Leading Fearlessly

Leadership is not a title or an event, it’s a journey. In its truest sense, it cannot be conferred or usurped, but earned. It’s not just about showing initiative and putting your hand up first. True leadership is a privilege gifted by the followers, who may not just be your direct reports. Nor is Leadership defined by the size of the team that you lead directly.

One of the toughest roles I had in my career was leading a franchise partner, as an individual contributor. The partner was an independent business with over 500 employees. And later on in my career, with even bigger stakes, my direct reports were far fewer than I had in some of my early-career roles. If so, our gravity as a leader depends on the complexity of the situation and the extent and the number of lives our decisions influence.

Perhaps the best definition of leadership comes from Randall Stutman*, who has studied hundreds of leaders. He defines the essence of Leadership as the ‘Courage to make a difference to people and situations’ (or business).

I really like the use of the word ‘Courage’ in this definition. Most admired leaders appear to be fearless. Though no one is without fear, they are able to overcome fears and doubts powered by the Optimism, in the environment they create around them. There’s no shortcut for this, it is a perpetual WIP. In my two decades long career, I was often humbled by the love and affection my teammates showed me. Looking back, I was able to distil the essence of what has worked for me to these 6 principles. 

• Growing my circle of Trust
• Inspiring a bold, transformative Purpose
• Constant learning & Deep Domain Expertise
• Leveraging the best of Diversity
• Mastering the Art of Decision Making
• Persevering with Agility

I will discuss these and the real-life challenges I faced when applying these principles, in my follow up articles. These principles are not without overlaps and clear interlinkages.

For example, Leveraging Diversity has great influence on the Art of Decision Making. And Art of Decision Making has a great influence on growing your Circle of Trust. Without reasonable Depth in Domain Expertise and Strategic Thinking, you will not be able to inspire a Bold and Transformative Purpose for your team. And without a Bold Purpose, there won’t be much that drives you to Persevere. Finally, only a Constantly Learning Leader will be fearless enough, without which you cannot be Agile.

One of the habits I have developed is to keep a decision journal, capturing the critical situations we faced, the choices we had, the decisions we made and the progress we achieved. This continuous log helps me constantly assess myself against these principles. Our effectiveness in applying these or any such principles, totally depends on one of the most essential traits as a leader – Self Awareness. 

I firmly believe that a commitment to be constantly Self-aware, without being judgmental is the biggest Leadership investment one can make.

With practice we can develop a reasonable level of ‘meta-cognition’, ‘being present and interested’ but as a non-responsive witness to our own moods, feelings, reactions and thoughts; and extending that neutral mode to observe the moods changes our interactions induce in people. Knowing ourselves and having a fair assessment of how we change the world around us, is a great starting point towards calibrating our efforts on the 6 principles discussed earlier. There are a couple of things we could do.

One is to probably get an 'OCEAN' personality trait assessment done. This gives your personality across the 5 traits – Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. For example, if you are low on Agreeableness and low on Extroversion, you may need to work harder on growing your ‘Circle of Trust’.

Another, once you start practicing the 6 principles or any such set of principles you are comfortable with, to do a self-assessment on a scale, to arrive at your own Leadership score. Being aware of where you stand is the first step towards growing yourself to be a fearless leader.

*Learn more from Randall Stutman in this awesome podcast 'The Knowledge Project' by Shane Parrish.