The 5Cs of Leadership

Myriads have already been said, written and debated about good leadership. How it should be. How it should not be. How corporates do it. How startups do it. How leaders believe it's done right and how the supposed to be-followers really perceive it.

This is my very own resume of what I believe to be good leadership and what I have tried to live in my teams at BCG Digital Ventures – after being an insecure leader at the start of my journey, who didn't provide the required room and trust to my stellar team mates. Well, we all start somewhere...

I have no leadership style "label" for my approach, I don't want to call it people-centric, servant or whatever. It is simply the 5Cs that worked for me and for the people who worked with me over the years. In the end, these are the 5 ingredients that yielded clear, measurable results in terms of a) task-oriented delivery in time and quality, even in the most challenging environments, and b) people-oriented trust, reliance and strong backing, when times got tough. It is the 5Cs of: Compassion, clarity, candor, conviction and congruence.

C1: Compassion

Before you might sigh: Showing compassion has nothing to do with making friendly overtures or cuddling around. Compassion is a human behaviour that worships the connection to another human being. Call it empathy. No matter how you want to describe the bond that you make to another human being, let that connection be a deep, trustworthy and relevant one. One that you can rely on even when you get into deep troubles with your project, product or venture. A relationship that allows meaningful conversations about your counterpart's thoughts, concerns, aspirations, and growth wishes – and the fact that right now work might not be your counterpart's top priority in life. Try to overcome the state of superficial 1:1 meetings that end up saying: "How are you? Good. Is anything up? No, not really. Ok, let's skip this meeting." To my experience, such a deep relationship is only possible, if you have a genuine interest in people and if you make the effort of truly listening to who they are and what they care about in life.

C2: Clarity

If you want to drive people crazy or create chaos big time in your teams, don't prioritise what is most important on the list, who owns a topic, which meetings are relevant, etc. You will from one day to the other have a situation where everyone believes their stuff is most relevant – or even worse: irrelevant –, your team will fight for resources, and team members (and you) will have endless meetings to debate things without an outcome, etc. The job of a leader is to create clarity and take – sometimes unpleasant – decisions. Leading others means juggling trade-offs all day long, making some people angry and others happy. But that is what it is about. To get everyone run into the same direction, clarity is key. Clear goals, clear messaging. Clear coordination, prioritisation and division of responsibilities. Clear and outspoken expectations – and no mixed, sugarcoated messages. Which brings me to the next C: Candor.

C3: Candor

Sometimes, we as leaders need to tell the ugly truth. That the team failed. That management cut budget. That the expected resources won't come. That the customer did not sign the contract after months of negotiations. That we need to let people go. The truth is sometimes hard to convey – you as leader know that it will affect your people, in a negative way at times. Sometimes it will also affect yourself or your relationships, e.g. when you have to convey a nasty truth to your own boss. But it doesn't help. It needs to be done. I believe, we as leaders have an obligation for honesty towards the things that are relevant for the people who work with us. This can be as small as providing direct, open feedback to your colleague after a presentation. Or as big as reporting a big fail to your boss or team. Talking teams. There are things your team does not need to know. As leaders, let us find a good balance between what we know (often a lot of weird things) and what is relevant and necessary to convey to the team. Not every battle needs to be passed on. Not every raging storm needs to hit your team. As leaders, we do have a protective function against our team members by default; but in moments where candor is required, we should speak up.

C4: Conviction

I believe that we as leaders should do our work with conviction, having a passion for what we do and how we do it, and standing up for our opinions. We have an obligation to voice our thoughts and to show dedication and tenacity walking with our teams towards the goal. If we are not passionate about where we are going, how can we expect others to be passionate about their jobs? We are the big multipliers in organisations – we talk to so many people all day long, we present in front of 10s, 100s, 1000s of people – if we don't spark the passion, if we don't show that we care and burn for something – who should follow us and why? I do believe we are role models by default – if we want to or not. We should exemplify the desired behaviours that we expect from our teams. And if behaviour change is required, we should be the first ones to walk the new way.

C5: Congruence

Achieving congruence and consistency from within is a life-long personal journey. It is a bumpy way to figure out yourself – who you are, who you are not, why you are like this and not like that. A way that often results in the question: Am I wrong or the others? It is the toughest of all jobs to do the work in order to dissolve inner conflicts that have been built up over decades. And to discover all the limiting believes in ourselves or the dysfunctional patterns that are often there for a good (protective) reason! But it is the first of all steps. If we have found some ground in ourselves, some authenticity in who we really are, we can emit this self image to the outside world. And if this inner image and the outer image blend into each other one day, we have achieved a high level of congruence and can act with full integrity. And people will naturally follow. I have started to walk this way – I would lie if I said that I am already there. But it is astonishing to see what happens if you allow yourself to be yourself and if you show that with radical candor (of course) also to others.

Let me know what you think about the 5Cs. Have they been relevant in your leadership experience? Is it other factors that constitute successful leadership for you? I am thrilled to hear your opinion.