so-called “subordinates,” who rarely take the
risk of voicing strong criticism—especially when it is due and much is at
stake. Moreover, many senior executives unwittingly reinforce their isolation
by coopting likeminded-collaborators as their closest advisers, and socializing
primarily among “peers.” You’d be surprised how difficult it is for some of
them to have a candid interaction with someone supposedly below their rank.
This and other
factors create the solitude of leadership, a state where it is virtually
impossible to have meaningful discussions about the bigger problems you face.
Conversations among “equals” tend to be competitive, devolving into bragging
and one-upmanship. And with staff, it is misplaced to doubt or commiserate
oneself.
A number of
techniques exist to overcome such seclusion. Leaders rely on mentors or
therapists, or lean heavily on supportive partners at home. They take flak from
their board members, who rarely know much about what is going on within the
organization. They put up anonymous complaint systems. Best practices include
bringing in third parties to interview staff and evaluate their boss’
performance. The truth is that, although an organization usually contains all
the thoughtful feedback its leader would need, it remains buried there, unable
to surface. This dynamic only gets worse in periods of crisis, when people
hunker down, blame each other, position themselves to gain an advantage, or go
berserk. That’s not feedback: it’s breakdown.
The only way to
encourage usable criticism of leadership is to gradually build it into an
institution’s professional culture, by repeating subtle encouragements:
communicating your own goals and the expectations you should meet; openly
rewarding dissenting views and ideas; soliciting staff input on substantive
decisions; pushing them to design their own leadership assessment mechanism;
and routinely admitting mistakes and failures, especially when they have
obvious collective consequences.
Raise your level
of incompetence.
The Peter
Principle is a classic management book that establishes, rigorously
and with refreshing humor, that high-performing individuals are condemned to be
promoted up to the point where they get overwhelmed—a “level of incompetence”
at which they then hover. Indeed, excelling at writing analysis doesn’t
necessarily make one a proficient editor, team manager, or chief executive
officer; yet outperformers tend to be promoted nonetheless, from the position
they’re good at, to one they’re not made for. Good leaders must thus understand
that what made them succeed previously may be largely irrelevant to their new
responsibilities.
Your own aura comes from helping others shine
Leadership,
therefore, is not the pinnacle of a learning curve, but the point where it gets
steeper. To raise your ceiling of incompetence, you must lower yourself to
recognizing everything that you don’t know; admitting to being a beginner in
some fields; and using “lower-ranking” staff as tutors, to grasp all functions
within the organization. Oddly enough, books “For Dummies” are particularly
suited “for leaders” too!
A related and
similarly essential attribute of good leadership is the willingness to
fail—which arguably supersedes the much-vaunted drive to succeed. Any form of
entrepreneurial spirit draws on a certain talent in making survivable
mistakes—the kind you learn from rather than sink in. A leader’s competence
grows via such trial and error, which also clarifies the organization’s
abilities, shortcomings and potential.
Use authority
authoritatively.
Finally, it is
essential to dispel the false association between leadership and authority. Being
in a leadership position does not, by any means, guarantee authority—other than
in the formal sense of obeying orders within a chain of command. But leadership
is less about getting people to fall into line for fear of personal
consequences, than convincing them to wholeheartedly support a collective
endeavor. Authority, in that definition, is not an attribute, but a form of
currency you earn and spend. Trying to establish authority through bossiness is
a bit like giving money away to look rich; soon there will be little left of
it.
To gain authority,
you must be generous in supporting others and restrained in criticizing them.
Your competence will stand out the more you enhance and highlight that of your
colleagues; your own aura comes from helping them shine. Pointing out problems
will produce the best results if you claim your share of responsibility and
take the lead in formulating concrete, actionable solutions. Criticism will go
down well if well-informed and empathetic, while being equally firm, pointed
and succinct. Suddenly opening a whole list of grievances, or expressing
frustration in general terms, only brings out defensiveness and creates
confusion. Of course, criticism is at its most effective when balanced
out, at other moments, with well-deserved praise, which should be equally
sensitive and specific. That means actively looking out for opportunities
to reinforce staff more often than fault them.
* * *
The one, seven or thirteen tricks you’ll see touted as the secrets to successful leadership are a hoax. To be entirely honest, that would include this list too. The same people, with their same mantras, have done great in one top position and terrible in the next. Successive CEOs have presided over the same upward or downward trends in the company they took over, despite sporting perfectly contrasting management styles. And wise seniors have carefully groomed their young replacements to disastrous effects.
That said,
leadership certainly demands, more than any other function, decisive action
with constant introspection. That is why it is useful to take time to write out
some lessons-learned—less a map to be followed than a set of lighthouses, to
spare you leadership-wreck and guide you in good and bad weather.
15 March 2018
Illustration credit: Criticism by Julio Ruelas on Wikipedia / public domain.
