I have been working with leaders for over 20 years and have found that one of the benefits of being a consultant is the immense variety of businesses you get exposed to. Sometimes I’m meeting with two or three clients each day, which allows me to see a vast array of cultures, environments and attitudes. I’ve seen leadership styles spanning the whole spectrum, and I have homed in on what makes an effective leader.
The truth is we all have the capacity to be leaders because leadership is a skill that can be taught and mastered through practice. I had one leader tell me, “Practice doesn’t make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect.” And that is my advice to so many new and young leaders out there.
I often give leadership advice to leaders who are trying to find their way. They’re new to management and often focus on the wrong priorities. Recently, I was working with a small company with an incredibly successful and ambitious young CEO. We will call him Andy.
Andy’s people shared that they knew a colleague’s job was on the chopping block and he may not be there much longer because Andy was telling everyone that his performance was suffering. The office was very much on edge. When I asked Andy to share his thought process with me around that strategy, he said he wanted to make sure people knew he was watching, and that attention from him meant you were not performing to job expectations. I shared with him that while that may have seemed like a good strategy, there had been two unintended consequences:
1. People now believed, “If he is telling me about my co-workers’ shortcomings, what is he saying to others about me?” They were afraid that if they performed poorly, they would be the last to know about it, and their co-workers would be the first to know about it. He was eroding trust in his people rather than building trust.
2. He was associating attention from the big boss with a negative connotation. Attention from your leader should be a positive experience. Strong leaders praise and acknowledge, not admonish.
Andy told me that he intended to someday be a caring, compassionate leader who invested in his people’s development and who built strong relationships with his team to inspire them to perform to their potential. He just felt like he couldn’t be that leader yet.
My advice to Andy was this: Be the leader you want to be right now. There is no time like the present, and if you wait to act like the leader you want to be, you will have already solidified some bad habits, making it harder to change both your behavior and your team’s perception of your leadership style.
I am a true believer in the fact that leadership is learned. We model our leadership style from leaders we have had ourselves — both the good and the bad. We work to emulate the positive leadership traits we are exposed to, and often overcompensate in correcting the negative behaviors exhibited by other leaders.
Don’t feel rushed or pressured into establishing a leadership style that is not in line with who you want to be. Make sure you are building trust with your team, not breaking it. The best leaders have a way of remaining positive and encouraging, even while critiquing their employees. Do you need to make a change in how you present yourself and interact with your people? Time is of the essence. Start today!
