Exceptional leadership is more than the absence of bad behavior. It requires emotional connections with associates and between associates and the company.
Who is the best leader you have ever worked with? What qualities make that person admirable? What traits do you see in that person that you try to emulate? Take a moment to make a mental list or to jot down a few. Now, who is the worst leader you have ever worked with? What qualities made that person difficult? What are the traits you shun demonstrated by that person?
Looking at your lists, what separates the person you named as the best from the one you consider the worst? Was it the exceedingly smart leader you named your favorite? Or an incredible salesperson / HR leader / attorney / other who is a master at her craft? Or perhaps a leader who has incredible flexibility and has moved around your organization holding a variety of positions. While being smart, capable, and flexible are all admirable qualities, I imagine for most of you those were not the deciding factors for naming your best leader. Those with a particularly strong quality or two tend to fall into the crowded category of respected leader but are otherwise unremarkable.
How many items on your lists of best and worst relate to how the leader makes you feel? Whether you feel a connection with that person? An insecure, arrogant, pontificator who does not listen, micro-manages the team, and takes credit for good results but assigns blame for the bad ones would likely win the title of your worst leader as he makes you feel unimportant and disrespected. Your named best leader most likely did not display those poor behaviors, but rather the opposite. But is great leadership merely the absence of bad behavior? No. That is certainly necessary, but not sufficient. Exceptional leaders, the ones we would do anything for, create emotional connections with associates and between associates and the company. They make us feel valued and that our work is important to achieving the corporate mission, that our efforts are more important than just completing daily tasks.
There are many books that do a terrific job of describing good and bad leader behavior and how that impacts team members, a company’s bottom line, and a leader’s legacy. Multipliers by Liz Wiseman, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith, and The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John C. Maxell are a few. As I read and compare their findings to my experience, I notice two things:
- The most admired leaders are genuine and develop sincere relationships
- Behaviors detrimental to one’s career have this in common: they weaken or break personal or corporate connections.
Although we all have different styles, strengths, and opportunities, each of us can be our genuine self and develop meaningful relationships by demonstrating understanding, empathy, and caring for our team members. Each of us has a unique personality, style, and approach but we can all exhibit these learned behaviors that are fundamental to exceptional leadership. We show these behaviors to our families and close friends, and we can be that way with our team members at work, too. I am not suggesting we share as much with our teams as we do with our family and friends, but sharing more than a sheer leader-to-associate relationship suggests and creating personal, caring relationships is certainly something all of us can do. Although they exist, there are very few people who simply do not know how to develop caring relationships. Often, it comes down to whether we want to or not. And that’s a choice. A choice that often determines a leader’s legacy.
In my next two posts I will discuss personal and corporate connections fully.
Two stories to illustrate the points above:
I once worked with a leader people naturally gravitated toward. When my peers and I would discuss her, it was inevitable someone would say, “I love working with her.” We all did. She was an amazing leader, one who began conversations with a sincere interest in how things were going for us, personally as well as at work and who took the time to really get to know her leaders, team, and partners. She was the embodiment of understanding, empathy, and caring. And she consistently demonstrated that through her actions. She asked questions more freely than she made statements. She never blamed when there were problems, but rather sought improvement. She listened and weighed the pros and cons for decisions to be made. She was thoughtful, open, and honest. She gave others credit when merited. She admitted when she did not understand something or made a mistake. She was genuine. And for that she was admired and loved.
Conversely, there was another leader I worked with who was an incredibly smart technologist. People respected his knowledge and his opinions on how to accomplish complex technology work and listened when he spoke. But his EQ was nonexistent, and he was miserable to work with. He had a particularly bad habit of correcting team members or scolding them in front of others. He was a single data point guy. If he heard something from someone he trusted, there was no need to validate whether it was correct or not before reprimanding someone. And there were many times where he was not correct, and he would apologize to the person in private. He was literally doing it backwards. He was so bad at this it impacted the way team members felt about his technology intellect with comments like, “he can’t be that smart if that’s the way he behaves.”
In one case, the leader developed personal connections that endeared her to the team. In the other, he broke those connections. Each has a legacy that lives on but only one would be proud of it.
Share your thoughts below.
What 2 – 3 qualities on your best leader list were most important to you? Which 2 – 3 qualities on your worst leader list do you seek to avoid?
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