12 Leadership Truths I Learned the Hard Way So You Don't Have To

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THEY WORK… WHETHER YOU BELIEVE THEM OR NOT!

I try as much as possible to make sure that every episode of No Bullsh!t Leadership is a valuable reference source for leaders at every level.

Some episodes are super practical. They home in on a specific facet of leadership that might be difficult, and they provide tools and strategies for how to deal with it.

Other episodes are a little more philosophical.

In the past, I've covered super practical topics like Ep.275: When Should You Let Someone Go? And on the other extreme, topics like Ep.229: Confidence, Arrogance and Self-Doubt.

Hopefully you're finding a really good blend of detailed, practical tools, and the higher level principles that help you guide your mental, emotional and psychological responses to the hard work of leadership.

This one clearly belongs in the second category. I cover 12 things that you'll instinctively resist on your leadership journey. Now of course, not all of you will resist all of them obviously – but I suspect there will be at least a few of these principles that you'll instinctively try to avoid or ignore.

There's no doubt in my mind that these principles are rock solid. They're like gravity – they operate the same way on all of us, whether we believe in them or not, and they'll ultimately have a huge bearing on how successful you are as a leader.

This newsletter is pretty simple: I outline each of the 12 hard leadership truths one by one. I've also created a free PDF downloadable, so that you can keep a cheat sheet handy.

TRUTH #1: ACTIVITY IS IRRELEVANT

Creating value is all that matters.

We get ourselves so caught up in activity, and we love to busy ourselves with the things that we've mastered, regardless of whether or not they deliver the highest value outcomes.

The people who work for you find comfort and security in being able to fill their days, and they’re going to gravitate towards the things that are most comfortable.

Leadership work – I'm talking about real leadership work – is tough, so there are always other things that you can busy yourself with, too.

As a leader, value comes from leveraging the talent of the people in your team… from giving them clarity and focusing them on the right work, and then holding them to account for delivering it. But it's easy to let people follow the path of least resistance, because to do otherwise might very well land you in a conflict situation.

The quest for value must be a lifelong passion that you pursue with single-minded focus. Otherwise, you'll have really good people working super productively on all the wrong things.

TRUTH #2: NOT EVERYONE IS GOING TO LIKE YOU

You have an inbuilt safety mechanism that's working to protect you from conflict. We are programmed, through evolution, to seek affiliation and acceptance.

Almost everything you do as a leader has the potential for conflict. And if you are leading well, conflict just comes with a territory.

Whether you're trying to stretch a team member's performance or whether you are disagreeing with your boss, or negotiating a supplier agreement, your leadership career will be so much happier and so much more fulfilling if you learn to handle conflict confidently and comfortably.

It takes conscious, consistent, disciplined effort to become comfortable in conflict. So the best advice I can give you is – get over it and get on with it.

TRUTH #3: PRIORITIZING SPEED OVER ACCURACY IMPROVES EVERY DECISION

Your decisions don't have to take a long time. Slow decision-making can be attributed to three underlying causes:

1. Fear of getting it wrong;
2. Seeking the comfort of consensus; and
3. A lack of diligence between decision-making steps.

You need a robust process to make sure your decisions are sound.

Understanding the risk associated with any decision is going to help you to work out how much is enough: how much data is enough; how much consultation is enough; how much analysis is enough.

You need to be really clear on the value trade-offs between making a decision now, and delaying it. In general, we tend to greatly overestimate the risk of moving forward, and totally underestimate the risk that comes from staying where we are.

TRUTH #4: THE HIGHER YOU GO, THE LESS LIKELY YOUR DECISIONS WILL RECEIVE UNANIMOUS APPROVAL

While we're talking about decision making, this is a really big one. It combines the importance of both getting over the need to be liked, and embracing the need for speed.

Consensus is harder and harder to achieve at higher levels, so the process takes longer, and you are more likely to reach an impasse.

Strong single point accountability is critical if you want your decision-making process to operate effectively. Otherwise, it just drives you to the lowest common denominator. You end up with a decision that everyone can live with but no one is happy with – and you'll really struggle to find anyone who thinks that it's the best decision that could have been made.

TRUTH #5: FEEDBACK IS A GIFT: GIVE AND RECEIVE THAT GIFT LIBERALLY

There seems to be growing hesitation about giving feedback. Performance management systems are out of vogue, and there's a growing school of thought that people are happier and more productive when they're given only positive feedback.

I could not disagree more with this perspective. To me, feedback is an essential part of good leadership. Letting people know whether or not they're meeting your expectations – the standard you're trying to set for them – is all important.

Killing people with kindness makes them weak and ineffective. Everyone knows instinctively whether or not they are performing, so telling them something they know deep down isn't true only serves to damage the trust you have with them. People always know.

So, whether or not your organization embraces performance management systems is sort of irrelevant.

Your objective, if you want to be a good leader, should be to give people constant micro feedback: the sort of feedback that helps them to calibrate where they truly are, gives them clarity around your expectations, and makes them feel secure in knowing where they are.

If you do this, performance management isn't daunting. There are no surprises, because you've already had all the individual conversations you need to address your people's performance.

TRUTH #6: THE QUALITY OF YOUR TEAM IS THE GREATEST PREDICTOR OF YOUR PERSONAL SUCCESS

The sooner you learn to leverage the talent in your team, the faster you're going to reach the point where your performance reaches your potential.

Too many leaders rely on their own individual brilliance, and they eventually hit a ceiling. They can't do everything and they get burnt out. Learning early to build capability in your team, to stretch every individual to whatever peak performance lies within them, and focusing them on the right things is going to speed your ability to grow and move up.

The better you get at building team capability, the sooner you're going to be promoted to a bigger role.

TRUTH #7: HIGH-PERFORMING TEAMS ARE TOUGH TO BUILD AND EVEN TOUGHER TO RUN

Lots of leaders kid themselves that they have a high performing team. If this is you, I just want you to ask yourself one question: by what measure?

Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls in the 1990s was a high-performing team: 6 NBA championships in an 8-year span…

The New England Patriots from 2001 to 2018 was a high-performing team: 9 Super Bowl appearances and 6 titles in an 18-year span…

Steve Waugh's Australian Cricket Team was a high-performing team: a record 15 consecutive Test match wins, and the 1999 World Cup.

Of course, not every team has to reach these heights to be considered a high-performing team. The point I'm making though is, Where are you setting the bar for your team? What's your yardstick?

Teams that have little or no conflict are rarely high performing. High-performing teams have strong, capable, driven individuals who are fanatical about achieving high performance.

I had the privilege of leading one of these during my executive career – maybe two at a pinch – and that was no walk in the park.

Managing the conflict so that it remains constructive, and focused on shared excellence rather than individual point scoring, can be really difficult. It takes a really strong leader to manage a high-performing team.

TRUTH #8: EMPATHY ISN’T OPTIONAL (AND LEADERS CAN ALWAYS USE MORE OF IT)!

Empathy is not sympathy though. Empathy is about understanding. It's your ability to see the world through someone else's eyes, to walk a mile in their shoes.

I firmly believe that, the more empathy you have, the better you will be as a leader.

Sympathy, on the other hand, is disastrous. If you feel sympathy for someone, you're likely to make concessions for them. You'll allow them to behave or perform in a substandard fashion, and this is bad for everyone, including the individual involved.

Make sure you know the difference between empathy and sympathy, and balance your empathy with strong leadership. This means that you understand and connect with people in a very compassionate and human way, but you don't allow it to cloud your judgment.

TRUTH #9: PERFECTIONISM WILL FREEZE YOUR TEAM AND DESTROY VALUE

Excellence over perfection, every single time. Perfectionism is driven by fear. People freeze because they're afraid to get something wrong, and because of that, everything grinds to a halt.

In the quest to take something beyond the Pareto principle sweet spot, where 80% of the value comes from 20% of the effort, time and energy are wasted, and value is destroyed.

You reach the point of diminishing returns way faster than you expect. Excellence on the other hand creates momentum. You can't fail fast… you can't be agile… you can't mimic any other business cliché if you are a perfectionist.

Your decisions don't have to be perfect, they have to be roughly right.

Think about how the very best performers view perfection. In the world of Major League Baseball, it's hard for a batter to hit the ball when it's coming at them at 98mph. Every batter knows when he steps to the plate that the odds are stacked against him making it to first base.

In fact, as a professional baseball player, if you could manage to get to first base once in every three attempts at bat, it would put you in the top 30 players of all time. Getting on base 2 times out of 7 is excellence. Getting on base 1 in 3 times is nothing short of freakish.

TRUTH #10: ACCOUNTABILITY IS EVERYTHING

One head to pat, one ass to kick (and they both belong to the same person).

Shared accountability is no accountability. It invariably creates gaps and overlaps. Nothing – I mean this – nothing will do more to improve your team's execution capability than implementing strong single-point accountability.

Everyone knows who's cooking the chook; decision rights are crystal clear; issues all flow to the right point; and you've got none of the old, "Oh Marty, I'm sorry, I thought someone else was doing that."

It creates a completely different energy and a different cadence for your people. If you can be strong enough to assign those accountabilities, give your people autonomy and empowerment, and then hold them to account for their performance, the results your team produces will be night and day different.

TRUTH #11: IF YOU MAINTAIN GRACE UNDER PRESSURE, YOUR TEAM WILL BE CALMER

Being relaxed and composed in the face of extreme pressure is the hallmark of great leaders, and it's contagious – your team will become calmer as well.

When you see a leader who genuinely has this nailed, they have what I call grace under pressure. Their calmness on the outside simply reflects what's going on on the inside. They have faith in their people and the ability of their team to handle whatever comes their way.

They're confident and they're diligent, but they're also unflappable. This gives the team permission to not panic. They don't buy into the drama but, instead, they take their lead from you.

It lets everyone work with a sense of urgency – without the drama and thrashing about that you often see when teams fall into a crisis.

TRUTH #12: BUSINESS IS SERIOUS, BUT YOU SHOULDN’T TAKE YOURSELF TOO SERIOUSLY

An old mentor of mine once said to me, "Marty, we're only in business for two reasons: to make money and to have fun." We sometimes forget about the fun part of business.

Now, let's face it, winning is fun, I don't care who you are!

But you also need the ability to laugh at yourself. If you become overly infatuated with your own self-importance, you run the risk of believing your own bullsh!t. So, keep it light and keep it fun… and then go and smack the ball out of the park!

EASY TO SAY, HARD TO DO!

These 12 truths are sometimes difficult to sign up to:

• Some come with additional work;
• Some come with personal risk;
• Some come with the need to grow your self-awareness; and
• Some come with the uncomfortable reality of having to challenge your long-held worldview.

But I can promise you that if you manage to adopt these principles, your leadership performance will skyrocket – and that’s why you read my newsletters in the first place, right?!

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The above article is from Episode 311 of the No Bullsh!t Leadership podcast. Each week, I share the secrets of high performance leadership; the career accelerators that you can’t learn in business school, and your boss is unlikely to share with you. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or on your favorite podcast player.