An Open Letter to Our Future Leaders
To the aspiring leaders and leaders aspiring, here are the competencies you will need to develop to become an excellent leader. Soft skills include: emotional intelligence, humility, purpose, critical thought, continuous improvement, communication and learning and sharing. Hard skills include: visualizing the business, strategy deployment, risk management and problem solving and decision making.
Dear Future Leaders:
You are an energetic and ambitious young professional closer to the beginning than the end of your career. You want to be a great leader, right?
Right now you don’t have all the tools in your tool belt you will ultimately need to cultivate a productive organization. You owe it to yourself sooner than later to develop the right competencies required for the success of your career and the organizations you will serve in a variety of future roles.
Leaders have a large influence on the culture of an organization. The organization takes on the collective qualities of its leaders. A friend said to me once, “if you want to get a sense of an organization’s culture, watch the movement of people. Who is getting promoted? Who is getting overlooked? Who is getting hired? Who is getting fired?” It’s true. Never underestimate your influence on others at every stage of your career.
You get to choose the type of leader you will become. How you act, how you react with those around you. How you behave will be a function of your personal style and principles you hold dear mixed in with what your organization asks of you and the competencies you will develop along the way to meet those expectations.
If you will allow me, I have a few suggestions you might want to consider to guide you in your leadership journey.
Soft Skills
Let’s start with the softer skills of leadership. Leadership is after all mostly about people and our business interrelationships inside and outside the organization.
In the course of your career, you will have the opportunity to learn and apply a variety of universal HR and Leader Development courses. Those are all fine and well. Learn and apply the knowledge you gain to get the most from these. But these generic skills are not enough.
There are some other attributes that will serve you just as well or even better. Unfortunately these competencies can’t be learned in a short period of time. These will take a career to nurture.
Emotional Intelligence
You will learn it takes emotional intelligence to connect with people in order to lead them. Emotional intelligence reflects abilities to join intelligence, empathy and emotions to enhance thought and understanding of interpersonal dynamics.
Why is this important for your leadership? To become an effective leader you must develop your ability to be self-aware, self-regulate, cultivate relationships, be empathetic and understand motivations. This will give you the emotional capital to assert your influence to move your organization in a more productive direction.
To do this you will need to practice perceiving, using, understanding and managing emotions. This doesn’t come easy for many of us. It takes a lot of coaching and practice so don’t be afraid to ask for help.
Humility
If you can’t say “I was wrong” then you are never likely to be a good leader.
Hold strong opinions, but hold them weakly. Be willing to adjust and change your perspective and your position. Sometimes you have to unlearn in order to learn to improve your knowledge.
Sometimes humility means trusting your people to do the right thing. You do this not from ignorance but from the confidence that have the competencies to perform. Good and effective employees don’t need their much direction from their leader or having their hand held. Hire and develop smart capable people, set the expectations, remove their roadblocks and get the hell out of their way!
You will learn a lot but you will never know everything. The more wise you get, the more you realize what you don’t know is expansive. Remember, there are always people smarter than you that you can learn from. Some of them might just be working for you.
Critical Thinking
I saw a statistic at a conference a few years ago from one of those reputable polling companies like Gallup. It said something like “only 10% of organizations’ senior leaders are capable of strategic and critical thought”. That is a startling and concerning statistic.
How could that be? Well mostly because people are predisposed to action and results. The organization cares more about getting quick results than the patience and process required to get the best results. Once, I had a senior leader once stop myself and a group from discussing a problem. He interjected, “I don’t care about that. Just tell me what we should DO!” The message was clear: we don’t have time to think, let’s just do. In many organizations leaders have to be seen to be taking action. It doesn’t have to be the best action.
What is critical thought? I’m not going to give you a clinical definition. Instead I’ll pose these two thoughts:
- What questions do you ask of yourself and your organization?
- What quality and completeness do you answer those questions?
Can you question, positively, yourself, what you know, your motivations and your behaviors? Can you question, positively, your organization to recognize where it is good, where it’s not good enough and the areas it needs to improve?
Train your mind to think. Resist the urge to jump to action. Put as much thought as necessary into the problem from different perspectives, the alternatives to achieve the requirements, and the solution to meet the objectives.
Purpose Driven
What is your purpose? Purpose is about building connected relationships between yourself and those around you. People are most effective when they have a shared purpose within larger groups.
Dan Pontefract outlines in his book The Purpose Effect, the sweet spot is that intersection of three crucial areas of purpose:
- Personal purpose — What drives you? What are you passionate about
- Organizational purpose — What does the company need? Your business unit? Your department?
- Workplace Role purpose — What’s your role within the organization
Combining personal, organizational and role purpose builds meaning for your personal and professional life.
A great leader is Purpose Driven, not simply Results Driven. Purpose means being very deliberate. Results can be either declared or earned. It doesn’t take a special leader to declare instant short term results then deal with the fallout. It does take a special leader to go out, engage others and have the patience to earn bigger, long term, sustainable results.
Take the hard road and drive with purpose.
Continuous Improvement
There’s always room for improvement, always lots of inefficiency and ineffectiveness in the organization. Your business will invariably have practices that range from poor, fair, good, better and best maturity levels; and they may vary across the organization, and over time.
You don’t need to be excellent in everything but if you want to be an excellent performing organization you surely need many better and best practices. Let your organizational objectives, your value map and your current practice maturity determine which areas would provide most value to preserve or improve.
Benchmarks, whether external or internal, can be instrumental in understanding where you are and where you ought to be. There are many techniques (like several lean practices) you can apply to make improvement gains. Don’t necessarily subscribe to trademarked TM practices. Do what is right for you. Educate yourself and pick and chose which practices will work for your organization.
Believe it is possible to get something for nothing. That is not the same thing as getting blood from a stone. You can improve efficiency and effectiveness simultaneously. You don’t always have to spend more to get more if you focus on stopping the value leakage hidden in your organization.
That said, challenge your constraints because they can impede progress: are they real or perceived? Challenge them as often the optimal result in a mature organization is where the constraints are solved for collectively, not unilaterally cast in stone.
Communicate Up, Down and Across
How well do you communicate? Whatever that is, it is not good enough.
Communication is hard. Some forms of communication are better than others. But whatever communication you do; be assured it is never good enough. Good communication requires good relationships. Relationships are a series of quality positive and difficult conversations. And as we all know, Relationships are hard work.
Before we look at what good communication leadership looks like, let’s explore a couple undesirable communication styles:
Corporate ladder climbers are incredible at managing up and riding coat tails along the way. They fend of competition from their peers and they don’t pay much attention to those below them. They tend to rise to the level of their incompetence, or beyond.
Commanders and controllers give one way orders down the chain of command. They use accountability as a big stick and stifle creativity and innovation. They put up ring fences to protect their own areas of control. They promote people the trust to do their will who have the same regardless of their limitations.
Great leaders, however, build solid relationships up, down and across the organization. They effectively manage what their bosses want with what’s best for the organization. They are masters of integration and collaboration with their peers. They are secure enough with their own abilities to hire and promote people smarter them and with diverse and complementary skills sets. They engage their teams to solve the business challenges with creativity and innovation.
Hard Competencies
Next let’s turn our attention to the hard competencies. But let’s get something straight: it is not reasonable or practical to expect a leader to be competent in every job functions and role of people within their organization. A leader needs to develop, engage and direct competent people to carry out the activities of the organization. But there are a few key competencies every leader needs to develop. And the higher up in the organization they are, the more important these competencies are for personal and organizational success.
Visualize the Business
As a leader you need to have a shared common vision of your business. But what does it look like? The Financial management system is likely very mature. But often the operational management system is not as clear to everyone. You will probably see many grouped or individual practices being managed quite independently.
But here’s the thing. An organization can have only one operational management system, and it must connect all the activities to assure the strategic objectives are met. Depending on the organization activities may include asset management, operational excellence, health & safety, risk management, process safety and quality management
What does the management system framework look like? It includes the organization’s strategic objectives and values, the company’s day to day and improvement initiatives, value map with leading and lagging performance goals, and the management system governance activities.
People need to see a line of sight. They want to know where they fit and what they do adds value to the organization. Your operational management framework gives everyone that common vision. It helps to connect and integrate all the people in all the roles with all the practices to make sure it is all pulling in the right direction.
Build it. Share it. Use it as the lens through which your team sees and manages the organization.
Strategy Deployment
As a leader you will have the accountability to build and execute the business plans for your area. Too often, immature organizations focus on the tasks they execute. Business planning here amounts to choosing the best work within a spend constraint. These organizations manage for cost and hope for performance. Maybe they don’t do all the work, or maybe they don’t get the results from that work. Then they just pick a another set of work. I call this the shotgun approach… if you miss the target, just load and shoot again. This is a recipe for mediocrity.
Mature organizations that are excellent at asset planning are able to drive their strategic organizational objectives down through the organization as strategies, objectives and plans. Strategies are the initiatives to preserve or drive new value. Objectives are the business goals and performance indicators that if achieved will assure the desired lagging business results. Plans here include the specific activities (no more, no less) needed to move the dial on the leading performance indicators and goals the right amount.
You are encouraged to apply some simple and visual techniques that can be used to identify these strategies, objectives and plans as well as accountability and responsibilities. Your management reviews will monitor both that the activities are being executed and that they are having the desired value effect.
Risk Management
Does your organization manage risk? Of course it does. But how good is it at managing risk. How good are you at managing risk?
People and organizations are generally worse at managing risk than they think they are. Managing risk effectively is an important aspect of good operational management of your assets.
I have learned three lessons about uncertainty and risk:
- People are not intuitively good at understanding uncertainty and managing risk. Why? We are programmed to think deterministically, not probabilistically. Worse yet, people overestimate their ability to understand uncertainty and therefore manage risk. This combination is dangerous.
- You must understand your organization’s risk tolerance before you can make an effective risk-based decision. The appetite for risk is not apparent in most organizations. It is tremendously difficult to align everyone to the same tolerance.
- You can make the right decision for the right reasons and bad things can still happen. You can’t win them all. Such is the nature of uncertainty and risk.
The objective in good risk management is to make more, better decisions than you would have otherwise. The good news is it is possible to improve your risk management. Assume there’s room to improve risk in the organization. Learn how to manage risk well. Build one risk management framework that can be applied to all kinds of operational risk use cases. Build the competencies in your leaders and practitioners.
The best attitude is to assume you and your organization aren’t as good at risk management as you should be. Work hard to improve because there is significant value in managing risks out of your organization.
Problem Solving and Decision Making
You are a good problem solver, right? Of course. Yeah, so is everyone else, or so they believe. Are you truly good at it? What principles and framework do you use to solve these problems?
Quality problem solving and decision making is a vital key to good operational management. And it’s not just for practitioners. As a leader your role is more facilitative but a good understanding of the fundamentals is essential.
Problem solving includes defined steps for situation appraisal and problem analysis that most people skip over. They proceed to solutioning before they even define the problem or understand its causes.
A very smart man once told me, “The most important decision you will make, is how you will make your decision.” At first I thought it was platitude, but slowly I was overcome by its brilliance. Many leaders make important decisions using only their intuitive model, or gut instincts, believing they are paid to use their experience and judgement. That approach yields mixed results.
Leaders great at decision making incorporate an appropriate level of rigor to understand: Who makes the decision? When does it need to be made? How complex is the issue? What are our alternatives? What is our uncertainty? What if we’re wrong?
Again, a healthy mindset is to assume you and your organization can be better at problem solving and decision-making.
In Summary
The journey ahead of you is certain to be long and adventurous. I encourage you to look to leaders who possess and those who lack these skills and competencies. If you look for them you will see them or their absence.
Whatever you do, try not to do all of this yourself. It takes a village to raise a leader. Find several mentors and advisers. Use a coach. Learn from those you trust in your network and from within your organization. The world is fertile with knowledge. Make it yours to learn and share.
Yours truly,
Paul Daoust
Founder, Scio Asset Management
Scio Asset Management Inc. empowers operational leaders to See. Think. Decide. Act.
