Leadership comes with it’s own pitfalls. The trappings we all hate. The frustrations of making a tough choice. The terror of stepping forward.
Yet we lead, even with the long lists of things we hate.
1. The added responsibility of leadership: Yup, we all step into leadership and know there’s going to be added responsibility. Sometimes the added responsibility that comes with leadership can be overwhelming.
2. The responsibility to make the hard decisions: Leaders are there for a reason. We’re there to set a course, to plot the way, to make decisions. Not every decision we face will be easy. We’ll have to make some really difficult choices.
3. The unclear path: As a young leader, you’ll be put into situations where you have no idea what to do. The path will be hidden. Still, you’re called to go forward even when you can’t see more than one or two sets in front of yourself.
4. The desires of others:Any leader who has been in the leadership game long enough knows this one. There’s a lot of politics in leadership and people try to push their desires on you. You’ll be tempted to go their way rather than to forge your own path.
5. The failures we experience along the way: I know failures are a great pathway to learning. But I don’t like to fail.
6. The feelings of responsibility: This thing I hate about leadership is similar to #1 but different enough I believe it deserves it’s own spot. A weight begins to fall upon you as you lead and you begin to feel responsible for those under you. Quitting or changing positions can make you feel like you’re abandoning those you lead.
7. The influence of my leadership: Leaders realize every action they take has an impact on those around them. Your influence goes beyond your wildest imagination. Sometimes I don’t want to influence anyone.
8. The passing of the baton: There will come a time in every leader’s life where they will have to step down. The leader will have to pass the baton to the next generation. Even knowing this can be difficult. And I hate that!
9. The transitions of others: You spend a lot of time building up others and getting them into the right positions. Only they move on and begin something new. It’s hard to accept but great knowing they’re having an impact in other places.
10. The desire to see people change: People have so much potential. So often they fail to live up to their full potential. Us leaders, we’re able to see the potential but we’re not always able to draw it out. We learn that we can create change in others, we can only try to coax it out.
Leaders face change – or the need to change – frequently in their work environments. When leaders look at needed change from a Western-thinking viewpoint – “this is broken, we need to fix it” – they miss a critical factor in effective change leadership.
Leaders miss the opportunity to describe where and why. They need to be specific about where the change will take their team – and why it is time to make that change.
This approach can help leaders shift from frequent tactical changes to a more thoughtful, overall change – to a high performing, values aligned culture.
There are three phases involved in this more intentional, strategic change. First, leaders need to describe their desired culture in tangible, concrete terms. Second, leaders need to explain why the change is needed – how employees and customers will benefit. Finally, leaders must model the change, coach the change, and celebrate the change.
Let’s look at the practices that serve leaders best in each of these phases.
Describe the desired culture – Leaders must look beyond managing just performance to proactively managing a work environment based on trust, respect, and dignity. The team (or department or division or company) needs a solid foundation of both performance and values. The team needs an organizational constitution.
An organizational constitution is a formal document that describes the team’s purpose (its “reason for being” today), values and behaviors (citizenship standards), strategies, and goals. Most teams today have some form of performance expectations, which should make the creation of a formal strategy and goals a bit easier. Few teams have a relevant purpose or valued behaviors to guide interactions each day.
The team’s purpose outlines what it does, for whom, and “to what end” – the meaningful contribution that compels and inspires employees to align to the team’s “reason for being.” The team’s purpose needs to be formalized and reinforced, frequently.
Values defined in behavioral terms allow desired team citizenship to be observed and measured – just like performance goals are observed and measured. If, for example, a leader is running a retail store, he or she may need to define exactly what is meant by great customer service. Behaviors might include “pleasantly acknowledging everyone who comes within ten feet” of a team member or “providing solutions for customer’s problems.”
Teams will likely have three or four values, each with three or four specific behaviors that describe how team leaders and team members will demonstrate each value.
Explain why the culture change is necessary – Humans crave context! They need to understand the reasons why the change is being made. Leaders must be able to effectively communicate the business case and the engagement case for the change. The business case is commonly founded on efficiencies, quality improvements, reduction in errors, and innovative solutions customers demand. The engagement case is usually founded upon reducing drama and conflict, boosting workplace trust and psychological safety, and even boosting fun as a workplace norm.
Model, coach, and celebrate the change – This is the “accountability” phase, where leaders must help everyone on the team “live” the purpose, values, behaviors, strategies, and goals, every day. Leaders must be role models for the desired culture. Only when leaders are credible models of the desired culture will the change be seen as legitimate – and real. Team members won’t embrace desired values and behaviors unless their leaders model them consistently.
Once leaders build credibility for the change with their own behavior, they earn the right to ask employees to embrace the behaviors. Leaders must be observant and present to reinforce aligned behaviors and to redirect misaligned behaviors. Leaders must celebrate traction on the desired culture – and not wait to celebrate when the change is “done.” It’ll never be done! It’s an ongoing evolution. It’s a lot of work, but the benefits are worth it.
Clients who have embraced managing to an organizational constitution enjoy significant benefits, including 40 percent gains in employee engagement, 40 percent gains in customer service, and 35 percent gains in profits, all within 18-24 months of embarking on the change.
Those are impressive numbers. My latest book, The Culture Engine, presents a step-by-step process that guides leaders in the creating of their organizational constitution – then managing to it.
David Ogilvy, the vaunted “Father of Advertising” and legend among the marketing community, has surely earned the designation of leader. While his true cunning lay in the craft of copywriting, throughout his book Confessions of an Advertising Man you will find deep insights on management, candor, and company culture.
The care he put into making every word matter for his campaigns mirrors his attention to detail in how he ran his company. For Ogilvy, many of his finest learnings on management came from an early job working as a chef in Paris. His experiences there would later establish the principles that were embedded in the Ogilvy & Mather agency:
Thirty years ago I was a chef at the Hotel Majestic in Paris. Henri Soule of the Pavillon tells me that it was probably the best kitchen there has ever been.
Every man jack was inspired by one ambition: to cook better than any chef had ever cooked before. Our esprit de corps would have done credit to the Marines.
I have always believed that if I could understand how Monsieur Pitard, the head chef, inspired such white-hot morale, I could apply the same kind of leadership to the management of my advertising agency.
By any standard, it seems that during his tenure as “Monsieur” of an advertising agency, he succeeded. Below are some of his prudent and often contrarian takes on how an organization should be run.
On Keeping Praise Sacred
Top-shelf words can begin to lose their meaning when applied inappropriately—for instance, it seems everything is mind blowing on the web of lies.
One humorous example that I’m consistently reminded of is the American tendency to use the word “awesome” in mundane situations. My cousin from Italy is fond of ribbing us for this: “Everything in America is ‘awesome.’ That hamburger was awesome, this weather is awesome—why don’t you say it is nice?”
He’s teasing, but the literal definition of awesome, “inspiring an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, or fear,” clearly shows that its modern usage has left it with a tamer meaning.
Praise, Ogilvy argued, can suffer from the same type of dilution. At the Hotel Majestic, coming across words of praise was just uncommon enough to make each instance a momentous occasion.
Pixar and Disney Animation president Ed Catmull (left) has instituted workshops designed to educate colleagues about how the company views trustworthiness. | Reuters/Regis Duvignau
It can be easy to trust too quickly, especially when a leader is affable, has an impressive résumé, and tells you what you want to hear. In 30 years of surveying senior executives, social psychologist Roderick Kramer has found that 8 out of 10 report being burned at least once because they trusted too much or put their faith in the wrong person at some point in their careers.
It’s important for an organization to build trust among workers for several reasons, says Kramer. Employees who know they can trust their leaders are happy workers who believe in what they are doing. Creating this trust from within can also lead to public trust. “A lot of leaders talk about public trust, then they focus on the impression-management side of things,” says Kramer, “it’s much more important to establish genuine trust within your organization, which leads to trustworthy performance, which then builds over time into a public reputation of being trustworthy.”
With surveys from Edelman, Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership, and others reporting public trust in business and government leaders at near historic lows, Kramer says it’s a good time for leaders to build a trustworthy reputation. “People are looking for leaders they can trust, and so there’s a lot of capital sitting on the table for leaders who can get the equation right.” So how do truly trustworthy leaders behave?
They project confidence, competence, and benevolence.
Research shows that trustworthy leaders demonstrate that they have the skills and knowledge to steer the organization, that they don’t shy from straight talk, and that they are acting in the best interests of the organization, rather than in their own best interests.
“These things sound obvious, but still it’s important to look for ways to communicate them,” says Kramer. “Several people have written about the importance of leading by walking around — being present, accessible. Leaders like this leave a good impression as tangible, real people.”
They say — and show — that trust is an important company value.
In a way, good leaders are trust teachers, says Kramer. “They talk about the importance of trust, so that people know the leader values it, and that there will be consequences if that trust is violated.” He notes that at Pixar, a company known for creating animated films that kids love and parents can trust, CEO Ed Catmull has instituted workshops specifically to educate colleagues about how the company views trustworthiness.
As an example of demonstrating trust in employees, Kramer cites Whole Foods CEO John Mackey and his policy whereby employees directly hire new people to work on their teams, rather than relying on a system of centralized hiring through HR. “He’s pushing the decision-making process from the top down to the people who are going to have to live with the consequences of those decisions, and that doesn’t happen in many organizations,” says Kramer.
They establish clear roles and systems to speed trust.
While one leader’s behavior can set a tone of trustworthiness, the entire company needs to have rules that enable trust to permeate a group’s culture, Kramer has found in his research. “When people know what they’re supposed to do, and they know what other people are supposed to do, then they trust that system of roles to work.”
He points to Pixar’s “Braintrust,” which Catmull describes in his book, Creativity, Inc., the process by which the company’s top minds relentlessly vet creative ideas and identify a project’s problems. Because the system is so rigorous and well defined, it engenders trust in the ideas that are deemed good enough to move forward. “And once you’ve had a history of success with that culture of rules, it becomes a background expectation,” says Kramer, a state he calls presumptive trust, which in turn leads to trustworthy performance.
They share the credit, and they take the blame.
Because leaders are highly visible, people both within an organization and outside the organization tend to overweight their responsibility for successes and failures, a phenomenon the late Harvard scholar Richard Hackman called the “leader attribution error.” For example, look at the success of the late Steve Jobs, says Kramer. “Many creative minds at Apple contributed to the development of the iPhone, but in the mainstream Jobs got the credit.”
Leaders can beneficially exploit this phenomenon to build trust by being out in front of the organization’s decisions, says Kramer, so that when good things happen, people recognize that the leader was in charge of the process, even though he or she might share the credit. “And there’s a little bit of evidence that suggests that when leaders are generous at sharing credit, they actually are more trusted,” he says. “It shows that they are fully confident.” Likewise, demonstrating confidence by admitting full responsibility when something goes wrong — even if the leader wasn’t fully responsible — can in some cases enhance a leader’s reputation.
They don’t mask a crisis.
"One of the fatal mistakes many organizational leaders make is not the initial misstep that causes the crisis; it’s the cover-up — the attempt to spin it or mask the problem,” he says. People quickly lose confidence in leaders who do this, says Kramer, pointing to bankers during and following the 2008 financial crisis. “I think some of the disenchantment with Wall Street was that leaders didn’t really take responsibility for their errors,” he says. “They blamed the system, or imprecise regulation — and people don’t like that because it’s a dodge.”
Instead, Kramer suggests, acknowledge the problem quickly, take swift and decisive action to address it, and put in place measures to prevent its reoccurrence. If the problem involves a defective product, recall it “and make a very public display of the new safeguards or policies that will prevent it from happening again.” In a recent book with Todd Pittinsky, Restoring Trust in Organizations and Leaders, Kramer suggests it is possible for leaders and organizations to regain the public’s trust, but it isn’t easy.
