I often refer to Leadership as being the ability to get people to do things when you are not in the room.
For most of my professional career I did not particularly think about the differences between management and leadership. I was not in a position where it mattered particularly; I was always ‘in the room’.
Generally I was either managing a single large program generally customer facing or managing people who themselves were managing single large programs. The way one achieved results was to use the importance of the program, either due to the importance of the customer or the size of the program, to leverage the rest of the organization I was working for.
“You need to listen to what I am asking”, a typical interaction would occur, “This is worth $100 million to us this year.” Few had the nerve to say no at that point.
When the projects were small it generally meant the other part of the conversation WOULD have the nerve to say no.
As the years passed, I was given additional responsibilities and had to learn to prioritize and help my staff prioritize better, but fundamentally had the same kinds of responsibilities.
In early 2006, I was appointed the CIO for the US Department of Transportation. Suddenly I was in a situation where I had hundreds of people reporting to me directly and thousands who I had at least nominal impact on through the myriad policy responsibilities that a Departmental CIO was responsible for.
I had sort of very faint dotted line relationships to all of the DOT agency CIO’s, created by the Clinger-Cohen Act, which established what I refer to as the negative authorities of CIO’s. By negative authorities I mean the Act gave CIO’s the authority to prevent results, for example not agreeing to a budget submission, but much less power to implement results, for example, without Department or Agency specific legislation or implementing authority, a CIO couldn’t consolidate or modify the resulting budget.
My ability to get things done was almost completely dependent, not on managing a project, but on providing leadership, whatever that was, to get people to do what I wanted without the direct ability to tell them to do it.
Now that I serve as the Chief Operating Officer at Powertek Corporation, www.powertekcorporation.com, while a bit smaller than the Department of Transportation, I still have the same issue of having indirect impact.
Having thought about this a lot over the last almost five years, I have come to five thoughts that provide me with some direction as to how be a good leader, or being perhaps a bit more realistic, to be as good a leader as I can be.
THE NARRATIVE. In my opinion the best leaders are storytellers. They explain how they want people to behave and what values are important to them by telling stories of behavior illustrating those values and actions. It amazes me how often I find out that the stories I have told are repeated to others. Amazed and pleased.
If you have read biographies of President Lincoln you will read how many anecdotes he told.
Even people who do not consciously or explicitly do this, they still are conveying a narrative about themselves and what they expect from others. How often they talk about their family, what they wear, the jokes they tell (or don’t tell), how they deal with people, whether they raise their voice or not, and so on.
NIGHT AND DAY. If you are in a leadership position everything you do and how you do it is watched and analyzed. It all becomes part of that narrative thing, whether you like it to or not or intend it to or not.
My father-in-law, a wonderful person I have been very lucky to get to know, used to tell me when he was President of a manufacturing company in Michigan, that when he was feeling sick and acted that way around the office, this impacted negatively the work of everyone at the plant. At first this surprised him, but over time he came to understand how important how he acted every day was.
About a year after I started at DOT, a young woman who worked for me asked for a meeting. When she came in she told me that she had heard that I was in a good mood and thus wanted to go over some difficult issues that she needed to be resolved. I reflected on the fact that never before in my business life had anyone cared about what mood I was in, or generally noticed.
I reached out to a wonderful person, Shelley Metzenbaum, who is now an appointee within OMB, who gave me advice about being a political appointee at DOT. Shelley told me “Political appointees are unable to talk in a whisper.” Wise advice. Over time I have come to recognize that this advice is true for all people in very senior positions in any organization.
BE TRUE TO YOUR SCHOOL. My final comment about narratives is to emphasize that the most important aspect of the narrative is to be true to who you are. Over time people can tell if you aren’t. The rare exceptions being if you are an extraordinary actor or a professional politician. When people detect a false note, everything else you say or do will be much less likely to be paid attention to.
I have read many books about leadership which provide lots of advice on how to act. All the advice in the world is of limited value if it is inconsistent with your nature. Understand yourself and go with that.
ROADRUNNER VERSUS COYOTE. I tell people who work for me that sometimes you have to go running off the cliff without knowing if you are the Roadrunner or the Coyote, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUq9hynzCVo, and not knowing how far down the ground is.
If you want people to attempt great things and run off cliffs for you, you need to be there to catch them and not blame them for trying. Toleration for the occasional failure is a characteristic to me of great leadership.
EMPATHY, NOT SYMPATHY. I read somewhere that leaders needed to show empathy, but not necessarily sympathy.
What I take that to mean is that it is important to understand the motivations of the people who work for you. You want to use those motivations to support your goals. You double the level of energy by having people working toward your objectives both to support you and to achieve their own goals.
At the same time, you have obligations to the entire organization, not just one person within it. Sometimes you are able to scratch individual itches, but often you cannot or at least not in the way that the individual might like.
TREAT PEOPLE WITH RESPECT. I say frequently that people will never act better than they are treated.
If you treat them poorly, not sharing information or objectives, just ordering them around, not empowering them in any fashion, most will act just like they are treated and no more. To have a successful organization you need people to take ownership of their responsibilities.
IN SUMMARY. So there you have it my five rules of leadership, reworded slightly:
- Understand and articulate a coherent narrative that explains to everyone what kind of person you are and what kind of organization you want to lead
- Recognize that everything you do regardless of the setting impacts on that narrative
- Be authentic, people will see through a false story over time
- Tolerate risk taking and its inevitable partner, the occasional failure
- Treat everyone with respect
I divide leaders into two types, those that want to win and those that want to avoid losing. These rules will help you be the first type, the winners, who are much more enjoyable to be around and build the best organizations.