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From selecting and supporting the right people to caring enough to provide the tools, mentoring and constructive feedback, this leader, whether CEO, Shift Supervisor or High School Tennis Coach, is truly responsible for creating an environment that breeds success. Success as we know, tends to breed more success. It's a wonderful, vicious cycle.
While to most it might seem implausible or even laughable that the leaders of tomorrow are applying skills developed from years of what we viewed as "wasting time" by playing on-line games, it merits some consideration. Certainly most organizations completely drop the ball on effectively identifying and developing leadership talent, and my own experience and research indicates that where most (new) leaders struggle is in the area of soft skills and feedback. You don't learn how to lead from a book or sitting in a classroom at graduate school, so who's to say that the on-line gaming environment is not an outstanding and risk-free way to develop leadership acumen.
This is a follow-on to my recent rave against the time-wasting, dysfunctional debating society events that masquerade as meetings in many corporate settings. My drive to momentarily stay on my "effective-meeting" soapbox was galvanized yesterday, when I spoke with a good friend who had just started a new job. Her first day coincided with an operations meeting that she described as an all day rugby scrum where everyone got bloody, but no one scored.
Leading is more than just being the person in charge. It's about selecting and developing talent, providing direction and motivation, creating the effective working environment and providing consistent and timely feedback on performance. The "direction and motivation" component comes directly from the leader's understanding of the firm's strategic environment (market forces, competitors, customers) as well as the direction and strategies (goals/actions) that have been selected by an organization's management. Strategy is context that gives meaning and purpose to individual roles and group activities and goals.
Feedback is the leadership triathlon equivalent of the swimming leg. Everyone knows that it is the difference maker in overall performance, but because it's hard, uncomfortable and easy to flounder with, many choose to de-emphasize or even ignore it.
The role of Project Manager is difficult. This is an informal leadership position—one of those with most of the responsibility and little of the authority. If a person is worried about being liked, this is a lousy choice of profession.
Tomorrow's effective leaders are better served focusing on bringing the right resources to bear at a point in time than they are being constrained by a consultant derived goal to reduce managers and costs by increasing span of control. It's time to reengineer the old school thinking that leads to dangerous advice about leadership.
While the technique or reaching agreement with your stakeholders one by one ahead of formal approval might seem a bit like playing politics, I prefer to view it as covering the bases. Leaders invest in people they trust and have a sense for, and the ceremony of a group meeting is the wrong place to try and build your trust and credibility.
Most high performance leaders that I know understand that they need to shift gears and get away from the day-to-day firefight once in awhile or they risk burning out. Quite a few of these leaders learned this lesson the hard way, succumbing at some point early in their career to the often self-imposed requirement to keep running at top speed out of fear of falling behind. A few cultures that I have been around actually encourage (or at least, don't discourage) this destructive pace, almost as part of some bizarre survival-of-the-fittest ritual. One of your core responsibilities to yourself and to your team members is to stay on top of your game mentally and physically (they go hand in hand). You owe it to everyone around you to be at your mentally sharpest when guiding, mentoring, helping with decision-making or engaging with colleagues. Just like the human body and brain needs sleep to function, I'm convinced that your effectiveness is function of giving your work-mind frequent and appropriate breaks to process and to recharge.
Thanks to a good friend and the person I credit with the creation of the "Why is a Product Manager Like the Office Photocopier?" joke, I recently unearthed a listing of questions that we had established with the PM team to help teach and remind everyone of the True Role of a Product Manager.
