Episode #421: Four Attributes for Leaders to Master

Regardless of what level of leader we are, from neophyte to legend, there are four attributes which we need to master and keep remastering, because business never sleeps. There are leaders who are busy, busy working in their business and then there are those who make the time to work on their business. The biggest component of working on their business should be working on themselves. This however tends to be neglected. We graduate from varsity, learn on the job, maybe we can lob in an executive education week, at a flash, brand name business school, but the day to day consumes us. Before you know it, the last serious work on yourself as a leader was many, many years ago. Often all you have to show for the passage of time is a thinning hairline or more grey (or both), a more generous waistline and higher blood pressure.

Leadership as a discipline requires constant study. We need people to work longer, so the generations in the workplace have increased up to five for the first time in history. Younger people grow up digital natives, seem terrified of the phone in many cases and often lack sufficient interpersonal skills, because they spend all their time staring at screens. In Japan’s case formal leadership education is rare because most firms don’t invest and default to the OJT (On The Job) training model. A few generations of this and the wheels fall off. Covid forcing leaders to operate in a remote online environment, exposed the weaknesses in the leadership cohort education systems. Many of our clients contacted us to get to work to fix the issues.

The areas of greatest weakness tend to be: (A) poor time management, especially not having a rock solid system for prioritising time usage and then having discipline to spend their time working on only the most important items, when they are at their freshest.

(B) Delegation of tasks, so that the boss can work on the highest value items that only the boss can do. Delegation tends to be a fertile training ground for subordinates, to prepare them to step up and take accountability at a higher level. Bosses who hoard work, because they don’t know how to delegate properly are denying their staff the opportunity to grow.

(C) Coaching is one of those high value tasks which is always sanctified but little practiced. Bosses confuse barking out orders like a mad pirate captain with coaching. When we shadow bosses and at the end of the day show them how many actual minutes they spent coaching their staff, they are universally aghast at how little time they are investing in their people.

Selling is a boss job for both internal and external audiences. Some bosses though, mistake spruiking for selling. Sales is mainly listening to the answers to supremely well crafted questions. The remainder of the time is spent asking follow up questions and introducing solutions. Bosses need to sell their vision and direction for the company to the team, stakeholders and the shareholders. If the boss has come up through the sales track, then there is a hope that they can do this well. If they are technical people, who have come to occupy the hot seat, this idea may be foreign, even repugnant to them. Nevertheless, bosses not only have to be able to sell, they have to master all of the medium touchpoints which now populate our business universe.

Communication skills maketh the leader today. Bosses have to be able to compose and deliver messages, all the while being paragons of clarity and conciseness. This is the Age of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism, so the task to get our message across has become unbearably complex and difficult. Staff are time poor, constantly minimising everything, swimming against the daily tsunami of emails and tramping from one meeting to the next. They are often not devoting the right amount of time to digest the boss’s messages.

The related skill here is giving presentations. In this modern era, a boss who cannot give a sterling presentation won’t be boss much longer or won’t rise above their current station. There are best practices for delivering presentations and a boss who doesn’t know them is defective. I was astounded to witness a gaggle of executives give two minute talks on why they should be elected by their peers to executive council positions. These were captains of industry in charge of brand name firms with large numbers of people and significant revenues. They were shockers. How could that be? They obviously hadn’t received any training on how to present and it embarrassingly it was obvious to all.

The modern boss has to be a multi-tasking wizard, waving magic wands across leadership, sales, communications and presentation skills. This is not an opt in function or a nice to have. We are speaking of necessities here, because if your rival has the full package and you don’t, they will win and you will lose. We don’t want that do we!