Coach Others into Leadership Roles
Great leaders are committed to developing other people as leaders, which often means putting them in positions where they might fail. This also involves encouraging people to step outside their comfort zone and helping them learn from setbacks and mistakes as opposed to punishing them for setbacks and mistakes immediately. [1] As I've written before,
Being coached helped me understand that I could have the greatest impact as a leader not by doing more by everyone else but by empowering other people to do more and motivating them to do their best. This meant letting go of certain responsibilities and recognizing the limits of my expertise. I didn't need to have all the answers--I just needed to ask the right questions. In short, I came to realize that effective leadership looks a lot like coaching. [2]
Follow Through on Company Values
Great leaders also internalize the responsibility to embody the culture and to walk the talk. It's a truism in organizational life that the "values plaque" that we put up on the wall is kind of BS. That's because in a lot of circumstances employees see a gap between the plaque on the wall and the leader's actual behavior, and employees are finely attuned to moments where the leader is not acting in alignment with those principles. So great leadership means committing to understanding those principles, internalizing them, and being very deliberate about following through on them, especially when they don't align with what the leader believes to be their self-interest. If a leader is going to follow the values on the plaque on the wall only when it's personally expedient, that creates a toxic environment in which employees realize that the values on the wall are not going to be followed by leadership, so they don't need to follow them either. [3]
Understand the Symbolism of Leadership
Leaders occupy a particularly important symbolic role, and this is often neglected in contemporary organizational life. We tend to think of leaders as decision-makers--they determine the course of the organization, set strategy, and allocate resources. That's all true, but it's also entirely cognitive, and what that leaves out is the emotional impact that a leader has as the avatar of the tribe. [4] The symbolic dimension of organizational life is one that comes up often in my practice. People join organizations and feel committed to them to a certain extent because of the feeling of community that they enjoy among their colleagues and because of the leader's commitment to invest in the health, development, and growth of that community. This doesn't mean that a leader is obligated to solve all of these challenges, but it important to recognize that a leader bears a unique responsibility to help the community feel a sense of collective identity and growth.
Know the Difference Between Leading and Doing
Great leaders are also able to make a distinction between leading and doing. Many of the people I work with have a technical background, either as coders or developers, or as investors or financial analysts, and they've achieved their leadership position by virtue of their technical prowess. And that's often very useful in the early stages of a company's development because other people are looking to a leader for that kind of technical expertise. And yet if a leader remains stuck in the process of doing--if they are essentially the "doer in chief," if their leadership rests on their ability to be the most effective person at that particular technical discipline or to be the proverbial "smartest person in the room"--then they will inhibit the organization's capacity to scale. A transitional phase that I often help leaders navigate is this period of being the most technically adept person in a given discipline to a phase in which they're adding value not on the basis of their own technical expertise but because they're hiring people who have deeper expertise in their particular discipline. At that point the leader is not adding value by telling that technical expert how to do their job or by, even worse, by shouldering that person out of the way and doing their job for them, but by bringing a group of technically adept people together and helping them operate as a team. Ultimately that distinction between leading and doing is how a leader truly helps an organization scale. [5]
Footnotes
[1] Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives (Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, 2014)
[2] Introduction to the HBR Guide to Coaching Your Employees (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013/2014)
- For additional resources: Coaching and Feedback Tools for Leaders
[3] How Leaders Overcome Adversity
[4] Leader as Avatar
[5] How to Scale: Do Less, Lead More
Adapted from What Do Great Leaders Do?
This is the third in a series of videos I recorded for the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The first two are How to Stay Grounded in Chaos and The Strategic Importance of Empathy.
Many thanks to my Stanford colleagues Allison Felt and Beth Rimbey for the invitation, the professional support, and all the work that went into the finished product.
Photo by Adam Kubalica.
