Your Relationship with the People you Lead

In the military, “the men” are separated from “the officers.” The basic idea is that the leaders shouldn’t be too close to the people they will be commanding. In the army, this makes a lot of sense because if you are too close, you might have a difficult time making decisions that could result in someone’s death. On the military base, they have an officer’s club, where the officers go to eat. On Sundays the facility is opened up for everyone, but there is a separate side for the men and a separate side for the officers. The officers’ side is generally a little fancier with slightly better chairs and table settings.

There is a certain amount of separation that is wise to keep in non-military leadership as well. If you are too friendly with your direct reports, it may be difficult for them to respect your authority. This doesn’t mean you need to intentionally be a jerk, but you need to be aware that certain individuals misinterpret an overly friendly attitude as a sign that they don’t need to follow the rules because they are “on your good side”.

Many times, people go to one extreme or the other. On the overly friendly side of things, they look to their direct reports to provide a social life. This isn’t healthy, because it means the leader may not be able to make difficult decisions without having an extreme emotional impact on themselves. Putting yourself in this type of situation can cloud your judgment about an individual’s contribution or effectiveness. It is also unhealthy because, if all of your personal friends report to you, it is possible to end up with a bunch of sycophants instead of true honest friends.

On the other extreme are the leaders who place themselves way above the people they lead. These types of people end up making lots of rules that apply to everyone except themselves and often carry an air of being better than everyone else.

Somewhere in between these two extremes is a healthy balance. The balance may be different for each person who reports to you. Part of your job as a leader is to identify and sense the proper equilibrium that will give your reports the satisfaction of feeling like they have a personal relationship with you, while keeping yourself in an authority role.

Clear Vision

Many inexperienced leaders fail to adequately communicate a vision to the people they lead. If you don’t tell everyone which direction to head, you’ll have confusion. For some leaders, their deficiency comes not from a lack of communication, but from not having a vision, themselves.

Leadership is an important trait, but sometimes people get so caught up in trying to become better leaders that they forget to spend anytime figuring out where it is they want to lead. It is much easier to lead if you have a clear idea of what you want to accomplish and your ideas are good.

In fact, a poor leader with a great vision will accomplish more than a great leader with no clue where they want to go. Success covers a multitude of failures. If you are successful, people will tend to overlook many mistakes you make as a leader. If you are unsuccessful, people are less likely to overlook your deficiencies in vision.

If you are driving people toward shared success, they will tend to stick with you because they are succeeding. In some cases, they may even start copying some of your poor leadership habits thinking they are part of the reason for your success.

This is the same type of latitude we give to geniuses. If you take a look at a photo of Einstein and think what your reaction would be meeting someone who looked like him in almost any social setting, you probably wouldn’t automatically have much respect for him simply based on his appearance. However, since he was successful, people overlook his appearance. I imagine there were even some younger physicists who stopped combing their hair with the idea that mimicking his (bad) habits would help them achieve success as well.

Obviously, leadership skills are very important. It is much better to lead with a solid vision and tremendous leadership acumen. Just make sure that as you develop your leadership skills, you don’t overlook the skills that will let you develop a vision worth following.

Successful People are not Necessarily Good Leaders

Most people assume that large organizations are well led. Some people assume that any successful business has good leadership. Leadership is interesting because it isn’t particularly easy to pass on to someone else. Because of this, there are many businesses that are successful (they haven’t gone bankrupt) that aren’t particularly well led. Many times an organization will rely on the success of its previous leader who has been gone for years.

Great leadership is a very rare thing. For most people, it isn’t something that comes naturally. What is amazing is that so many organizations are very successful with only marginally competent leaders. Sometimes, this is because the structure of an organization helps make up for the leader’s shortcomings. Sometimes, inadequate leaders are able to succeed because their support staff specifically makes up for their weaknesses.

While great leadership skills will help make someone successful, don’t assume that being successful indicates that someone is a good leader. This is a trap that many people fall into when they are looking for someone else to emulate. They find someone successful and assume that following their example will make them a better leader. Obviously, if you are mimicking good solid leadership skills, this might be a good thing, but many people can’t tell the difference between a skill that leads to success and a bad habit that someone succeeds in spite of.

When you stop assuming that successful people got that way because of their leadership skills, you are in a much better position to truly observe the strengths and weaknesses of others. Don’t assume that every habit of a successful person is a strength and don’t assume that every habit of an unsuccessful person is a weakness.

Recognizing Failure

My dad teaches at a community college. He has some students in his class who don’t have to take tests like everyone else. They take their tests with a special proctor who reads the test to them. This is so they don’t get confused by reading it themselves. I’m not joking. The idea is that they might be at a disadvantage if they have to read it by themselves.

I feel sorry for these individuals because they have never been allowed to fail. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I don’t think you should be able to get a high school degree if you are incapable of taking a simple multiple choice test without help.

Our educational system is set up to keep people from failing. But failure is an important part of growth. It is sad to see someone who should have experienced failure in 2nd or 3rd grade making it all the way to college. When they enter the workforce, they are going to fail terribly once their employer discovers that they can’t read.

Make failures learning experiences, but don’t gloss over or ignore them. You need to recognize failures to build a strong team, but you also need to recognize failure to help people grow as individuals.

How to Challenge an Organization

A good leader can take an organization or team and accomplish things that no one thought was possible. In order to do this, a leader must make incremental changes that are challenging, but not impossible. By giving their organization a series of successes, they will build momentum that will help them overcome even more difficult obstacles in the future.

There is an occupation that is particularly good at doing this with the people they lead–teachers. Good teachers take their students far beyond what the students think is possible in a short period of time.

To accomplish this, teachers break the overall semester goals into smaller weekly goals and arrange them in a logical order. One of the things that sets truly talented teachers apart from others is their ability to arrange study topics and assignments in the sequence that is most suitable for learning.

The best teachers I have had plan their assignments out for the entire semester and include it as part of the syllabus. Going into the class, you look at the assignments and it is overwhelming, but the first one looks doable, challenging and interesting. In the process of completing the first assignment, you learn several things that make the next assignment a little more doable and so on. By the time you’ve completed 3 or 4 assignments, you have momentum and confidence. The confidence isn’t in how smart you are, but it is more of a trust in the teacher that if he gives you an assignment, it is something that you can complete.

A leader must take the same approach as a teacher when it comes to improving his organization. They must present a picture of where they are going that is challenging and beyond what their team thinks they can achieve. They must present a plan broken down into individual goals and the first one must be challenging, but within what everyone thinks is possible.

The difficulty for most leaders is the fact that many don’t have enough experience with their organization or as a leader to know what is possible and what is not. They also don’t have the experience to know how much obtaining a particular goal will increase the skill of their team. This makes it difficult to create a series of goals where, every time you achieve one, you are more equipped to achieve the next.

Professors have the advantage of being able to teach the same class year after year. Some of the best classes I’ve taken were by professors who have been teaching the same class with the same assignments for the past 20 or 30 years. Since teachers get a new class each semester, they have the chance to start fresh. Any miscalculations about the difficulty of certain assignments can be changed the next semester and any discouragement on the part of the students is not cumulative. They will start with fresh students next year.

If you are leading an organization, you don’t have many of these luxuries. One miscalculation can discourage your team and instead of catapulting them to a new level, can actually reduce what they are capable of accomplishing. To manage these risks, a leader must approach their first goals very carefully.

It is wise to start with small changes first. This helps build momentum and gives the leader a better idea of what his people are capable of accomplishing. By making the goals informal, a leader can learn these things while reducing the risk of creating discouragement.

Over time, a leader must articulate formal goals and plans. Some leaders don’t want to tell anyone what the organizational goals are because they don’t want people to get discouraged if they aren’t achieved. While this might be beneficial for a short period of time, if a leader is unable to share goals and plans after a year, it will be detrimental to the organization.

Teamwork can only flourish when there are clear goals. Without clear goals, everyone will default to doing whatever is best for themselves. This creates a political environment.

The Born Leader

Popular leadership books make a big deal out of saying that anyone can be a leader. United States’ culture places a heavy emphasis on everyone being equal, so I understand why this idea is so popular in America.

I was reading Politics by Aristotle the other day and it struck me how different his view of leadership was from our modern ideas. Aristotle felt that people were more or less born as a barbarian (someone not fit to lead) or a noble (someone fit to lead). While his views might seem extreme in our modern view of things, there may be some benefit in that type of approach.

If we recognize that some people are leaders and others aren’t, we’ll spend less time trying to develop leadership skill in people who have no natural propensity to lead. One of the great failures that technology companies are working to overcome is the tendency to pay more for leadership skills than for technical skills. Many very productive scientists and technical people get moved to management positions because it is viewed as a promotion.

Some do well, but others find themselves poorly equipped for their new responsibilities. They are basically taken out of the area where they perform well and are highly skilled and put into an area where they don’t perform well and have no skills. Technical companies are responding to this crisis by creating parallel development paths for employees—one path is technical and the other path is management. Someone who is not a leader can continue to advance throughout their career without requiring them to shift to management.

I do believe that leadership skills can be taught, but I don’t believe that it is necessarily beneficial to everyone. If you’ve ever seen an eagle try to run, you’ll know that it isn’t something they are good at. Since they don’t do it much, they aren’t quite balanced and usually compensate by sticking out their wings.

One point of view would be to look at the eagle and decide that, with a little training, he can become a better runner. With a little practice, the eagle should be able to keep his wings at his side and balance more naturally while running. I’m not sure how much work it would take, but with persistence you could at least make some improvement.

The other point of view would be to make sure eagles aren’t put into situations where they are required to run. Even if you could train them to be twice as good at running, that really isn’t much improvement. Your organization will gain much more by putting them in areas where they can be successful with the skills they have.

Leadership vs. Management

Management skills are a subset of leadership skills. I’ve often heard people try to separate them by saying that they are leaders, but not managers. In my experience, the people who say this are generally failures when it comes to attracting followers, which makes it difficult to consider them successful leaders.

A leader is someone who knows where to go. Management skills are how they actually get there. A college student who gets a bunch of friends together to take a weekend trip skiing is acting not only as a leader, but also as a manager. The student must take into account how much gas they have in their car, how much lift tickets are going to cost, invite people who have a reasonable chance of getting along with each other, etc.

Someone who is trying to act as a leader, but wants nothing to do with management, is like a 7 year old who has found the keys to the family car and is overcome with the desire to drive to Disney World. Vision, a goal, and a sense of purpose are all present, but the ability to plan and execute is lacking.

I once worked for someone who wanted to lead, but not manage. They tried to explain this by saying that they were “a visionary”. I suppose that they meant they came up with the ideas and other people executed them, but a quick trip to the dictionary revealed:

visionary – noun. One whose ideas or projects are impractical.

That is a pretty good description of someone who wants to lead, but not manage. They may have wonderful ideas, but without the ability to plan and oversee the necessary work, their ideas are not going to be realized–at least not by them. If their ideas are implemented, it will be done by another leader who embraces the management function.

While management is an important part of leadership, the reverse is not necessarily true. There are many people who are very skilled at implementing someone else’s vision who are not leaders. The fact that these people exist can make some leaders feel justified in abdicating their responsibility to manage.

In its simplest form, management is the process of defining and measuring success. The leader who attempts to pass these responsibilities off to a different individual is unlikely to achieve 100% alignment between their vision and the actual work done by the organization. This doesn’t mean that the organization will necessarily be ineffective, but if only 80% of the work being done is actually aligned with the vision, there is going to be a decrease in productivity overall.

A leader who sets the vision, defines success, and determines the measurements of success will be more effective than the same leader who wants to set the vision, but refuses to undertake any work in the management area.

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