Credit — National Geographic

Grow your Spiky Leader

saranyan
saranyan
Sep 6, 2018 · 3 min read

In a company, I worked with in the past, a certain Jeff was passed on for promotion over and over again. He was not considered a leader (or a future leader) because he was…er…different than the rest. In a company where all the leaders were expected to be noisy, stand first row and wear shiny attention drawing clothes, Jeff was laid back. He was calm, rarely took the front row seats, allowed his team to lead, quietly stamping influence from the backstage. He provided confidence, direction, strategy and quietly worked towards building a self-managing team. He might have been missing on stage, but his presence was never missed off-stage. He was a quiet but powerful force.

Jeff made other leaders uncomfortable because he was not a leader, in their traditional sense. The company did not know such leaders and they could not relate. In all the pulse surveys, the team was inspired by him, not merely satisfied. His impact needed to be felt at a higher level.

Transformational leadership comes from spiky leaders. There is a wonderful book called Different — Escaping the competitive herd. It is a book about marketing and brand. The book talks about how many consumer brands have lost their meaning by trying to be well rounded, and how so few brands represent something unique in a customer’s mind. A lot of ordinary companies (aren’t companies defined by their leaders to a large extent?) don’t get this. They like to create stereotypes and work off stereotype ideas. Jeff was not to be influenced into being a stereotype and that made a lot of people uncomfortable.

In this HBR article about transformational leaders, a particular excerpt stands out.

In this way, Nadella was unlike his predecessors, in that he built his reputation as a hands-on engineer, not as a visionary like Bill Gates or a Type-A salesman like Steve Ballmer. Instead, Nadella was known for listening, learning, and analyzing. His idea of how to engage and motivate employees wasn’t by making a speech but rather by leading a company-wide hackathon, and empowering employees to work on projects they were passionate about. This new level of employee engagement has helped drive Microsoft’s expansion into cloud services and artificial intelligence, areas that now account for 32% of revenue.

The point is not about Nadella doing hackathons, etc. It is about his true understanding of the pulse. He is an inside-out leader and understood the Microsoft culture to its core. He understood what was the missing transformational piece and honed in with laser focus. He changed things with a purpose and a deep conviction about what was wrong.

Spiky leaders will not be institutional and that is the way it should be. They will be different and you should be comfortable with that difference, growing them into what their potential allows. This needs a beginner’s mind, which can be rare in senior leadership teams.

Spiky leaders give you the best chance of inspiring your employees on different dimensions. In the case of Jeff, it was his zen mind. In the case of Erik, it could be his ability to connect strategic dots. In the case of Liz, it could be her stellar technical chops. In the case of Vijay, it could be his understanding of the bowels of the product. They are all going to be different but they will share the following traits, though their approaches will be different.

  1. They can intrinsically motivate their employees.
  2. They are a role model for the company culture and values.
  3. They care about growing people, solving problems and have no tolerance for politics.
  4. They deliver.

Rest should not matter. Unless one of the above factors impacts, their spikiness should not matter to you. On the contrary, you should welcome that. I would even say, you should look for spiky leaders who are different than the collective mind of your team/organization. Think of a unicorn walking inside a balloon factory. They will burst few balloons that are flying low. Let it be. But overall, the collective mind will become stronger.

I am currently the VP of Engineering at Elementum, a startup revolutionizing the supply chain space. I also research on organizational leadership and love understanding what it takes to build highly inspired teams. Talk to me here @saranyan.

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