Lessons For Leaders

In the course of a multi-decade career, it has been my privilege to work with- and for some terrific leaders. These people demonstrated the essential behaviors that make leaders great. They were generous with their time, but more importantly, they taught by example.

Leadership roles are now transitioning to the next generation. I see so many younger people thrust into these roles without having had the benefit of this kind of mentoring that was once so common. So, I decided to write this to try and distill the core principles that have served me so well over the years.

I claim none of this as my own. I'm just a scribbler that took time to format the great notes given to me ...

Acknowledgements

Don Stuart, Manager, Radar Alaska - Who taught me that the work isn't done until you're proud of it.

Zvie Liberman, President, Talk-A-Phone - Who taught me the centrality of work discipline.

Richard Brander, Director Of Research, Beltone - Who taught me to focus on very hard problems for long periods of time.

David Cornwall, Sr. Architect, United Airlines - Who taught me to integrate technology and business and then lead upward.

Mark Teflian, CTO Nets Inc., President Time0 - Who taught me to be a relentless advocate for my people.

Jim Manzi, President Net Inc. - Who taught me that doing well includes doing good.

H. Ross Perot, EDS and Perot Systems - Who taught me that leaders begin and end with unimpeachable integrity.

Who Is A Leader?

We've come to think of leaders as people who are CEOs or Senior Vice President Of Nothing Important or some other lofty title. Implicit in every young person's first promotion to Manager 1st Class is the message, "NOW, you are a leader."

This is nonsense. In fact, it's a corrosive idea. First of all, you manage things, but you lead people, ideas, and strategies. Management - even when done at the highest levels - is essentially glorified bookkeeping. Yes, it's necessary bookkeeping, but that's all it is. It has been my misfortune to see more than a few "great" managers who were fundamentally lousy leaders. This ends up being destructive to the organizaton and bad for that manager's professional development.

Secondly, title and pecking order do not correlate directly with leadership. It is certainly true that the higher up you move in an organization, the more "leadership" responsibility accrues to you. But it does not follow that your new title magically makes you a leader, let alone a good one.

The truth is that leaders are people that ... exhibit leadership behaviors. And here's the great thing, they exist at every level of the organization. There are leaders to be found among administrative assistants, bookkeepers, engineers, teachers, soccer moms, and retail clerks.

The point is that your title doesn't make you a leader. Your title sets the expectation that you will exhibit the behaviors of a leader.

The Lessons

Great Leaders Have Permission

Whatever your title, past accomplishments or educational pedigree, your people have to give you their permission to be led. This is a matter of trust. The Board Of Directors may have just annointed you CEO and Chairman, but if your people do not find you worthy of their trust, you will fail.

Trust is not built all at once, but great leaders exhibit daily behaviors that - over time - create a deep reservoir of trust. This is incredibly important when times are bad. People will hang in there with you if you've proven yourself to be trustworthy. They'll do this even if their jobs are horrible at the moment, or the raises are lousy, or there have been RIFs and so on.

The inverse is really terrible. When people do not trust their leaders, they don't necessarily quit. More usually, they just take their foot off the gas, or in the most pathological cases, they will practice what I call "Malicious Obedience". They will do exactly what they are told, even though it's the wrong thing. The feedback paths every leader needs to succeed will dry up and the wheels will come off the organization.

I've seen more than one putative leader - even some fairly good ones - watch their organizaton implode because their behaviors did not instill trust.

Great Leaders Have Unimpeachable Integrity

Trust begins with one thing: Integrity. Leaders usually cannot say everything people want to know. But when great leaders speak, you always know it is the truth, or at least the truth as they understand it. People will forgive mistakes, but they will not forgive a lack of integrity.

Our larger culture is adrift exactly because there has been so much lying, cheating, and stealing going on that people don't trust the leadership of our core institutions. We are in the tragic situation of people questioning the integrity of their government, their business leaders, their legal institutions, and even their clergy.

Great leaders shine precisely because they will never, ever stoop to these behaviors. They are tough and relentless in their demands on their people, but those people know - without a doubt - that the leader in question is indisputably honest. Large or small, anything less than this will destroy anyone who aspires to lead.

Great Leaders Are Stewards And Servants

We think of leaders as being "The Boss" ... and they often are. But no matter how senior, how important, how accomplished, or how wealthy they are, the greatest leaders I've ever worked with see their jobs as being stewards of their organizations. They serve their company, their stockholders, and their employees.

These things show up in small ways. I've had the President of the company - whom I worked for at the time - offer to get me coffee because I was nose down in a hard problem. I've seen one of the most powerful business execs on the planet pick up the phone to call the wife of an employee who was very ill - even though that employee was 5 levels down the organization. This wasn't gladhanding or for PR. It was done in private because the CEO knew that they were a steward and servant and that lady needed comfort.

There is no more repulsive a corporate hack than the person who thinks they're more important because they have a title or the corner office or whatever other trappings of power they possess. Title gives you more responsibility, it doesn't make you more important.

Oh, that reservoir of trust? It gets deep really fast when people see their leaders acting like stewards and servants.

Great Leaders Think Strategy First

Great leaders tend to naturally bubble up in organizations, incrementally taking on more and more responsibility. As this happens, they start offloading the day-to-day minutae of the work and start focusing on larger, systemic issues. Instead of focusing on "Why didn't we ship that on time?", they work on things like, "How do we improve our processes?" or "Are we structured for success?" or "With whom should we partner?"

Steve Case at AOL famously said words to the effect of "Vision without execution is an hallucination." There is no question that execution has to be the bedrock of any organizaton. But great leaders focus on the larger, meta issues that impede execution systemically.

How much time are your people spending on needless paperwork? Have you even asked them? How many of your processes are masking accountability? Can you even tell? How much time do people spend positioning politically? Have you noticed? These are the kinds of larger process and structural issues that great leaders focus on first.

Great Leaders Are In Sales

If a great leader has a strategic mind, they have the heartbeat of a salesperson. Whether it's the CEO trying to grow customer revenue, the CTO trying to implement a new mission critical system, or the VP of HR trying to get an employee wellness program funded, real leaders are always selling something.

Many people are of the opinion that sales is about taking people to ball games, wining and dining them, slapping them on the back, and getting them to buy something. Nothing could be further from the truth. Just like buildings or computer systems, effective sales has an "architecture" to it. Central to that architecture is that a sale can only be made when both parties realize significant value from the deal. Great leaders - at every level - know this. Their stategic thinking sets the direction, but their salesmanship exposes the value of their ideas.

Show me a CEO who isn't constantly in front of customers and I'll show you a failing CEO. That's sort of obvious. But how about the VP Of Technology who isn't bothering to explain the value of a new system to their most junior engineers? How about the Director Of Finance who never explains the difference between expense and capital burn - and why it matters how people report their time? Silly? Perhaps. But these are all "selling" and they're fundamentally important.

Great Leaders Take Cues From Reality

Great Leaders Are Often Lost And Lonely

Great Leaders Maintain Perspective

Great Leaders Foster Constructive Argument

Great Leaders Take Risks

Great Leaders Can Identify Bricks And Mortar

Great Leaders Insipire People Beyond Their Boundaries

Great Leaders Are Whole People

Copyright And Licensing

Permission for unlimited distribution and use of this document is hereby given so long as this document is reproduced in full. This article may also be quoted in any part so long as original attribution is provided with the quoted material.

Author

Tim Daneliuk
tundra@tundraware.com

Document Revision Information

$Id: lessons_for_leaders.rst,v 1.102 2015/03/06 22:11:39 tundra Exp $

You can find the latest version of this program at:

http://www.tundraware.com/Software/lessons_for_leaders

A PDF version of the document may also be downloaded from:

http://www.tundraware.com/Software/lessons_for_leaders.pdf

This document was produced using Restuctured Text and TeX Live.