Episode #385: As A Leader, How To Provide Guidance Your People Will Follow

Giving people orders is fine and fun, when you are the leader. Not so great when you are on the receiving end though. Collaboration and innovation are two seismic shifts in workstyle that are fundamentally different from the way most leaders were educated. Command and control were more the order of business back in the day. Hierarchy was clear, bosses brooked no opposing ideas or opinions and everyone below knew their place. Things have moved on, but have the bosses moved on with it?

Basically, the people you see in your daily purview are arraigned against a similar team in another steel and glass, high rise monstrosity somewhere across town. The quality of their teamwork and their ideas determines who wins in today’s marketplace. All the cogs have to intersect smoothly and the quality and speed of the output are the differentiators. Are your salespeople better than the opposition, is the marketing department punching above its weight, are your mid level leaders really rocking it? Clarity of purpose, inculcation into the cult of the WHY, dedication combined with smarts, make so much difference when competing with rival organisations.

The leaders are what make the difference. They are hiring the people, training them and promoting them. There are so many deeper aspects to this. Is the culture profound or anaemic? Is talent recognised, rewarded and embraced as a competitive advantage or are we checking the age and seniority of the straps on the slave galley oars? What is the communication mode? Is this monologue boss city or are we engaging with a firestorm of vibrant, powerful ideas from below. Is the boss the chief know-it-all or the orchestra conductor, moulding the raw untrained troops into a stellar team?

Communication is at the center piece to all of this. When the boss communication is focused on direct orders on the what and how all day long, we breed robots. Why don’t we push ourselves much higher and go for motivational leadership, where words capture souls and move mountains. The key to this pivot is to dump the olde style locker room halftime rousing call for maximum blood and guts in the second half. Today’s sports coaches are geniuses of psychology. They know their athletes’ temperaments, aspirations, fears and hot buttons at such an intimate level, that it is simply breathtaking.

Bosses have to be in the same mould. Knowing each person thoroughly as an individual is the starting point. On top of that is knowing what they are trying to achieve. We become their cagy corner man in the ring, wiping away the blood and helping to focus their dizzy brains through the fog of the daily beatings going on in the marketplace.

When we tell someone what to do, all we do is trigger negativity. Their cynical brains are burning with reasons why that is a bad idea. They feel the prime insult of being told what to do and consequently lack interest in executing a plan not of their own design, desire or creation. The reason they are so sceptical is that the plan is unleashed in a finished format, with no context or background attached.

We need to get to the point tangentially with a short story. By the way, we don’t say, “I am going to tell you a story from my glorious past”. That would be amusing. I would love to see their reaction to that little doozy of an opener. No, instead we go straight into a place in time, to a location they can identify, with people they probably will know and we spin a yarn, a true yarn, about what happened to us and what we learnt from it. This whole narrative is short, under two minutes. We certainly don’t flag our conclusion MBA executive summary style at the start. No, we are more crafty than that. We are like Iga Ninja, luring the listener into our web of charm. We expose the background that led us to an experience and viewpoint on a topic. At the very end, we give them the order, the action we want them to take and then we finish off with the benefit to doing it that way.

Next comes the hard bit for olde style leaders like me. We ask them if they can see a way of taking that idea or method further and bettering it. The old ego can take a battering at this point, when they trot out their half baked and crappy ideas, with all the aplomb of tender, ignorant youth. That is why we make an important intervention. We say, “Get together with others, you select them and then together think about what I have said and come back to me tomorrow with your best ideas”. This momentum breaker is important, otherwise only first phase, shallow musings will spill out of their mouths. We have also forced them to collaborate with their peers, giving us a better chance to reap richer alternatives.

In the end, they either adopt your suggestion as the best alternative or they adapt and improve on it. Either way, they have been given ownership of the next steps and so are more likely to execute it with commitment and enthusiasm, compared to following your lofty commands. This is a different way of leading. It is the methodology needed to match the future of work we are all facing.