Category: leadership

Hear the noes

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It is up to you to set expectations with those around you.

If you are a leader, this means setting expectations first and foremost with those you report to (upper management, executives, board). Expectations on what can be achieved, in which time frame, at what cost. Saying yes at all cost, whatever the reason for it, will just put you in a situation where all you can accept from those who report to you is a resounding and enthusiastic “yes!”. And a “yes” – perhaps not resounding, perhaps not enthusiastic – is all you are going to get. Ever.

It is the perfect recipe for failure.

Defuse

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Caught in the heat of an argument, the challenge is to find the lucidity to defuse. Do that while you are in a position of power, and you will have made real progress.

Going head against head, second guessing, paying back, raising your voice, smashing and controlling. Those are short-lived strategies that will just feed into the next argument.

What is strength?

Your edge

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The easiest thing to do with your fear, anxiety, tiredness, stress, mistake, inadequacy, disappointment is to place them on others. Yell, demote, gossip, badmouth, exhaust, demand. It’s almost automatic to resort to these when things get tough.

The alternative is owning all of that. Knowing that’s part of you, identifying it in time, expressing it with words so that you don’t have to do it with actions. It is the long road, it is challenging and it takes time and practice to get there. And that’s where you’ll find your edge.

Natural born managers

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People are promoted into managerial and leadership positions, and then it is expected they learn how to do that on their own. That rarely happens.

The skills you need to manage or lead a team are very different from the skills you need to successfully execute a project or design a flawless service or build a company from scratch. If managers and leaders are not put in front of this very basic fact, they will fall back to what got them promoted in the first place (in most cases, execution and some sort of compliance) and their teams will fail.

A new survey by the Boston Consulting Group about the challenges of managers stresses two facts that is worth considering before you put the autopilot on and promote the next best performer.

First, not everyone wants to be a manager. We often assume that is the natural career path everybody aims for, yet the survey points at only 9% of non managers actually wanting to become one (in Western countries). If you have a great performer, it is more likely they want to either stay in their current position or become a subject matter expert. Of course, this means you’ll have to ask them, and then find ways to reward them other than the title. There are many.

Second, just one-third of managers receive career coaching. It’s a very delicate transition, one that often creates challenges even out of the office. If supporting the manager through it is not a priority for the company, it won’t be one for the manager either.

New leaders

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How do you communicate with your team? This is an excellent example.

That does not mean you have to be a mum and make jokes about the smell of your child’s nappies. It’s about understanding the situation, being able to show your vulnerabilities and reminding yourself that literally no one in your team (whether it’s 5 or 5 million people) expects you to be a god-like creature with all the answers to all the questions.

The idea that as leaders we are flawless, unwavering and enlightened is out-of-date and makes more harm than good day after day. It’s time to promote new types of leadership. And already it feels we have been talking about this forever.