Stop holding your team back!

Some new thoughts on leadership in business

For me a leader operates at their best when they understand their ability to influence is much more fruitful than their ability to control. Here’s the thing: the purpose of leadership is not to shine the spotlight on yourself, but to unlock the potential of others. Control is about power, not leadership.

In this article, I wanted to share some thoughts around leadership and call out inspiring people whose books and podcasts I have recently consumed. They helped give me a new perspective and I hope they can do the same for you.

Leading from the front means you are demonstrating your leadership by going first. I like to think that the best leaders strive to make themselves redundant, by creating an environment where their team gets to shine and grow. Create an environment that encourages innovation and creativity. Allow your team to be self-directed and able to learn from their mistakes in order to grow.

“Have you ever stopped to wonder what would happen if a project lead had to step away for three months unexpectedly? And while some may view this irreplaceability as a badge of honour, the reality is that it’s often a sign that they’re failing to fulfil their most important role: leading.”- Jack Skeels, Author at AgencyAgile

A big theme around leadership that resonates with me is the idea of ‘failing often and well’. When it comes to failing, our egos are our own worst enemies. As soon as things start going wrong, our defence mechanism kicks in, tempting us to do what we can to save face. Yet, these normal reactions wreak havoc on our ability to adapt and use autonomous teams. Autonomous teams can and do assimilate learnings more rapidly. They adjust their processes in a more-fluid way and reach new cultural norms much more quickly than larger teams when given the chance. I’ve seen it first hand.

As my younger self used to say “Mum I always value your advice, but I also need to make my own mistakes.” For me this taps into the idea that failure is part of a process that everyone needs to go through themselves, it’s personal and layered on many levels. I’m not saying it’s ok to let people run a muck. I’m saying that failing often and well is an important source of learning for individuals and businesses if they do it in the right way. If you give your department/team/staff breathing space to work shit out and assimilate at their own pace. If you lead from the back and let the team set the pace. If you only go as fast as the slowest person and allow them to grow from their mistakes (within reason). Then you can leverage the intelligence and capabilities of the people around and create a place that people love to work and thrive in.

1. Good leaders make everyone smarter, bad leaders diminish intelligence

Liz Wiseman’s book ‘Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter’, is a great read and explains two distinct styles of management. Diminishers and Multipliers (or manager x and manager y).

Multipliers are leaders who uses their smarts to amplify the smarts and capabilities of the people around them. Diminishers are leaders who drains intelligence, energy and capability from the ones around them and always needs to be the smartest one in the room.

Her book aims to help move away from a Diminisher style of leadership towards the style of a Multiplier, stating that there is at least a 2x greater return on resources for Multipliers vs Diminishers.

Take-away: Diminishers can deplete the intelligent and passion from the team. It’s not that Diminishers don’t get things done. They do. It’s just that the people around them feel drained, overworked and underutilized. Some leaders seem to drain the intelligence and capability out of the people around them. Their focus on their own intelligence and their resolve to be the smartest person in the room can have diminishing effects on everyone else. For them to look smart, other people had to end up looking dumb. Diminishers are absorbed in their own intelligence, stifle others, and deplete the organization of crucial intelligence and capability. Be a multiplier and leverage the intelligence and capabilities of the people around you instead.

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2. Our ‘default’ setting is to be autonomous and self-directed

In Daniel Pink’s book titled ‘Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us’ he says “our ‘default setting’ is to be autonomous and self-directed… a sense of autonomy has a powerful effect on individual performance and attitude”. He gives an example of a Cornell University study on workers autonomy at 320 small businesses, which discovered that businesses that offered autonomy grew at four times the rate of the control-oriented firms and had one-third the turnover.

Pink suggests that organizations should put in place a new way of motivating people based on the three pillars:

• Autonomy: the desire to direct our own lives;
• Mastery: the urge to get better and better at something that matters;
• Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

Take-away: As long as people are paid enough to get the question of money off the table, companies need to look beyond reward based motivation. People want to be self-directed, they like to master things, and that they want to be a part of something that is important. So give your team space to generate ideas and solve problems while you lead from the back, encouraging and supporting them.

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3. The key to success is ‘failure’

For me individuals and organizations need to change the emphasis on failure. They need to encourage innovation, creativity and change leadership behaviour. They need to create an ecosystem built on trust and courage, so that people are not afraid to speak up and try new things. Success lies in seeing failure as a tool to learn from rebounding from any defeat you experience. You’re not a failure if you get something wrong. You’re just someone who has failed.

There’s tons of successful people out there who at one or another point in their life/career have failed as something too.

One of my all time favourite podcasters and author of The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferris, speaks a lot about self-awareness and conditioning yourself for failure. He has been a guinea pig of the pursuit of success through failure, having been knocked back many times before his book became a top selling success. I highly recommend listening to his podcast series which deconstructs world-class performers to extract the tactics and tools you can use.

Here are some giant entrepreneurial figures who didn’t succumb in the face of early failure, but rather enjoyed and appreciated it for the lessons heeded. And they aren’t afraid to admit it.

1. Henry Ford — It’s hard to think of Henry Ford as anything other than a smashing success in the automobile industry. Early on, though, he was anything but. Ford’s first company — Detroit Automobile Company — went out of business in 1901 amid customer complaints of high prices and low quality. Henry Ford Company (founded one year later) was abandoned due to a fight with his partner, while a third company nearly collapsed from low sales numbers.

2. Steve Jobs — Arguably the most influential business figure of our time applied the principle ‘failure is just feedback’. Despite being kicked out of his own company he founded, he went on to become the Da Vinci of our tech-world renaissance.

3. Richard Branson — Despite running one of the most recognizable brands today, what you may not know is that Branson had poor reading and math skills, dropped out of high-school and is proud to admit he’s been dyslexic all his life. Some of his earlier ventures like Virgin record shops, in the midst of cash-flow problems, almost put him in jail. He has famously said ‘Learn from failure. If you are an entrepreneur and your first venture wasn’t a success, welcome to the club!’

4. Jack Ma — the founder of Alibaba personifies the saying, ‘failure is the key to success’. He faced a lot of obstacles and failures growing up including; failing college entrance examinations thrice, before he was dismissed by the institution. After this, he kept applying for jobs, giving interviews at almost 30 different organisations, only to face failure. When Ma founded Alibaba in 1998, he had to face a lot of hurdles. In the first three years of its inception, the company made no profit.

Take-away: Thomas Edison failed thousands of times before he revolutionized the world by inventing and patenting the incandescent light bulb. Greatness comes from growth and growth happens in an environment that fosters people to be courageous and experiment without concern for reprisal or failure.

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Wrap-up

Be meta-aware and cognisant of your ability to influence. Ask yourself if you’re a diminisher or multiplier? Check in to see that you are giving your team autonomy. Put in place a new way of motivating staff based on Daniel Pinks’ three pillars — autonomy, mastery and purpose​. Read books and listen to podcasts on leaderships to stretch your perspective on what a good leadership is.

We all have different ideas of what it takes to be a good leader. The constant is everyone striving to find a place in life and work where they have purpose, autonomy and happiness. It’s just human nature. The exciting part is that we all have the capacity to learn and grow, so long as we are open to it. What kind are you today? What kind of leader do you want to be tomorrow?

Hopefully that resonates with you. If it does, some claps 👏 would be great if you feel like it could help others be better leaders. Better yet, pls share any books or resources that communicate powerful ideas around leadership.