Episode #281: Leader Roles We Must Play

LinkedIn posts can throw up some valuable insights and contributions. I am posting everyday, so I aim to be in that category. I also look for interesting things that other people are posting that will help me. Someone called Tamray Vora created an infographic called Nine Roles For GREAT Leadership. Whether these role designations were Tamray’s original contribution or the infographic medium is the contribution I don’t know, but anyway, great work Tamray and thank you for sharing.

I liked this infographic because it does draw out our roles very well.

1. Architect refers to the leader setting the vision, mission, values and clarity in the business. We all know this but do our people know it. Does the most newly joined, most junior person know what the Vision of the organization is? When we do leadership training in companies we take the nicely framed Vision, Mission, Values statement off the wall and turn it around so no one can read it. When we ask for these key drivers of the business, the answer is usually embarrassed silence. What does this tell you? As the leader, you have to keep repeating these things over and over, well beyond the point where you are sick and tired of hearing about it.

2. Planner refers to our looking at both short term and long term objectives for the business.Sometimes we are so focused on the immediate daily nightmares, that we lose track of the long range planning. If we excel in the long term planning and neglect the short term day to day realities, we may find ourselves out of business pretty smartly. How do we ensure we can strike the right balance, year in and year out?

3. Executor talks about doing stuff and making things happen.Yes, we can delegate tasks but the fundamental driving force of the business is always going to come from senior management. The team has to keep pushing to get things completed. The staff love that Comfort Zone where all they have to do is repeat the same tasks everyday and never have to grapple with the new or more complicated. All leader’s middles names are spelt “c-o-m-p-l-i-c-a-t-e-d”. That is what we do. We push the whole organisation upward and forward, whether the team likes it or not.

4. Conductor is a great role because we are just like that. We are trying to get every person to not only exceed in their personal roles, but also to play in harmony with the whole team, so that we are a 1 + 1 = 5 type of organisation.

5. Teacher means we are the mentor to our people and their coach.Managers manage processes and leaders manage processes and build their people. The way they do that is by teaching them about the business and about themselves and the possibilities lying within them, to help them be the best they can be.

6. Steward comes from the servant leader idea of the leader serving others before self.Often though the leaders are the most driven, ambitions few, who stop at nothing to get to the top. This includes using people to their own ends and crawling over the bodies of rivals to climb the greasy pole. The only serving going on here is self serving. That leadership model is falling out of favour as modern business requires more involvement from everyone to succeed. Engagement and motivation levels determine how successsful that exercise is going to be.

7. Innovator ideates and enables motivation.The best ideas, the most valuable ideas, the coolest ideas don’t all emanate from the boss. If they do, then there is something wrong with the way that organisation is being run. We want the people with the best feel for the front line to be innovating. They don’t do this as a necessary function of getting paid. They do it because they are committed and signed on for the journey. The leader will have ideas of course, but the best leader will have all the ideas from everyone at their disposal.

8. Expert who understands people, business, context and can weave these into a strong culture that gets results. We must become an expert in dealing with people. In the old model, we were the functional expert. We had the most experience and knowledge. Then this thing called the internet came along and now we can all access global experts in seconds. The boss monopoly on being the the source of all wisdom and knowledge has been broken forever. The boss role nowadays is to be an expert in the business and additionally be an expert on getting the most success for the people working there.

9. Thinker who can assess, analyse and think critically.The boss has the luxury of thinking big. The workers below the boss all have their clearly defined roles and responsibilities to take care of and don’t need to consider the whole. This is the boss’s function and therefore the opportunity to think holistically about the operation is there for the leader. Leaders who can’t delegate well or can’t manage their time effectively, won’t have much chance to do any real thinking about the business. That is a big cost to the organisation.

So we already know we have all of these roles, but it is a nice exercise to pull them apart and separate them out to apply more of a spotlight to what we should be doing, as opposed to what we actually are doing. “We know but we don’t do” is the dilemma. By looking at these nine roles in isolation from each other, we can see the gaps and see where we have been neglecting our responsibilities. This infographic I saw on LinkedIn reminded me of what I should be doing and I hope it is a reminder for other bosses out there in leaderland. We can always do better, can’t we.