Immutable leadership principles

Leadership is often glorified and made to seem more complicated than it needs to be. We pretend leadership principles have changed with time, hence new books get written every year. However, since humans have not changed fundamentally over the past few centuries, it is difficult to believe how they should be led should evolve any faster. Leadership principles remain the same. We may just have chosen to ignore some in favor of others with mixed results.

Paradoxically, I believe the role of a leader is to make oneself redundant. This is undoubtedly a journey, and to get here, here are a few principles. This is not a long list. Leadership is not complicated. You do not need a magical 7 or 11 principles unless you want to justify a few hundred pages in a book on leadership!

1. Be a good human being: A leader and the team around are all a bunch of human beings. A good leader therefore has to be a good human being. A person others want to work with. Someone who invests in connecting with the team, individually where possible. This may be feasible at an individual level for a smaller team but a lot harder, if not impossible, for a larger organization. However, people look at how a leader interacts with his/her direct team or with individuals in the organization at every opportunity for signals that they are being led by a good human being. People watch how a CEO interacts with employees or customers. They look for a genuine interest and warmth in those interactions, even if they were for a fleeting second. You will find some executives who wish the security or the janitor on their way in or out every day; some may even know them by name. Jeff Weiner uses the phrase leading with compassion. You have to be a good human being (don’t need to be a Dalai Lama!) to lead with compassion. A word of caution: You are either a good human being or you aren’t. You cannot fake it - not for long. People see through insincere attempts to connect lot faster than a leader would give them credit for.
2. Inspire with the Why:?Simon Sinek has said it all. If you want to lead your team from good to great, you need to inspire them with the Why. Help them find their own Why. This ensures the entire organization is rallying behind you for the right reasons and will go the extra mile if required, time and time again, because they have found their purpose, either individually or collectively. You can win people over with charisma but such charisma is hard to come by, fortunately. Fortunately, because such adulation is often misguided and can lead to group think. The organization stops thinking on their own or even valuing their own expertise in favor of the leader. A sign of failure as a leader is when people around you change their opinions on a dime without questioning you. Similarly, you can achieve results with fear but it is at best short-lived.
3. Build trust and empower:?A leader often does not have all the questions, let alone the answers. Not even the big ones such as vision and strategy. It is a myth that a leader has to be the one to set the vision. A leader can at best build an environment where people with the required skill and knowledge feel empowered to fill in the blanks. A leader will then have to trust them to get the job done. Final decision might still remain with the leader, specially when there is no easy answer. Even in such circumstances, that final decision is based on an open discussion where people feel safe to challenge opinions, even if they are of the leader. An empowered team is also self-organizing. They proactively identify problems or opportunities, find creative ways to solve them and know when to elevate or escalate the discussion to the next level. The best a leader can do in such an environment is to be the one clicking the team picture with the trophy!

There are some exceptions that seemingly contradict these principles. Charismatic leaders like Steve Jobs are often associated with top-down leadership. However, this is part inaccurate, part fraught with risk. Inaccurate because Jobs is also credited with the epiphany that you should not hire smart people and tell them what to do. Risky because if a single person is making most of the major and minor decisions, such a decision maker better be right most of the time. Jobs was one such leader with a unique pulse on what people didn’t know they wanted, and with a unique combination of aesthetics combined with understanding of technology.

Some of these leaders are also known for being difficult people to work with, “jerks” even. Such an environment is not sustainable in the long run. No one wants to work the long hours with jerks, where their individual contributions don’t matter, where they get shouted at regularly, unless… unless the purpose is so strong that they are willing to disregard everything else. So, if you want to build such an environment, you’d better be working on something very inspiring that can truly (not the Valley kind) make this planet a better place.

If you assemble a talented team and create an environment where people around you are happy to work with you because, first and foremost, you are a good human being, because you have helped them find their purpose, because they can truly bring their whole selves to work, and because they know their opinions matter, your job as a leader is done. Maybe be even redundant!