If your organization is like most, you’re leaving money on the table in terms of team productivity and performance. Social and interpersonal factors, motivation issues, lack of group cohesion and the general up-front churn that teams display as they form, are just a few of the areas where you can pick up immediate productivity improvements with a little bit of smart leadership.
I regularly use the label “Senior Contributor” (SC) to reference a state of management maturity that tends to exist somewhere between upper mid-level management or senior knowledge worker and the executive layer. The SC is a professional (manager or individual contributor) on the brink of executive qualifications and someone that has displayed effective formal and informal leadership skills, value-creating critical and strategic thinking abilities, credible executive presence and a strong operating and quality orientation.
Someone asked me the other day, whether there was one quality above all others that stuck out as essential for success as a leader? Without hesitating, I responded, “intestinal fortitude.” And while the question is not dissimilar to one of those impossible to answer but fun to speculate about debates that run endlessly on sports talk shows (e.g. Who was better, Aaron or Ruth?), I’m taking sides on this one.
Few phrases are capable of sending shivers down a person’s spine, like, “Bob or Mary, why don’t you present your ideas at our next meeting.” Except perhaps, “Bob or Mary,” why don’t you present your ideas at our next Board of Directors meeting. For some people, this seemingly golden opportunity to show and share is akin to receiving a prison sentence with no hope for parole.
For too many leaders, word selection is a hurried and blind groping in the toolbox for something that will do the job. In the absence of careful selection, a quick barking of orders, an unfiltered criticism or an out of context pronouncement will all create collateral damage.
Like the brother-in-law that you dodge at family gatherings to avoid his pitch on the latest “can’t fail, get rich quick” business scheme, some people are involved in a constant game of that childhood classic, Chutes and Ladders. Catch one ladder and you skip over the rest of us as we wind our way along on journeys of unknown destination and duration. Occasionally, these short-cut seekers find their way into positions of business and leadership responsibility, and the results range from a preoccupation with the near-term to overt decisions to cut corners in an attempt to move faster. However, the effective leader recognizes that there are no true short-cuts.
“How can I help?” These four simple words are powerful leadership tools when framed into a question and applied with genuine intent.
Something funny happens as we age and gain experience. Many of us expect the world to continue conforming to our view of things, which of course, it rarely does. For those that stubbornly stick to the perspective that I’m right and everyone else is wrong, the world quickly spins away and they become leadership and management relics from a bygone era. For those that have the courage to recognize that they are the ones that need to change and keep pace, everyday is a true adventure.
Some leaders move through their days like a flat rock skipping over the surface of a pond. They are focused on personal efficiency and speed, and the faster they move and the more decisions that they make, the better they believe they are doing as leaders. They are transactional leaders. Their days are blurs of decisions, quick meetings, hurried hallway exchanges and even more hurried text and e-mail messages, often created while they are present but not engaged in the event or conversation of the moment. If improving performance, fostering a culture of learning and innovation and developing the confidence to tackle the tough topics are all important for your firm, it’s time to engage more and transact less.
Are you capable of putting it all on the line for the right issues? Your career isn’t worth a budget or a product feature or a resource squabble. Those disagreements are part of the normal process of working together, and developing effective negotiating skills and learning to give and take are what we do to help propel movement inside organizations. Putting it on the line is however worth it when the conflict involves a legal issue, or, any issues that potentially impact life or environmental safety. It’s time for all of us to build courage into our roles as leaders and to teach and reward courage on our teams.
