Many assume that as a leader and expert in your field, you can meet the technical demands of your role and seamlessly lead your people. But ask any CEO or business leader, and they’ll tell you differently.
While meeting technical demands can be second nature, having the attributes required to effectively motivate, inspire and initiate change in employees, teams and organisations can be a whole other matter.
Generally agreed as being more about EQ (emotional quotient) than IQ, running a collaborative, supportive and productive workplace calls for a number of key leadership characteristics. Here are five to keep in mind.
1. Develop empathy
We don’t manage machines, we manage people. These people need to be heard and understood. Hearing and understanding effectively first requires you, as a leader, to take some time to get in touch with yourself, develop listening skills, self-awareness and show empathy.
Once you’ve achieved this, you’ll be more in tune with the needs of others and able to respond to their emotional requirements effectively. It’s a skill that requires constant development, but nonetheless, is critical to success.
2. Culture first
If you have a high EQ, you’re likely to be focused on culture as much as anything else. Management theorist Peter Drucker, is quoted (perhaps mistakenly) as saying “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. We interpret this as meaning that there’s no point putting a business plan in place if you haven’t got a plan for how you bring your people, your most important asset, together to deliver the plan.
We have to accept that we, as humans, are poorly equipped to handle our current environment. Our genetic development simply hasn’t moved as quickly as the innovation that we’ve deployed in the world around us. As leaders, we need to appeal to basic human needs and behaviours in order to create a successful culture.
This is a very interesting subject, and one that warrants its own air time. There’s been some great work from David Logan and Simon Sinek in this area. “Tribal Leadership” and “Why Leaders Eat Last” are seminal pieces of work for developing modern organisational culture. Both are must-read pieces if you want to turn EQ in to a thriving organisational culture.
3. Clarity of direction
As the leader, your team turns to you for consistency and clarity through the inevitable ebbs and flows that businesses experience. By clearly articulating exactly where you’re going, why you’re going there, how you’re going to get there and, more importantly, what that means for your people, you are taking your team on a journey where everyone is clear on the long term plan despite the day-to-day challenges that arise.
We have discovered two key elements that ensure success here.
First, make sure that you as the leader are acting and behaving in harmony with this plan. Nothing will derail the plan more than if you yourself don’t stay the course.
Second, bring your people on the journey early. We don’t believe in having only the leadership team define the business or cultural plan. Everyone at MediaCom, at all levels of the organisation, has had and continues to have, a say in where we are going and how we are going to get there.
4. Empower your people
Build your teams – and therefore your organisation – with empowerment in mind. Centralised control and executive orders might work in government, but when you’re trying to foster a culture and take people on a journey, it doesn’t. It also slows the dynamism of the organisation and leads to disillusion.
Of course, empowerment needs to be undertaken with reference to the other requirements mentioned here, and it should always be supported by a strong change management plan and relevant training and support.
Empowerment also has to start from the top. As leader, step one is empowering your direct reports to make decisions. Ask them to do the same with theirs, and so on.
The transition to empowerment can feel uncomfortable for many people, including yourself. If this is the case, you may find it helps to scenario plan with your reports and let them arrive at decisions with you. Once you build mutual trust and confidence, you can start to delegate more.
This is such a crucial step for a leader. If you don’t empower your people, you won’t be able to nurture succession or take the time to develop and grow yourself.
5. Understand the butterfly effect and today’s leadership paradox
Here’s the paradox: as a leader you need to be decisive and execute with speed, while still understanding the full nuances and implications of those decisions – which takes time.
While Gladwell raises many very interesting points about our ability to make quick decisions in his book Blink, the reality is we are not perfect and we all have blind spots, regardless of how high our EQ and IQ might be.
Despite our experience, no two roles are the same and nor are any two businesses, no matter how closely they compete.
In a culturally driven environment, you need to explore key decisions from all angles and make sure your team has helped you consider the follow-on impacts of those decisions.
At MediaCom, everyone in the leadership team knows they have a say and we work through key decisions together. But at the end of the day, I’m the one who needs to make a call if we don’t reach consensus. That said, I will always explain why.
Sure, there will be times where you do just have to make that call, but try to limit those to purely quantitative decisions, or those that only you can make for privacy reasons. In a people driven organisation, you’ll be surprised how the butterfly effects from making a “captain’s call” too often can conflict with your ambitions to empower your people.
Sean Seamer is the MediaCom CEO for Australia and New Zealand
