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.
As professional project management practices (and project managers) grow in importance to a firm's success (see my post: Struggling With Strategy? Think Project Management), it is critical that top leaders learn how to support the process rather than beat it into submission. And because as the saying goes, "it takes two to tango," Project Managers need to learn how to "manage" their executives to minimize unproductive involvement or outright interference.
As a leader, you are on display every day and in every exchange and how you conduct yourself is observed very closely by all around you. Lose your cool, snap at a subordinate, act like the spoiled tennis player above, and you not only fail to build your professional credibility, you damage it. Alternatively, if you recognize that the moment in time when things are heading the wrong way is a remarkable opportunity to build credibility and create powerful learning opportunities for your team members, you will conduct yourself with grace under fire.
Bob is leaving behind the business that he helped start and grow and save and grow and sell and sell again, and no one in BIGCO cares. Frankly, no one in the upper ranks even knows that he exists. The dirty little secret: he's just another faceless number on a spreadsheet and his departure will improve the expense to revenue ratio, and solve an annoying compensation problem in this now remote outpost of BIGCO. Bob is in the prime of his career, an expert and one of the last shreds of the soul of a great business. Bob is relieved to be moving on, but to BIGCO, it's not even noticeable. Good for Bob. There's more.
The best leaders understand that one of their principal responsibilities is to shape the working environment that determines how their team members communicate, collaborate, innovate and problem-solve.
One of the many priceless discussion threads during the interview, focused on the challenges of developing leadership and individual contributor talent in technical organizations. Specifically, he railed at the "single career-track" approach that in his opinion results in many otherwise great individual contributors pursuing leadership roles for the wrong reasons regardless of their interest or capabilities for leading. There is wisdom in his perspective.
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.
"The only way that you will succeed on my team is if you are married to the job!" "The reason that I am not in any family vacation pictures is because I'm on the phone. If I'm in the picture, I have a blackberry stuck to my ear." Yeesh. What a jerk! The quotes speak volumes about this individual's leadership style, priorities and character. A "my way or the highway" approach, coupled with an "I will succeed on the backs of your labor and you will help me succeed or else," philosophy. It also speaks volumes about the culture in the organization that tolerates this leader's style.
Somewhere during my second decade out of college (Hey, I'm slow but I figure it out eventually!), I recall having the epiphany that most people in leadership roles acted like they had no conception of what their job as a leader was. In fact, it dawned me after a few moments in thought that it probably wasn't an act—they truly did not understand their job. The evidence to support this conclusion was all around me.
