Episode #394: The Three Circles Of Leadership

Most leaders are not properly trained for leadership. This is especially the case in Japan. Here you study under the mentorship of your busy, time poor, over worked boss. Your access to formal leadership training is constrained by the firm’s buy in to the dubious virtues of On The Job Training or OJT. I am sure that at one point in time the OJT worked like a charm but the used by date has well and truly passed on that methodology. Business is a lot more complex today, technology rampant and the younger generation are increasingly feral.

The core required skills of the leader form three inter connecting circles. These comprise leading, selling and presenting. Now for many leaders they only see the one circle of leading as relevant and see the other two as less important. The point here is that these circles each connect so that there is an overlap between all three. If you are a leader you are in the business of sales. You may have come through the CFO or Chief Scientists or General Management track to get to this position of authority, but you still need sales skills. The problem is you haven’t ever sold anything, so you have no experience, no skills and no training. Worse yet you have no positive mentality about how important being able to sell is for you as the leader.

It is a little regarded, not sufficiently embraced truism, that we are all in sales. We are all in the influence business, trying to have other people follow our choices, suggestions and ideas. Experts in sales know how to anaylse what their audience wants, how to ask key questions to lead to self-discovery and how to present solutions in the most appetising and appealing manner. The leader decides the direction. That is their job and job number two is to get everyone to accept that is the correct direction and to get others to head there. We are selling conviction that we are correct. We are selling trust that we can be relied upon to get the organisation to where it needs to be to succeed.

“Selling is not telling”, is an old idea in sales. It is actually asking very well designed questions, listening carefully to the answers and then making a decision about what is best for the buyer. The salesperson decides what is the best because they have the most knowledge of their solution line up. The leader has to do just that. Decide the direction on behalf of everyone based on their superior knowledge of what is the best solution for the organisation.

Communication skills are the critical factor between getting compliance and getting engagement. The leader can extract obedience based on threats, hierarchy, force of personality and position power. That is a long way from motivating the team to self motivate to crawl across a mile of broken glass to get the results for the firm. Being able to frame questions in such a way to reveal to the listener, the team member, the realisation that their best interests are best served by doing what the leader has suggested, is the key communication skill the leader must have available to them.

This is where the leader presentation skills kick in. How to understand the team, their fears, their desires and to be able to meet them in the thought processes populating their own minds. The ability to package up complex offerings and make them clear and able to be consumed by all.

Words stir the hearts and minds of the team members, but does the leader have that ability? That is why the presentation skills of the leader must be extremely high. Garbled messages, unanimated delivery, uninspiring aspirations sabotage the leader’s efforts to lead. So many leaders though got to the top and somehow evaded the responsibility to become excellent communicators. They relied on their technical skills and hid from the chance to reach out and gather people to them through their speaking skills. They wander around making dopey statements about excellent speakers being “all style and no substance” to justify their own ineptitude.

Leaders who lead without advanced sales skills and speaking skills are playing at leading. They flaunt and enjoy their status, while relying on the creaky apparatus of the company organisational chart to hold them up. They are fake leaders. These leadership Lilliputians are mediocrity personified. They are in deep denial. They have only one circle of the leadership puzzle and continue to deny they lack the other two vital components. They all get found out eventually and are exposed for their failings, their careers shattered on the rocks of self-delusion, timidity and fear of the unknown. You don’t have the necessary sales and presentation skills? Well stop hiding from reality and go get them. We need expertise at the highest levels in all three circles, if we are going to be a true leader.