Episode #472: Leadership Essential Understandings

The P&L, the Balance Sheet, Cash Flow Projections, revenues, profit, the list goes on regarding where we leaders place our attention. There is nothing like a pandemic to have you focused on the numbers in the business. It is easy to get caught up in the dynamics of survival and forget some of the subtleties needed to lead an organisation. These usually revolve around our people and how we treat them and how we think about them. Like a juggler keeping 5 balls in mid-air rotation or the artist who can keep many, many plates spinning at the same time, we have to be agile and be capable of concentrating on more than one thing at a time.

Here are four things we need to be aware of while we struggle through the day to day.

1. It is essential to influence others to cooperate toward achieving desired results: the leader only has value in relation to an organisation and the people who constitute it. Basically, we know this, but often in straited times, our force of will, determination, grit and guts drive us to push ourselves hard and push everyone else hard as well. Cooperation becomes replaced with demands, orders, announcements from on high reflecting one single perspective – our own. The servant leader rhetoric is flung straight out the window and the value of the people to the leader becomes the dominant consideration, rather than the other way around.

2. The leader’s total personality, including the attitudes toward life and particularly toward people, will determine success or failure as a leader. Being perfect would make this whole leader gig much easier. In fact, we are a tangled web of fears, hopes, desires and value judgements. Basically, as we progress through organisations as a leader, we start to smooth off some of the rough edges. We learn to curb our sardonic wit, sharpish tongue, that devastating riposte and love of bitter, razor sharp irony.

When things are humming along it is easy to be pleasant, upbeat, positive, hail fellow well met. We have that spring in our step, smiles appear easily and tolerance and patience reign. What a great leader we are. When things are going down the gurgler and we are looking into the face of oblivion, our dominant spirit of negativity permeates throughout the entire organisation. Being calm amongst the carnage and chaos isn’t a natural play for most of us. So as leaders we have to have that actor’s ability to appear in control when we are out of control underneath.

McGregor in his study of motivation said the Theory X type leader focused on the shortcomings, saw only the negatives of subordinates at every turn and became the super detective uncovering faults and failures. His conclusion was that how we saw people influenced the culture of the organisation. This means we have to be highly disciplined to make sure our biases are not running rampant and damaging the team’s esprit de corps.

3. The blending of the organisation’s goals and the career goals of the individuals in the organisation is of paramount importance. These goals are interrelated and must all grow and prosper in concert. Is this the case though? Isn’t the leader’s own goals usually of the most paramount interest for the leader? We are all human and our frailties are many, so self-interest is a natural human dimension and we should stop trying to put lipstick on the pig here. That doesn’t mean that we cannot also have a keen interest in furthering the careers of our subordinates. Knowing what drives our people, one by one, takes a lot of time, but this is the leader’s mark of excellence – spending the time to know what each individuals’ goal are in the first place and then trying to bulldog the system to deliver for them. It is rare that the organisations goals and the individual’s goals cannot be homogenised like farm fresh milk into a creamy confluence. The devil is in the details though and a lot of brute force can be needed to get that whole coalescence thing to work properly.

4. A central responsibility of a leader is to develop people and help to make them successful, since only successful people achieve important results. This sounds a bit trite doesn't it. In fact, we are often failing our way to success. The innovation process is full of risk and is a messy endeavour. Hanmen Kyoshi in Japanese means teacher by negative example and importantly this can include ourselves, as well as the failings of others. We learn what doesn’t work by trying it and failing. The important thing to keep in mind is to be as generous with the failings of our subordinates, as we are with own failings. Holding them to account, but to a higher standard than we apply to ourselves, is a toxic cocktail and unfortunately a common one.

In our own case if “we never fail, but only learn”, then that philosophy has to be applied equally to the team members under our care. This is relatively easy when the stakes are low. It gets more exciting when some very serious numbers are involved and this is the test of our integrity, commitment, trust, credibility and reliability as a leader.

Kuki wo yomu is a favourite Japanese expression meaning to read the air in the room and understand what is really going on, which might be different from what things appear to be. For leaders, sometimes we have to take a pause in the heat of battle and ponder if we can read our own air and understand what is really going on inside ourselves. These four prompts are a good reminder to make sure we haven’t lost perspective on what it means to be a leader, especially when things get rough and tough.