Be courageous and kind
To build a great team you need both the courage to be wrong and the kindness to inspire your team.
Feed ‘characteristics of a leader’ into Google and it quickly becomes clear just how many different ideas there are about what constitutes good leadership. Early results will include articles promising ‘7 important traits’, ‘10 impressive characteristics’, even ‘22 qualities that make a great leader’.
There’s nothing wrong with that. Good leaders do indeed show many different skills, qualities and aptitudes. At this stage, however, we want to try and boil it down to two characteristics that we think encapsulate great leadership in today’s world, particularly when it comes to building and nurturing teams. These are the two, equal-but-opposite qualities that great team leaders will use to encourage, inspire and challenge their teams, and to win the vote of their people time and again.
Courage
The first is courage, which might seem an obvious quality to be associated with leadership. After all, it can take a great deal of personal courage to step up into a leadership role, and move from being responsible only for your own actions and results to those of many other people.
However, we want to suggest that courage is no longer about a macho view of leadership: the hunter-gatherer, alpha fe/male who sets the tone by being the biggest and bravest beast in the jungle. We would encourage you to think about courage not just in its traditional sense, but in some new – and more vulnerable – ways.
The bravery of a leader is the ability to make difficult decisions and live by them; to face up to big or combative audiences to defend those decisions; and to truly be the one with whom the buck finally stops.
Yet in the context of building your team, you will also need to show many other types of courage, and that will require different forms of bravery: the bravery to be yourself, with all your flaws, and to admit that you don’t always have all the answers; to face up to your mistakes, and to have the humility to ask your team what you could have done better; and to put your trust in other people and to do one of the things that many leaders find most difficult: delegate.
Here are five forms of courage we think leaders today need to show and role model to their teams.
THE COURAGE TO BE YOURSELF
As a leader, you will most likely be spending more time with your core team over the course of a given week than you spend with your close family. What that means is you can’t try to be anyone other than yourself. So the last thing you want to do is wear a mask and pretend to be someone you’re not. As Steve Jobs said, ‘Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.’
Not only would that be exhausting, it’s also counter-productive. People can see through fakery and if they feel you’re being fake that will erode the trust you need to build with the people around you. Authenticity is what people respond to; they want to know about you – what you care about, what motivates you, what kind of person you are to work for. So you don’t have an option to be anyone other than yourself, and nor should you want to be.
This book wants to help you be the best version of yourself, but don’t get bogged down by ideas of how a ‘great leader’ is supposed to look or behave. The advice in this book is here to be interpreted and adapted to your own personal style and circumstances. Take what’s helpful to you, leave what’s not, and be brave enough to always be yourself.
Words of wisdom: Be yourself
Leadership is about being you. It is about understanding who you are and from there, you define your own leadership style. It should be real, natural and not a costume you put on at work. Leadership is not about closing yourself off. Recognise all the best bits and the problematic parts – and from there shape and draft the portrait of who you are. With me, what you see is who I am. I am not afraid to say what I think or to admit when I don’t know the answer. Followers want to see the real you – your passions, your curiosity, your real self.
HELEN MCRAE, CEO, MINDSHARE
THE COURAGE TO TRUST
Many leaders, entrepreneurs especially, will say that their biggest problem is a reluctance to delegate. It’s understandable; when as a leader you are responsible for results and performance, your instinctive reaction is to try and do as much as possible yourself, so you have maximum control over the outcome. Except that control is an illusion, because all you’re really doing is creating a bottleneck, depriving your team of opportunities to lead, and adding unnecessary weight to your already heavy burden. Put another way, control creates a dependency culture and suppresses the initiative of other people. Being routinely in the weeds denies people the chance to flower.
Ever done a ‘trust fall’ exercise before? We bet the first few times, you stopped yourself rather than letting yourself fall freely to be caught by the person behind you. That’s essentially how most leaders start when it comes to trusting their team. You know, in principle, that there’s someone waiting to catch you, but you aren’t quite ready to put that to the test. Getting past that trust barrier is one of the most important things you will achieve as a leader. Until you’re prepared to actually trust your team – not just to do things under close supervision, but to make their own decisions, take ownership of their work and take responsibility for their self-improvement – you will never get the best out of yourself or other people. Conversely, when you do put your trust in people and empower them to have confidence in their abilities, the results can be amazing.
THE COURAGE TO ASK
For some leaders, the last thing they would ever want is to lose face in front of their team. But if you want to fulfil your potential and keep on stepping up through your career, you need to be entirely willing to look foolish. Ask the questions no one else is asking, especially ones that may seem silly or obvious. If you don’t, probably no one will. One of the great fallacies of groupthink is ‘someone must have thought of that’. People often keep quiet because they don’t want to risk being ridiculed for asking the obvious question. And that can be how important things are missed, bad decisions get signed off and mistakes get made. It’s your responsibility to ensure everyone knows it’s OK to ask.
As a leader, you can set the tone that says nothing is off the table, no idea is too weird or wonderful to be considered, and no question too obvious or silly to be discussed. That may sound like a small thing, but it takes some guts to do; it’s cutting against a lot of our social conditioning to speak out in this way, so as a leader you have to show the courage to keep challenging, and encourage others to do the same. You will have healthier discussions and make better collective decisions as a result.
THE COURAGE TO CHANGE
Not every decision you make will be the right one, and that doesn’t mean you made it for the wrong reasons either. With disruption knocking on every door, circumstances and information can very quickly change and that means you have to adapt and course-correct as you go along. It may be perceived as a ‘flip-flop’ by your team but it’s far better to admit the error and turn back early than continuing down a dead-end road map while you work out some way to save face and shift the blame. Being wrong and admitting to being wrong doesn’t have to be a bad day; it can be a brilliant opportunity to show your honesty and trust in the team, asking for their help in coming up with alternative solutions.
Words of Wisdom: be fearless
We cannot expect comfort along this journey and we can never become complacent. We must be brave and fearless enough to drive the change this world need and support each other as much as we can – as peers, mentors and friends. Women, especially those just getting started, have such an incredible opportunity to bring a new way of thinking and collaborating to the workplace if they show up as their whole selves and have confidence in everything that they have to offer.
HARRIET GREEN – GENERAL MANAGER, IBM WATSON IOT, CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT AND EDUCATION.
THE COURAGE TO FAIL
Not everything is going to go to plan so it’s good to recognise early on in your career that getting things wrong is sometimes a necessary step on the way to getting them right. As a leader you’re in an exposed position: people are watching your actions and their results; indeed, results are what you will be judged by. But if you obsess over the illusion of a perfect record, you will miss opportunities to experiment, to try new things and to do better in the long run.
All of which means you need to be willing to fail, and be seen to fail. That may seem counter-intuitive, but if you are not getting anything wrong or ever tripping up, then you are playing it too safe. Don’t limit yourself to what is known and comfortable. Have the courage to fail, make sure you learn from it when you do, and develop a team ethic that supports people putting themselves outside their comfort zone and learning from their mistakes.
Kindness
Becoming a leader is a brave thing to do, and it often makes you a braver person too. To courage, an obvious leadership asset, we think you need to add another which hasn’t always been a big part of the business lexicon. That is kindness.
Many view business as a ruthless, Darwinist world where winner-takes-all and forget everything and everyone else. When profit margins and shareholder value are the aims, there is a certain logic to this. Shoot first, do everything in your power to protect the bottom line, and ask questions later.
Yet, like an increasing number of people, we think that business has the potential to be about so much more than profit. You want to be profitable, of course, but it should be the purpose behind the profit that drives a business forward. Of course shareholders are important, but there are many other stakeholders who are also essential to the long-term success of a business. Moreover, our belief is that business is one of the great global forces for driving innovation that changes lives, transforms opportunities and underpins progress.
Brilliant, mission-driven business leaders are at the heart of global efforts to tackle poverty, deadly diseases, and social and gender inequality. That’s not to say business is perfect – any number of corporate scandals can attest to that – but we are entering an era where the collective focus in business has become much more about the positive impact that companies can and should deliver. The revolutionary concept of the ‘B-Corp’, a certification for businesses that benefit people, community and the planet, and the 2012 launch of Richard Branson’s B-Team to champion a better way of doing business are both signs of change and the growing momentum for businesses to have a conscience as well as a capitalist imperative.
In a business world that’s more purposeful, more socially aware and conscious of its impact on people and planet, leadership has to change too. Your style needs to reflect the attitudes and ambitions of the people on your team. Which means command and control is out; empathy and kindness are in.
Some will shake their heads at that, and not be persuaded that it is anything other than hippy nonsense. They are entitled to their view, but the importance of kindness to modern leaders is grounded in some important and new realities. Here are two good reasons why you need to be kind to step up and lead today.
WE ARE IN A RELATIONSHIPS AGE; EMPATHY DELIVERS BETTER BUSINESS RESULTS
It’s important to recognise that at this time of heightened technological commodification, when there’s always a cheaper platform for your customers to choose, the strength of your business lies in the sum and strength of its relationships. From employees to customers, suppliers, investors and observers, a business runs on the quality of its human interactions and the goodwill you build and sustain with your full range of stakeholders.
That has to start with your team. They are the principal ambassadors and spokespeople for the company. They will tell their friends, their social networks and their contacts what sort of place your company is to work in. They will compare notes and assess equivalent opportunities elsewhere. Your people have options aplenty and places to go if they don’t like the environment you create. They are as brainy and footsy as you, so invest in developing relationships with them, understand what motivates them and work to fully appreciate their point of view.
PEOPLE NO LONGER RESPECT THE RANK AND UNIFORM
Being an empathetic leader isn’t about being a nice boss or wanting to be liked. It’s a fundamental part of building strong relationships with your team. You can no longer expect to be listened to purely on the basis of being ‘the boss’. You have to earn the respect of your people; and that means you should be listening and learning from them as much as you are talking and giving instructions. Listening is the operative word here! Take the time to listen to people’s worries as well as their wild ideas, their criticisms, concerns and, yes, their reflections on your leadership style. Only by listening will you learn what your team needs from you as a leader to help them deliver awesome results.
That doesn’t mean you always have to agree with what you hear from others. The important thing is that you take the feedback on board and then, once you’ve reached a decision, explain clearly why you have chosen that particular course of action. People might disagree with your thinking, but they will generally respect a leader who takes the time to listen, explain and work through their decisions. The alternative is a didactic ‘do as I say’ style which only feeds disaffection and alienation. That’s not something you can afford if you want to avoid losing your best people to another company of their choosing.
Don’t think of empathy as a concession to other people; see it for what it is: a vital part of your leadership toolkit, one that helps you build better relationships with your team, empower your people and achieve better outcomes as a result.
Empathy is the oil in the machine, helping avoid misunderstandings that can fester over time into real problems. By making yourself a kinder, more empathetic leader, you will be helping yourself become a better one: someone more in touch with your people, your customers and how your business functions at all levels. Don’t think of kindness as a nice-to-have value add; see it as central to your personal and leadership development.