Effective leaders

Have you been fortunate enough to get to see a really effective leader in action? If so, perhaps you noticed how she or he seemed to effortlessly knit together a disparate group toward a common goal, made solid progress toward lasting impacts, and made everyone feel like they were an essential part of the final outcome? In an effort to better understand what makes these leaders so effective, and become more effective myself, I’ve tried to identify those things that distinguish them from less effective leaders.
One of a leader’s most important strengths is their ability to set, communicate, and reinforce tangible goals toward broader impact.
They may be visionaries, but they don’t just establish some ethereal, distant target of a future that could be. Instead, these leaders work tirelessly to inspire other people to see themselves in that vision. Not just what could be, but how it can be brought about: they provide signposts toward achieving the vision.
They identify the outcomes that will have the most impact, and break those into smaller, bite-size goals that can be more easily understood and accomplished by others. Effective leaders work hard to achieve understanding and buy-in with those goals, because that is what motivates others to contribute. They provide just enough structure and process that the group involved can focus on meaningful work rather than logistics.
In a vision driven goal, project, or organization, it is absolutely critical that others are able to understand and see themselves within that vision. Otherwise, they’ll always be pulling at the boundaries toward their own goals, because they don’t see where they fit in the larger whole.
They set priorities and act strategically. Often, responsibility accumulates upward in a hierarchical organization, and so they have to continually focus on delegating and sharing that responsibility with others. If the organization has done a good job hiring, staff are competent and responsible, and can usually absorb (and appreciate) more responsibility over matters proximate to their own work.
They have developed a strategy to focus on those activities that will have the most impact. They worry about what is to come, not as much about what is right now. This is because they’ve done a good job of delegating most decisions and responsibilities to others.
Some leaders help lead a team to put out fires as they emerge. Maybe they have great tactics, but perhaps are a bit lacking in strategy. Great leaders help avoid fires in the first place.
They share the opportunity to lead. Effective leaders understand that in delegating, they are giving others the chance to fail. They don’t try to prevent these failures (unless truly disastrous) by taking control themselves, but instead are champions at helping others learn from failures. The more that people feel able to fail, the more they are willing to try new things, and from this ultimately emerges better solutions.
In contrast, less effective leaders think they need to be out front most of the time. They feel that they need to be the smartest in the room, have the best ideas, and do most of the talking. I remember when I first started taking on leadership positions: I thought it meant I had to tell everyone what to do. I still goof this up. Instead of telling people what to do and how to do it, focus on what needs to be accomplished, and why. If necessary, provide limited guidance about how, but chances are those you lead are going to have a better handle on the specifics.
They focus on impact. They focus on cultivating characteristics within themselves and their teams that will have more effective impact. You can be a small organization, but have broad impact, because you are continually expanding the capacity of your team to absorb more responsibility, to have more ownership over their tasks, more opportunity to pool their talents and creativity for the good of the organization, and a culture that embraces experimentation (with associated failures) and learning. Instead of focusing their efforts on smaller, less impactful tasks where they know (or assume) they are capable— based on things things they’ve done in the past, perhaps in other roles — effective leaders instead delegate them so that their teams have the opportunity to grow.
In contrast, less effective leaders hold back from impact because they don’t know the bounds of their authority. Maybe they are unwilling to commit to a decision because they aren’t sure if they have the authority to make it. Maybe they feel they need the blessing of a higher-up. Usually, this holds them and their team back: it is a wet blanket over experimentation, and at best results in mediocre solutions. One of the best pieces of advice I was given by a favorite mentor was to “stop asking permission. Just DO it.” They knew I was always holding myself back, and holding back my team, out of fear of being held accountable for making the wrong decision or taking too much authority. While I still doubt myself sometimes, I’ve gotten a lot better about creating the space for my team to be creative and experiment and improve. In rare cases this has backfired a bit, but the failures were almost always the result of poor communication on my part rather than overstepping bounds.
They are excellent communicators. They do most of the listening instead of most of the talking. They use probing questions and targeted feedback to help their teams understand and align around goals and impact. They develop an understanding for each person’s motivation, and tailor their message to those motivations. They understand that the details matter to those who are absorbed with those details on a daily basis. They aren’t dismissive of these details or proclaim ignorance; instead, they flip this around and ask those they lead to teach them why those details matter and how to reason about them. They know that both will grow in the process: the leader will develop a better understanding of the proximate details (without taking responsibility for them), and their team members will learn how to better communicate broader impacts of those details. Effective leaders ask really good, probing questions — but never with the intent of trying to outsmart the other person.
In contrast, ineffective leaders have a hard time communicating the things that matter. They are challenged by communicating their vision, ideas, and goals to others. They may communicate, but they don’t communicate effectively. They fail to share substantive content needed by their teams in order to do their best work. They dominate the conversation, limit the ideas that emerge from others rather than giving them space, and do most of the talking.
In particular, ineffective leaders retain too much control and ownership over context. They haven’t learned how to effectively delegate or share the context required for their teams to have sufficient understanding of the problem and solution space to be effective. For example, they retain the sole contact with most of the team or organization’s clients, and act as the “funnel point” for relaying nearly all the information related to the project. Unfortunately that means that the information required to complete the project successfully is isolated within one person, with all associated risks: what if they leave? what if they heard wrong? what if they aren’t able to communicate effectively? etc.
Effective leaders own their mistakes, and use them as learning opportunities. In order to develop a culture that actively experiments, fails, and learns from those failures, these leaders don’t always hide their own failures out of sight. Public successes and private failures only demonstrates acceptance of success, not failure. Instead, they use these as opportunities for everyone involved to learn too; otherwise, they are doing their teams a disservice. Failures are not presented as a please-feel-sorry-for-me gripe-fest, but instead shared in a way that gives respect to the act of learning: “look, I failed, and you know what, it is OK for you to fail to. Here’s what we can learn from this… What else do you think we can learn from this?”
Effective leaders are highly introspective and actively seek feedback. They are always trying to improve their effectiveness as leaders. While they may develop habits that enable them to be successful, they are not afraid to question or completely overhaul those habits when they see opportunities for improvement. They know they will make mistakes at least some of the time, understand the value of identifying those mistakes sooner rather than later, and know they have blind spots unless they seek other perspectives. They know that by not seeking feedback at all, or only seeking it from perspectives that agree with theirs, they are undermining their own ability to improve as well as demonstrating to their teams that they no longer feel the need for improvement. Teams spot this remarkably quickly.
They are powerful mentors. But they don’t come at it by being more wizened, experienced, or scarred by past failures, although these are occasionally valuable perspectives to share in this context. Instead, they focus on helping you learn from your mistakes, and especially help you understand how you can be more effective yourself and have broader impacts. Great mentors may be lurking out of plain sight; they may even be the youngest or quietest members of an organization.

Want to be a more effective leader?
Here are some things I think you could improve, regardless of your experience:
Focus on your blind spots. It is easy to seek out guidance from those that generally agree with you. It is much harder to seek out guidance from a perspective very different than yours, but this is exactly what you need to complement your own perspective. Understand that nearly everyone has something to offer you that will help you learn how to be a more effective leader, if you chose to learn from it. It could even be the person most frustrated or threatened by your own leadership style. They may not even be interested in helping you improve, but their perspective is a gift, if you can learn how to receive it properly.
Learn something new. Chances are, at least some of those you lead will be actively pushing themselves to learn all the time. If you learn something new, you will have empathy and a better understanding of their process. Those you lead will be among the first to notice that you’ve stopped pushing yourself to learn. It is also very invigorating. Remember being challenged by not understanding something at the outset, and after hard work you figured it out, and felt that sense of excitement? Help inspire that in those around you that are actively learning too; you’ll see them excited about their own learning, so take that moment to celebrate with them.
Understand your fears, but don’t let them define you. The things you fear give you a unique opportunity to understand yourself. Don’t let them hold you back.
- Are you afraid of making the wrong choices? Seek out advisers and contrasting perspectives, always do your homework, and seek out smaller successes to build confidence, such as non-critical, reversible decisions. Get comfortable occasionally making the wrong decision, but make sure you learn from them every time.
- Are you afraid of giving poor feedback? Develop an understanding of the ways of communicating that will help the receiver best understand their current and future potential impact. Understand that feedback is a gift that requires a sender and a receiver, and that feedback which helps the receiver improve in the ways they want to (rather than the ways you want them to) will likely be more effective.
- Are you afraid of having to come up with most of the ideas, or have to be seen as the smartest one in the room? Step back a moment: what you really want are the best ideas, and realize that those you lead want to feel smart too. Instead, create the structure that allows these ideas to emerge, and for those that bring them to be valued. Once I started recognizing that I was the dumbest person in the room, instead of feeling threatened, I felt relief. I was surrounded by amazing people I could be privileged to collaborate with and learn from. How cool is that? All I had to do was create the environment in which those ideas could come out.
- Are you afraid that those you lead won’t respect you? Start with how you act toward them. Treat them with respect. You are here to help their ideas have impact that they themselves can appreciate. Don’t treat people like they are just the means to realizing your vision.
Develop feedback channels you trust, and early warning systems. However, make sure those channels don’t calcify. If you always go to the same person for feedback, you’ve introduced bias and a blind spot.
I recently participated in a meeting where I acted with less empathy than I should have. Through targeted feedback from one of my channels, I was able to recognize the issue from their perspective, and was able to pull the whole team together to re-establish team norms around behavior and make clear that my example was quite poor in that situation. This allowed the entire team, not just me, to learn from my mistakes. It’s OK to fail publicly, just learn from it!
What are some things you think you can do to become a more effective leader?
Epilogue
It is one thing to try and understand what makes an effective leader. It is an entirely different proposition to try and become one. I, for one, am still learning!
Thanks to Jerre Stallcup for feedback that helped improve this post.
