Leadership Caffeine: “You Have No Business Leading Others”
In setting and adopting strategy, it’s critically important to decide what you are not going to do. The same goes for promoting people into roles where they are responsible for others. It’s OK to say, “No” to those who aren’t right for the role.
Leading others is not an inalienable right that comes with seniority or through mastery of a technical discipline. It’s too bad that a good number of senior leaders struggle to offer a clear “No” to those seeking the role.
While I’m a staunch defender of the premise that leaders are mostly made not born, there are some people who have no more business responsible for others than I do conducting brain surgery.
Sorry folks, not everyone can learn to lead. This doesn’t mean that leadership misfits don’t end up in roles responsible for others, but that doesn’t make it right.
One way to stop the perpetuation of lousy leaders and lousy leadership practices is to quit passing the problem forward. While that’s contrary to what we see in many of our schools and certainly from our politicians who like to kick the problems down the road, it’s an opportunity for you to take a principled stand for all of the right reasons.
3 Core Questions to Answer Before Promoting Anyone to a Leadership Position:
1. What are the individual’s true intentions? Much like a father questioning his daughter’s new date, experienced leaders must work with their team members to properly assess motivations. If pay, title or an office with a door are the unspoken objectives, the individual should be shown the door, at least as it pertains to a role leading others.
While most people won’t outwardly describe less than honorable intentions, some careful observation and interaction via low-risk developmental assignments spread over time, will provide you with ample insights to make a good decision.
2. How well does the candidate self-manage? If the individual showcases an ego as big as Indiana and a desire to prove that he is the smartest person in every room he occupies, the obvious lack of both emotional and social intelligence, is not only a leading indicator of poor fit, it’s a big, bright flashing red flag. Instead of putting on your dark glasses to shield your eyes from the light, it’s time to slow down or stop and face reality.
3. What is it about prior performance (anywhere in life) that offers clues to future performance in a leadership role? While people can and do change, I want to see at a minimum, examples of leadership…even if the circumstances were informal. Eagle Scout? Student Council President? Volunteer Manager? Military leadership?! Examples of where the individual rallied people to troubleshoot and solve problems? Life crises that taught important leadership skills?
The Bottom-Line for Now:
When we sign on to support the development of new leaders in our organizations, we are signing on for a full contact activity. The output is a direct reflection on us, and given the importance of this activity, it behooves all of us to take time and deliberately and carefully assess our leadership candidates.
I’m all for giving deserving people a chance, however, the key word is, “deserving.” Convince me through your actions that your intentions are honorable, and I’m willing to move to the next step. Prove to me that you can manage the person looking back at you in the mirror and your chances of gaining my support are increasing. And show me through examples that you have context for the role and I’m motivated to support you. Fail any one of those three, and you’re out, at least as it comes to leading.
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Want More? Check out Art Petty’s latest book, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development. Created for fast-moving and highly motivated professionals and leaders, Leadership Caffeine offers more than 80 short, idea-packed essays for the critical leadership and professional development situations in your life.
Join the many groups and management teams and meeting/conference organizers who have adopted Leadership Caffeine as a discussion and development tool. The collection makes a great gift for the newly promoted leader or for your team during the holidays.
- Single and Kindle copies on Amazon.
- Group and Volume orders, visit Marathon Books for the best service.
About Art Petty:
Art Petty is a Leadership & Career Coach and Strategy Consultant, helping motivated professionals of all levels achieve their potential. In addition to working with highly motivated professionals, Art frequently works with project teams in pursuit of high performance. Contact Art via e-mail to discuss a coaching, workshop or speaking engagement or to inquire about being a guest on The Leadership Caffeine podcast.
Want to Lead? Answer These Questions! Number 1 of 7
Note: the Seven Key Questions for Ambitious, Aspiring Leaders are presented in Practical Lessons in Leadership by Art Petty and Rich Petro. I’ll explore each question here at Building Better Leaders through individual “Leadership Tip of the Day” posts, offering ideas for investigation.
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One of the fundamental tasks of any leader is to identify and develop his/her leadership bench strength.
In the ideal situation, the leader is watching her associates for signs of effective informal leadership skills, and then providing developmental assignments to those individuals interested in moving into more formal leadership roles. In this case, the aspiring leader gains valuable context for the role and challenges of leading and the manager is able to provide feedback and coaching.
Another scenario occurs when individual contributors or early career professionals recognize the potential benefits of a leadership role (usually it’s about money or title), and declare to their manager that they are ready to lead a team. Ask any experienced leader if they have been on the receiving end of someone walking into their office and making this declaration, and the leader will likely smile.
In either situation, the leader in charge can benefit from some simple but powerful questions to guide the ensuing discussions and activities.
The First Question:
1. Why do you want to lead other people?
This straightforward question can be disarming to the erstwhile leader. Often, well-intentioned professionals have not thought through what it is about leading others that they find appealing.
If the motivation is simply money, title or overall advancement (all reasonable desires), this question provides the opportunity to draw these objectives out and begin discussing the many ways that advancement can occur. Often, this question will clearly indicate that the individual does not have proper context for the true role of a leader, again opening the door for an important discussion.
The aspiring leader or coach/manager of the aspiring leader can use this simple question to encourage exploration and investigation into this heady topic. Try talking about the motivation to lead with other leaders of varying experience levels. A senior engineering manager offered to me that his motivation was very straight-forward: “I can contribute more to the firm by helping a group of engineers, than I can by working on my own.” Another people-savvy manager had discovered that one of her strengths was building coalitions across organizational silos. She found the ability to do this nearly-full time in support of helping people achieve their goals to be a rewarding experience and her primary motivation for leading.
Until the aspiring leader can plainly and genuinely articulate the answer to “Why?” they are unprepared to lead.
Leadership Caffeine: Take Your Best Practices Viral with Leadership Development Blocking and Tackling
Filed under: "To Do" List, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leading Change, Performance, Professional Growth
One of the interesting observations of writing regularly about developing and reinforcing great leadership habits is that the readership tends to be the group that already gets it.
Trust me, the lousy leaders that haunt our corporate hallways are not spending much time reading and applying the lessons of this blog, or the great work of: Wally Bock (Three Star Leadership) or Dan McCarthy (Great Leadership) or Bret L. Simmons (Positive Organizational Behavior) or Mary Jo Asmus (Intentional Leadership) or Becky Robinson (Leader Talk) and the many other outstanding leadership evangelists.
The people reading these blogs tend to be in violent agreement on the need for effective leadership practices and effective leaders. They might occasionally differ on key points and the “how-to’s,” but we’re having a great deal of fun writing to and preaching to the proverbial choir.
Our issue is truly about taking the people-focused, results-oriented great practices so widely covered and helping them go viral inside our organizations. No small task and one that takes time, dedication and teaching by example.
First, some quick observations about barriers and then my thoughts on catalyzing a mini-leadership revolution inside your organization through good old-fashioned blocking and tackling. And, pardon me if the football tie-ins are starting to show up. I’m excited that we’re quickly moving towards the greatest season of all!
- The slightly cynical, cold-hard slap of reality: there are some people in positions of authority that don’t get it, don’t care, and sure as heck don’t want to be converted. Get over it and get over them.
- I encounter many firms in my travels that are truly ripe for improving their practices but lacking the catalyst to get going. No one is saying “No,” and the issue isn’t that the current leadership class doesn’t care, but more that it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. I usually find pockets of effective leaders tucked away in these organizations in spite of the lack of a visible leadership development culture.
- The people change, but the excuses for not improving leadership practices are all the same and include words such as: time, money, too-small, no one to coordinate, don’t know where to start, don’t need it, no budget for training and so on. Of course, the reality is that improving leadership practices is not expensive, and the notion of not having time to do the right things to improve the business just ties my brain up in knots!
Actions You Can Take To Start a Leadership Revolution in Your Firm:
- Always strive to set the the example of the effective leader. No one is perfect, but word travels fast through an organization when some one and some team is meeting and beating targets, innovating, problem solving and somehow becoming a magnet for talent from other areas.
- Be a relentless developer of talent: your support of the development of others through coaching, feedback, a supply of increasingly more difficult challenges and your encouragement of risk-taking in pursuit of innovation are all powerful tools at your disposal. You don’t need a budget or a training program to do any of this.
- Encourage your team members to branch out into the organization. The better a developer of talent and the more success that you have at propagating your former team members into roles around the organization, the more likely you are to see your best leadership practices popping up all over the place. The most successful football coach of the 80’s, the late Bill Walsh of the San Francisco 49ers, is given credit for the creation of an entire generation of head coaches and the modern method to run an offense. It’s hard to read an article about a coach that doesn’t track lineage back to this brilliant coach and leader. In this case, one man set about the task of creating excellence and without knowing it, changed the culture of the entire sport.
- Work leadership development into the corporate conversation. Ensure that strategy discussions ultimately encompass talent discussions…because no strategy can be executed without the right talent in place. Once there is broader awareness, encourage your peers to engage in activities that promote discussions and that lead to actions. An example is the simple, low-cost “leadership book club” activity that I’ve seen work so successfully at the senior and front-line leadership levels. Tie development actions to lessons-learned from the reading activities.
- Build leadership development accountability into the organization. Hold your managers accountable for proving that they get it and are living it in the prosecution of their jobs.
The Bottom-Line:
When it comes to leadership development, sweeping corporate mandates and expensive training initiatives are rarely as effective as consistent blocking and tackling. Your own practices are capable of creating a new and next generation of professionals that carry the right approaches and ultimately innovate and improve upon what you did. That’s what it’s all about.
I write everyday with the picture hanging in front of me of the great Green Bay Packers of the 60’s running the one play that everyone knew they were going to run…the sweep. They of course did this with devastating efficiency en route to numerous championships that decade.
The picture (signed!) shows Bart Starr handing off to Jim Taylor with Jerry Kramer and Fuzzy Thurston leading the way as blockers. Coach Vince Lombardi is visible in this picture standing on the sideline, watching his team execute this play as effectively as they understood how to breathe. Relentless practice around relatively simple concepts yielded perfection.
How’s your leadership blocking and tackling training going on your team? Done right, it might just catalyze a revolution!
Leadership and the Young Professional
Every academic quarter for the past few years, a good colleague has invited me to be a guest speaker in her senior-level college management class and talk about leadership. I’m on the schedule tonight and I love this experience.
It’s great to have to stand in front of a group of early-career professionals and go through the humbling experience of recognizing that you are talking based on the road traveled and their view is on the uncharted horizons in front of them. Talk about different perspectives! You have to try and look backwards over their horizon to understand what they are looking at. Fail this and you will fail to relate.
You have to work hard to not come off like some dinosaur pontificating on your incredible body of experience. Remember, all that this audience cares about is “How can this ancient 40-something help me?”
The world that these young professionals are entering is very different than the world that many of us experienced. From technology to time and the nature of work (how, where and what), everything is different. It’s essential and a bit frightening to try and look through the eyes of a twenty-something at a world filled with an incredible array of technologies and opportunities, all cast against the backdrop of a world on watch for terror.
This college speaking experience always serves to remind me of how smart and worldly young professionals truly are. During the session, I provide them with a case that tends to befuddle most experienced managers. The crisp and correct answers that are communicated in this session showcase what its like for people to make decisions completely unbiased by corporate politics and all of the other barriers that we create for ourselves as we gain experience.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
As indicated, my principal topic tonight is leadership and while everything in our world is different than when we were starting out, some things are the same. The attributes and approaches that make a leader great still apply. Credibility, the ability to articulate a vision, ensuring that your words match your actions, delivering timely feedback and offering constant coaching are timeless practices of the best leaders of every generation.
Of course, we all know as well that you cannot teach people how to be leaders in a course or workshop or in a book. The best I can hope for is to plant some seeds on the commitment and hard work that it takes to be an effective leader and how all of us have to take responsibility for our own career and professional development. Come to think of it, these are good lessons for anyone of any age.
I look forward to feeling younger and smarter after my session tonight. I always do.
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