LEADERSHIP
What Makes A Great Leader?
Including 3 Practical Steps To Become A Better Leader
Good leadership is the basis for a society to thrive, people to grow and for yourself to flourish.
Leadership often gets confused with titles like ‘manager’, ‘supervisor’, ‘director’. People conflate where someone is in a hierarchy with being a leader, but tell me this: would you still follow that manager if they didn’t have that title?
When you follow someone it’s because you know they will care for you and others around you. You know that they will fall first in the line of fire to protect the rest of the group.
A leader bears similarity to a house. They make up the strong foundations for people to live happily in but also acts as the roof to cover them from the rain.
The foundations of leadership are the ability to make difficult decisions, see the horizon amongst the clouds, but more crucially, being able to develop your people into future leaders — this is what most people miss.
When you are not investing your capability into building others up, your job as a leader is redundant, and you are reduced to a mere decision-maker. The crux of being a leader is that those people in your team are made more competent, confident and able individuals when you are no longer around.
The Leader is like a Watering Can
The role of the leader is that of a Watering Can. Filled to the brim with water, you are useless if that water does not go to the seedling whilst it's buried in the soil.
For when you water them, it is through that nourishment the seedling breaks through the layers of dirt to become a sapling.
As time passes, the Watering Can pays special attention to each of the saplings, knowing when and when not to water them.
You continue to nurture and care as they get taller until they bloom. You are bound by duty to see them grow from start to finish.
As the Watering Can nourishes the seedling to become the flower it is meant to be, a good leader, through their proactive dedication and involvement, encourages their people to become the leaders they are meant to be.
How To Lead With Integrity
Former CEO and President of Campbell Soup Company, Douglas Conant, talks about developing his leadership counter-culture whilst at Nabisco (an American food company).
When he first joined, the managers wanted one thing and one thing only: earnings, earnings and earnings. But Doug wanted to create a road map for prosperity where his people were also a priority.
He had this philosophy - it’s performance and people. Take care of the people, and you take care of the performance. Being concerned with performance and wanting to nurture people are not mutually exclusive — you can do both.
Doug was wildly committed to assembling a world class team and giving them the tools to succeed.
He made sure that whatever his team members were responsible for were done to a high standard. He paid special attention to his team, and the result? They performed extraordinarily that year, and soon after Conant was made President of Nabisco.
For the next five years they outperformed against all the food companies in the US.
“You need to win in the workplace before you want to win in the marketplace” — Doug Conant
Amongst all the highflyers of the East Coast, this unassuming introvert from the Midwest managed to instil this idea: you take care of the people, and they will take care of the work; invest more into them, and they will invest into your agenda.
This was logical to Conant, but a paradigm shift for the work culture of the day.
3 Practical Steps To Improve Your Leadership
1. Understand the individual
Don’t treat your team as a monolith. Your team is a dynamic set of personalities and characters, each with their own motivations and needs.
It is critical to form your own relationship with each of your members. This will include understanding what they want out of being in their position, what skills they wish to improve on and you knowing what their capabilities are.
When you’ve developed this holistic profile of your team member, it is up to you to work with them on their goals. When you ask them how their day went, you actually listen to them. When you show that you’re invested in them, they will be invested in the greater goal.
You’re making everyone feel like they matter.
2. Get the individual to be a part of the team
Whilst you see everyone as part of the team, it doesn’t mean everyone feels like they’re in a team. This step applies to your more ‘difficult’ members. Like I mentioned earlier, you have individuals with their own aspirations and agendas. At the start, they aren’t likely to care about your goals as a leader.
This is where you need to align your goals with them. Instead of persuading them to do something for you, encourage them that this is in their own interest (whilst at the same time this benefits the team).
I probably sound like I’m asking you to manipulate your team, but this is basic human psychology. By changing the frame from ‘I’ to ‘you’, you decrease the resistance your team member faces in doing what needs to be done.
3. Develop your lieutenants
Your goal as a leader includes developing your team into future leaders. So when you start to see some of your team begin to mature faster, help them lean into leadership by giving them more responsibility. Create your lieutenants.
“I always tried to foster an environment in which everyone played a leadership role, from the most unschooled rookie to the veteran superstar.
The most effective approach is to nurture everyone else’s leadership skills. When I do that, it paradoxically strengthens my role as a leader.”
— Phil Jackson, One of the best coaches the NBA has ever seen.
One of the hallmarks of being a great leader is being open to ideas other than your own. Once one of your members comes up with something special, you celebrate it. Kick your ego to the curb and realise that you’ve got a leader in the works. You’ve done a damn good job.
Go out there and Lead
Let’s rethink what it means to be a great leader. The greatest leaders of history were multifaceted in their thinking, to think that leadership is purely command and control is a finite mode of thinking.
Leadership is strategic decision making to achieve goals, it’s also strategic relationship building with your team.
There are many decision-makers in the world, but there are few leaders.
When we get the environment right, we can develop people to be better leaders — to work in the service of others.
