In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.
Theodore Roosevelt
Tag: leadership
The One Characteristic of Great Leaders
One characteristic makes great leaders stand out. The characteristic is not their performance. All leaders, good and bad can drive performance.
So what defines a great leader?
Great leaders make you better than you are. Great leaders make you better than you think you can be. They connect people with purpose, provide context and grow capabilities. They lift people up and help them realise potential.
The best leaders in my career helped me understand the context, challenged me to live my purpose and the organisation’s purpose, coached continuously and shared their experience, wisdom and lessons. They were also the most ruthless in providing feedback and setting stretching targets. They expected more and trusted you to deliver.
If you are a leader, don’t put up the drawbridge, drop down a ladder. Focus on how your people can stretch and grow. Build a strong pipeline of successors. Become an engine of talent for the business.
If you aren’t yet a leader, look out for the leaders who develop their people and grow their opportunities. Who you work for can be more important than the role in advancing your career. Ask yourself if you can begin to develop others in what you do now.
The easiest answer
Some people think the easiest answer is always:
NO
It shifts the accountability. It avoids work. It reduces complications. Most important at all it is seen by many as risk free. Who can be held accountable when they said no?
No is simple. No is safe. No is permanent. No is easy.
And that is exactly why the answer is:
YES
Nothing in life is simple, safe, permanent or easy. We live in complex, changing and difficult times that call for Yes. Yes means more work and it means change. Yes is harder and it will be riskier. Yes will require you to innovate and be at your best.
Take accountability to be part of this challenging future. Yes is your pathway to change and owning something of which you can be proud.
So next time you feel like saying ‘No’, ask yourself
‘how do I make it a yes?’
PS: Perhaps a voice is telling you “but it can’t always be yes”. Challenge that voice for a little: What if things were done differently? What risks or issues would you need to mitigate to make yes possible? Push that voice hard before you succumb to it.
Trust is a design choice
A man who trusts nobody is apt to be the kind of man nobody trusts – Harold Macmillan
At the beginning of any organisation, whether you realise it or not, you are faced with a design choice:
Do I trust my people?
The answer to that question and the culture that grows around that answer determines how so many processes, conversations and other interactions will occur across the organisation.
If you don’t trust your people
Should you be going ahead with your organisation? Seriously. Think about it. They are going to have to act on their own at some point. Nobody can or should remove every independent decision from another person.
Can you build their capability to earn your trust? It is worth investing some money in recruitment and development to avoid the costs ahead in an organisational design without trust.
If you still want to go ahead, prepare yourself for lots of controls, hierarchy, and monitoring processes and people. A lot of value will be invested in controlling people, managing the lack of trust out of your business so that you can function. You will also be more likely to have silos of power and information separating haves and have nots. These processes will all impede the agility, engagement, flexibility & potential of your people. Remember you don’t trust them so that’s what you chose.
Of course, trust may only extend so far. If they are not trusted in one process, do you trust them in others? Can you explain why the processes differ. You will need to or the lack of trust will be corrosive to an overall culture of trust. We all have heard examples of the refrain “I can discuss a $1m deal with a client, but I can’t post a comment on the intranet without approval.” If there is a reason then you need to be able to explain it.
Often you hear the excuse “but the consequences of failure are catastrophic, we cannot afford to trust”. If the consequences of failure are extreme, you need trust more but you might want to think about how you genuinely engage your people in mitigating the risks. Taking the risks out of their control may be no improvement at all if the result is apathy or lack of responsibility for the risks.
If you trust your people
If you trust your people, focus on the culture of personal accountability in your organisation. Work to build your people’s capability to that they are better able to exercise that trust. Give people real meaty challenges to enable them to show your potential. Ask yourself if you can have a flatter organisation, fewer approvals and put more upon your people. They might just revel in the challenge and surprise you.
A word about ‘Trust but Verify’
‘Trust but verify’ is a commonly discussed way to enable organisations to loosen the shackles and create a higher trust environment. In many cases, some verification will be mandated by regulatory or other requirements. People need follow-up and follow-through to see the reinforcement of their responsibility and to understand that there are consequences of breaches of trust.
However make sure you have the order right. If your process turns out to be ‘Verify, then Trust’, you have no trust at all. If someone can’t act on their own and wear the consequences, then you don’t have ‘Trust but Verify’.
Driving executive engagement in enterprise social media
Great tips in this post for conversations to encourage leaders to engage in enterprise social media.
Driving executive engagement in enterprise social media
Great tips in this post for conversations to encourage leaders to engage in enterprise social media.
As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Are you a spark or an accelerant?
The spread of civilisation may be likened to a fire; First, a feeble spark, next a flickering flame, then a mighty blaze, ever increasing in speed and power. – Nikola Tesla.
Are you a spark or an accelerant?
Sparks bring ideas for change. They start conversations, activity and change. When a spark connects you get a small fragile fire. Life is full of sparks.
The vast majority of small sparks disappear without starting a fire. The vast majority of small fires die out.
Add an accelerant to a small spark and it will grow, catch-on and spread. Sustainable change needs an accelerant to push change beyond the initial small start.
Accelerants play a number of roles:
- Spreading change: community managers, connectors & networkers
- Advocating change: leaders, great marketers, advocates & storytellers
- Completing change: designers, developers, entrepreneurs & implementers of change
- Enabling change: change managers, capability builders & effective sales people
We need more accelerants to drive our changes to widespread sustainability.
At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us. – Albert Schweitzer