A fresh approach to leadership
Traditionally, the approach to leadership has been bureaucratic. “Set up expectations, define goals, have clear metrics and you will be a great leader”. This approach has given us the wide-spread abominations such as annual goal-setting and performance reviews, 3% raises and lawsuits due to terminations. Even the most jaded HR bureaucrat should admit that bureaucracy is the exact opposite of leadership. A strong reliance on bureaucracy indicates a lack of trust.
Skills-based leadership training is the predominant form as of this writing. New and aspiring leaders are coached on a variety of skills, most of which are abandoned after a couple of weeks. For example, leaders are coached on “active listening” — consisting of having an open friendly expression and head nods to make the subject open up. Nevermind the obvious fact that no amount of facial expressions are going to make someone who doesn’t trust you to open up nor will they open up if it’s against their best interest. However, the reason these skills don’t stick is because copying what’s successful for someone else feels unnatural to you.
You turn into a leader not by learning skills, but by working on yourself and transforming into one.
Leadership consists of four aspects: Credibility, Organization, Presentation and Expertise. This can very conveniently be made into an acronym: COPE. Each of these is a tome in itself and this introduction serves as an outline for you to assimilate them easily from forthcoming posts.
Most people assume that their expertise or experience gives them credibility. In a sense this is true, but only at the bottom of the org chart. Indeed, your expertise makes you valuable, but not a leader. It’s one thing to be able to do something and another to lead a team to do the same thing on a larger scale. Work on your expertise till you are utterly confident at what you do.
Once you have built a core reputation with your expertise, you need to work on your presentation. Excellent presentation skills amplifies your expertise. Presentation skills not just involve talking about subject matter, but also improvisation, audience handling and networking.
Take every opportunity to present. Start small with both time and audience size and slowly increase it until you can present with the whole world watching for about an hour.
After you can present well, you will be a leading candidate for any leadership position. My suggestion is you take any that come your way since leadership spots do not open often. It is always better for you to be a proven leader looking for the right spot than to wait as a novice waiting for the right fit.
A leader simply will not function without organization skills. This is not just limited to organizing your team and work but also organizing your thoughts, goals and vision. Even a charismatic leader will run his ship aground with poor organizational skills.
And last and most important is credibility. You need to act every day to increase your credibility. When in doubt, choose the course of action that enhances your credibility. This is the most difficult for many leaders since we are taught to be polite rather than truthful, kind rather than just and generous rather than fair. You will need to go against everything your mother taught you while maintaining integrity. You have to do all of this without fearing your boss or your subordinates.
You have to go against the grain and stand up to your boss. You have to treat both the flattering subordinate and the gruff worker fairly. You have to keep your word. Your have to adhere to your own impossible standards. Earning the credibility of your subordinates, peers and superiors is the hardest task, but you are not an effective leader until you accomplish this.
So go ahead and COPE with the burden and blessing of leadership.
