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The Power of AND…A call to rethink strength-driven leadership
There was a time when leaders didn’t just focus on what they were good at; they focused on being a complete leader. If they found a deficiency, they worked on it, which is part of becoming a well-rounded person and leader.
In our quest to achieve, we have mistaken efficiency for effectiveness. You will always need to use your head and your heart.
A New Kind of Leadership Hero
Leaders in the twenty-first century understand all too well the pressure to be all, know all, and do all. We understand that what “got us here” might not “keep us here.”
Lord Colin Sharman, chairman of Aegis Group, put it this way: “A weakness is there; it’s something you have to take into account, but the way in which you get superior performance out of a group of people is to figure out what they’re good at and then get them into a role that uses that to the maximum advantage.” But eventually an unrelenting adversary punches it hard in the face: Reality.
Only focusing on what you’re good at and only highlighting your strengths does not work in the diverse demands of today’s integrated and competitive world. Some leaders excuse themselves from their weaknesses by spotlighting their strengths. But their singular focus developed blind spots—blind spots that can send the best of careers into the ditch.
Focusing on strengths tends to work on your personal efficiency. Focusing on strengths misses the point of effective leadership. If you want to be a top-tier leader, you must develop personal wholeness that focuses on how you can empower and equip others to reach their potential. If you do nothing but hone your own strengths, at some point you’ll discover a serious lack in your ability to lead others well.
We can’t afford to ignore the areas that don’t come naturally to us. When it comes to executive qualities, we need the good and the great…not just the great.
Leaders often must work on rounding out their born-with-it gifting by developing new capacities that come through intentional, focused discipline learning. We all have competencies to be discovered as well as competencies to be developed.
We can staff to our weaknesses, but at the same time, it’s imperative that we make every effort to round out our own leadership skills. We cannot be content as an executive specialist.
Seven Collective Qualities of The Hero Leader
1. The Relatable Producer: Being Results Driven AND People Focused
Conventional wisdom holds that you are either a chatty people person or a task-driven maniac, but in actuality you cannot afford to neglect either side of the pendulum. It’s time to break all the pendulums!
You cannot get where you need to go without the help of other stakeholders. You need people. And always remember, the larger your vision, the bigger your people pool will have to be. Your relational reliability largely determines the willingness of employees, vendors, and customers to join with you and stay with you.
2. The Future Looks Greasy: Doing Friday’s Payroll AND Inventing the Future
There are two key horizontal elements to any enterprise production: Creating future opportunity and delivering on yesterday’s promises. One focuses forward; the other keeps a watch backwards. One is about the windshield; other is about the rearview mirror.
If your five-year plan is more than a year old, then you’re already behind on the future.
A senior executive of a large public company once told Graves, “Every company I know in every industry you can think of is in course correction mode. It seems we are relooking it our strategic plan every six to twelve months.”
Friday’s payroll represents all the things you have to do today that fulfill past commitments. It is the running list that captures all the obligations, agreements, and pledges you have made that require resources today to fulfill them.
3. No More Head Cases: Having Heart AND Using Your Head
The realization of the heart’s importance to leadership is a long overdue correction. The traditional choleric, task-driven approach to business was heavily dependent on a left-brain addiction to linear logic. But such businesses had a massive blind spot: human capital or real people management.
You need to see with the eyes of your heart before you can factor the left-brain logic of the world more effectively into your leadership maximization equation. Empathy is a capability nurtured in both sides of the brain.
A business that is all heart and no profit will be soon be empathetically hugging people as they go out the door just before the lights are turned off. If you aren’t using your head, then don’t be surprised when your heart finds itself in a world of hurt.
Even the most careful sometimes are not careful enough. NASA is as left-brained as they come. Yet the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger just after takeoff exposed the tragic mistake that something had been missed. It only takes one O-ring failure to blow any business apart. Business failures invariably can be traced back to overlooked flaws in the original plan or the daily execution.
Effective leaders constantly update their strategies and plans, evaluating and reevaluating the latest data shaping their business realities. At the same time, however, they don’t do it a vacuum that locks out emotions.
4. Your Candy and Your Conveyor Belt: Thinking Corporately AND Working Functionally
A balanced leader thinks both functionally and corporately.
There is danger in working head down all the time, never looking up to see what’s going on around us. Taking in the larger view means thinking corporately.
This is one of the biggest challenges for rising leaders because it’s so hard for them to shake free from the nose-to-the-grindstone approach that played such a key role in their initial advancements. Most mid-level leaders and upper managers are extremely competent within their vertical function.
The higher a person moves up within an organization, however, the greater the need to think corporately.
Every organizational captain needs to have both a clear focus on specific objectives and an unobstructed view of the 360-degree context. The key is to do both: To think corporately as you work functionally; to see down into the silo as well as all across the frontier.
5. The Lion and The Lemming: Leading Others AND Managing Yourself
Leadership has an inner and outer dimension. Being a leader means both managing yourself and leading others.
The lion has a pride—the group of cats whose welfare he oversees. He makes sure they are fed. He takes the lead and sees that they get rest. He protects them from attack. When there is a healthy leader he top, the pride is at peace and can function and grow.
A lemming leader is highly effective at moving his followers. The problem is that he is leading them to a steep fall onto unforgiving rocks. The lemming has no internal moral compass. He does not lead self before he leads others. He steps out in a whimsical direction and takes others with him.
Challenges to our moral fiber generally fall into one of five categories:
- Greed: We must open up our hands and release what we “own.” We must give.
- Lust: We must take ourselves out of potentially tempting situations. We can’t “manage” our level of dangerous involvement. We have to evacuate.
- Revenge: We must stand still. We can’t retaliate and strike back. We must forgive.
- Independence: We must “lean in” to someone else with transparency and vulnerability. We must engage others.
- Pride: We must promote others. We discipline ourselves to shift our attention and energies to others.
6. Living in Truth: Feeling Confident AND Being Humble
If we go long enough without humility, life finds a way of delivering a big batch of it to our doorsteps. If we wallow in it, however, we will never leave our front yard.
One of the greatest challenges leaders face is striking that balance between humility and confidence. A leader without confidence simply isn’t a leader. Action always flows from self-assurance.
The apostle Paul was a hard-driving leader who did not slow down to pander to anyone, yet he had the broader wisdom to admit the importance to “not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment.”
Sober judgment. Healthy self-awareness. That kind of balanced self-assessment is what it means to be confident and humble at the same time.
7. The Lone Ranger Still Needs Tonto: Embracing Team AND Performing Alone
Every successful athlete knows the loneliness of preparation and training. Every successful entrepreneur understands the self-discipline of getting up early and staying late to ensure a start-up’s survival.
Successful, sustainable leaders operate effectively on a team and efficiently on their own. (Check out my previous post entitled, “Are You a Lone Ranger Leader?”)
The Hero Leader
A hero leader is someone who, like Batman, understands the need to possess more than one tool to get the job done—paradoxical qualities that, if you take the time to hone them, will help you become a more effective leader.
Like Antoine de Saint-Exupery said, “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to year for the vast and endless sea.”
We were not created to be autonomous. We were created to integrate ourselves into the lives of others. We are hardwired to fix things, to learn things, to challenge, to be involved in more than just one thing. We operate out from our core but we’re always looking for ways to learn and to connect with other humans.
We should not abandon leading from our strengths, but leaders, in particular, should lead from that core but not only from that core. Never abandon what you’re best at, but at the same time, never stop stretching yourself so that you can learn more.
In the professional world, we should play to our strengths but we should never abandon our weaknesses (i.e., outsourcing them to someone else). For leaders, this simply will not do.
The New Effective
The business climate has changed in the last 40 years, but the need for effectiveness has not. We need whole leaders leading, not fragmented specialists.
Here are four stepping stones that will help us become the Modern Effective Executive:
- More than One-Dimensional. Stepping Stone One leads us to recognize that today’s competitive market requires a leader to be more than one-dimensional. As Graves puts it, “What I’ve learned from a quarter-century of working in the market myself and coaching scores of other market leaders is this: One-dimensional competence is not enough.”
- Be Natural, Be You. Stepping Stone Two walks us toward the realization that we need to appropriately use our built-in, internally engineered skills that just come naturally. Start with your strengths, but don’t finish there. You can’t afford to.
- You’re Not Leonardo Da Vinci. Stepping Stone Three tells us to remember that none of us will ever be omni-competent.
- Broaden Your Horizon. Stepping Stone Four directs us to cultivate a broad portfolio of “developed and discovered” competencies.
The daily reality for the effective leader is this: on the left is the over-emphasizing of ones’ strengths and the neglecting of some of the real needs of the business. On the right is the omni-competence, trying to do everything. If you jerk the wheel to either side, you head straight into the creek, killing all progress while you wait for a rescue.
Strive for excellence but accept adequacy (not mediocrity). In the areas where you can excel (your built-in strengths), become one of the absolute best and center your core tasks around those skills. In areas where you struggle and (let’s be honest) never excel, work to get a passing grade.
As Drucker—from a half century ago in The Effective Executive (see my blog post summary here)—observed, “”In forty-five years of work as a consultant with a large number of executives in a wide variety of organizations—large and small; businesses, government agencies, labor unions, hospitals, universities, community services; American, European, Latin American and Japanese—I have not come across a single ‘natural’: an executive who was born effective. The effective ones have had to learn to be effective.”
So, continue learning and growing to be an effective Hero Leader. Then, maybe you can reach the pinnacle—your best leadership self, shooting for the stars—as an Out of This World Leader!