Make Yourself a Great Leader - A Simple Model for Self-Improvement

Do you work with someone who is so obsessed with their reputation with senior leadership that they throw their team under the bus to make sure that they don’t look bad?

Do you work for a leader that you love but just can’t seem to get anything done because they are always fighting with their peers?

Have you ever had someone work for you whose team loved them but you can’t seem to get them to get the things that you need done?

Do you know if you are one of the three people described above?

All of us come into leadership roles with different strengths and weaknesses. Few of us ever holistically assess how we lead and how our gaps may be holding us back from achieving our goals. There are a myriad of different models for leadership which look in depth at attributes, both intrinsic and learned, that make people effective leaders. While I’ve found some usefulness in some of the models (some are better than others), I strongly prefer a much more simplified model as a starting point. My model has been developed throughout the course of my career - it will be very familiar to those who have worked with me over the years. I hope that you find it as valuable to your own leadership development as I have to mine.

It starts with 3 simple questions:

1. How is your leadership viewed by your superiors and those in senior leadership?
2. How is your leadership viewed by your peers?
3. How is your leadership viewed by your direct and extended team?

If any 1 of the 3 answers is substantially different from the other 2, you have a problem that needs addressing.

Let’s start by figuring out how you answer the 3 questions. The simplest answer is that you ask. It’s no secret that people are, in general, much more willing to give positive feedback than negative feedback, so you will have to use some different techniques to illicit feedback. 360 degree feedback processes that have a level of anonymity can help. If you don’t have access to such a process, you can ask the question in a non-threatening way - such as “tell me 3 things that you like about my leadership style and 3 things that you don’t like” - by explicitly asking for constructive feedback, you are easing the burden on someone who may be hesitant to offer such feedback. Or, you can ask people “what are some of the criticisms that other people on the team would have of me?” - this question enables people to depersonalize the feedback and makes the conversation more comfortable. However you do it, make sure that you have an HONEST picture of how people at various levels of the organization ACTUALLY view you, not how you’d like them to view you or think they should view you.  

Next, find yourself on the matrix below. Because matrices tend to be two-dimensional and this is 3-dimensional feedback, it’s a little clunky, but you will get the hang of it.

Let’s talk about each of these groups of people.

1. Lousy Leaders (low subordinate, low peer, low superior)

To borrow and paraphrase a Presidential candidate, I would call these “future former employees”. This is a group of people that fundamentally need to rethink their entire approach to business. They usually have little success anywhere and few friends at work. These failing leaders have a reinforcing negative cycle of receiving poor feedback on their performance and then lashing out at their team and their peers as a result. Prone to conspiracy theories about how the world is out to get them because of their greatness, these folks can be extremely frustrating.  

Advice: If you fit this category, take a step WAY back and rethink your whole approach.

2. Ineffective Socializers (low subordinate, high peer, low superior)

These are the people you work with around your level that you really like but seem to fail in every direction. They don’t have the respect of senior leaders or their teams. They are generally nice people and easy to befriend. They tend to take their failures out on their teams and rationalize that they would be a better leader if they got a better shake from management. Typical characteristics of this category are people who hang on at the same level in an organization for years, getting shuffled from role to role. They don’t quite fail badly enough to get fired, but never succeed enough to move up or grow. Sometimes these are people at the tail end of their career who have lost their passion for success, sometimes they are people who never learned how to relate to someone in a different position or a different stage of life from themselves.

Advice: If you fit this category, figure out what you want in your career. Maybe you’d make a better individual contributor than a leader. Maybe you really want to be a leader and need to spend some time thinking about different audiences and how to communicate with them. 

3. Body Bag Collectors (low subordinate, low peer, high superior)

These are the most-hated people in the office. The darlings of upper management, they are actively despised by both their peers and their teams. Members of this group are constantly throwing peers and team members under the bus to upper management to protect themselves, stealing other’s work and presenting it as their own and displaying a social preference for being around members of upper management versus “lesser people”. They extract petty revenge on undeserving subordinates that they consider insufficiently loyal and generally rule through fear rather than effectiveness. They may engage in unethical things like setting people up for failure or even terminating people on false premises, often actively stepping over ethical and even legal lines in a sad attempt to exert “power”. They tend to be obsessed with job titles and hard power and miss that they actually have very limited influence in an organization. Typical of this group are people who have actually achieved a measure of success in getting to at least middle management jobs, but often jump from company to company or business unit to business unit every few years, leaving a scorched Earth of resentment and distrust behind them.

Advice: If you fit this category, take a step back and ask yourself about your core values. Why are you trying to be a leader? And how sustainable do you want your success to be? Most of us are motivated at some level by self-interest, but your long-term success is going to be dictated by your reputation - and your reputation isn’t just your ability to dazzle senior leaders - you will eventually get seen through if you employ scorched Earth politics. Do you really want to have to find a new company to fool every couple of years?

4. Unsustainable Users (low subordinate, high peer, high superior)

A slightly more advanced version of Body Bag Collectors, these folks actually have good relationships with their peers and can be quite helpful to people at their level. Their teams just hate them. Unwilling to show humility or admit failure, they blame everything that goes wrong on their team. I once knew someone who I was trying to help with a complicated issue on her team - basically her team was repeatedly making failures administratively. “I don’t know how you can help. You can’t fix stupid.” She told me - never stopping to consider that better processes, training and quality control measures might be the solve rather than her team simply being “stupid”. These people typically came up through organizations with poor leadership role models and, while often well intended, are unable empathize with people who work for them. Typical of this group are, unfortunately, often people who advance pretty far in an organization, never learning the right lessons on how to lead a team, until their team becomes so large that employee disengagement causes them to fail.

Advice: If you fit this category, consider first whether leading people is actually a passion of yours. If it is, it’s worth learning to do it well. Get coaching and feedback from your team. Surround yourself with people who will challenge you courageously and encourage them to do so. If leading people isn’t a passion of yours, find a better career path for yourself where it isn’t required.

5. Ineffective Revolutionaries (high subordinate, low peer, low superior)

These are people whose team LOVES them. They take the time to coach their team, they publicly support them and they seem to truly care about the people that work for them. Their peers and their bosses, unfortunately, can’t stand them. Often these people talk very starkly in terms of “us versus them” to their teams and act as if they are the only line of defense for their team from the shortcomings of management. The problem is, since they don’t have very much influence in the organization, they struggle to be able to actually impact anything positively for their team. Too often these people’s careers end in an unpopular termination. Typical of this group are people in low-level line management positions who struggle to ever advance.

Advice: If you fit this category, ask yourself, am I really doing right by my team if I’m not able to influence the big decisions in a company or even help them get a job in another group for which they are qualified? If you truly love your team, you will want to do everything you can to help them succeed, and that includes you being able to support them effectively to your peers and block-and-tackle with senior leadership for them. It may SEEM like you are protecting your team from poor leaders, but you are really leading them down a path to ruin.

6. Likable Non-Influencers (high subordinate, high peer, low superior)

These are otherwise good leaders who simply don’t know how to talk to management. Their peers love them, their teams love them, but they have no influence in the room with top leaders, if they are even in the room with them. They will often vocally disagree with things senior leadership is doing, believe that they are speaking truth to power by fighting the top of the house. The problem is - because they don’t have political capital with the top of the organization, their ability to impact big change is extremely limited. Typical of this group are people who have achieved middle level management roles and consistently demonstrate good business results but who are never on succession lists for the next level roles.

Advice: if you fit this category, it can be frustrating. It FEELS like you are doing all the right things. Everyone who is close to your work believes in what you are doing, but you never get the recognition from senior management. But perception is reality in this case, if senior management isn’t seeing the value in you, it is your job to figure out how to show them the value you provide and also demonstrate that you can be loyal to what the company is trying to achieve. Power doesn’t exist without influence and without power, you can’t make things better for yourself, your peers or your team.

7. Overly Competitive Non-Collaborators (high subordinate, low peer, high superior)

These are often fast-advancing leaders who simultaneously are the darlings of senior leadership and have the unqualified commitment of their teams. There is just one problem - they struggle to get things done when it crosses department lines because they don’t have good relationships with their peers. These tend to be hyper-competitive people who view their peers as threats to their next role - they may talk down the performance of other departments or sneakily tell senior leadership or their teams about their peers’ perceived failings. They are most likely to split their lunch hour with members of their team or with upper management. They don’t realize that they aren’t succeeding to their full potential by not being effective collaborators and they are limiting their team's success by not being able to promote their team members into other groups. Typical of this group are people who have a lot of career success but hit roadblocks when they are promoted (and now have to manage people with whom they have poor relationships) or when one of their peers gets a role they wanted (and they now either work for or are jealous of a former peer competitor).  

Advice: If you fit this category, take a step back and realize that your current peer may be your future boss and that your current high performing employees may want to work for one of your peers someday. You will have the most influence in an organization if you can operate on ALL levels and sometimes your peers have more ability to influence your success or a key decision than your bosses or your team will. Competition is important, but there is a time and a place for it and the office shouldn't become Lord of the Flies.

8. Great Leaders

The best of the best. Everyone loves them at all levels of the organization. They are just as comfortable in a room full of clerical workers or in a room full of executives and they seem just as genuinely themselves in both rooms. Typical of this group (which is regrettably small) is incredible career success, massive loyalty at all levels of an organization and genuine emotional connection with all sorts of people at all different places in their career.

Advice: If you’ve figure out how to be a Great Leader, keep doing what you are doing. But constantly monitor and make sure you don’t fall into one of the other groups. Also, realize that on a RELATIVE basis, you are probably weaker in your relationships with 1 of the 3 groups than the other 2, so work on those relationships.

Most of us don’t fall cleanly into one bucket, we have a range of strengths and weaknesses and share characteristics from multiple categories here. If you are reading this article and taking the time to think about it, you likely aspire to be a great leader, which is a fantastic starting point - not everyone cares enough to work on it. Assessing your relative strengths and weaknesses and focusing your developmental energy on improving your interactions with the group with which they are presently weakest will always benefit you, whether it is subordinates, peers or superiors. You can think of it as an ongoing game of improving whack-a-mole, you will always have a group that you are weakest with and by always working to up your game with that group, you will continuously make yourself better.

As for myself, early in my career I was likely in category 4. I related well to people on my team that had similar ambitions to mine, but did not connect well with team members who had very different goals from me. I had to rethink how I approached people, understood their needs and responded. The bulk of my career, however, I believe I spent in category 7. I am a hyper competitive person and I think that had a tendency to spill over and diminish the effectiveness of my peer relationships. It’s an area I had to spend a considerable amount of time and put a lot of thought into how to improve. Some of the adjustments were simple - find several times a week to publicly praise a peer for doing something good, making sure I dedicated a day or two a week of my lunches to socializing with peers, etc., some were more difficult (it is REALLY hard to be genuinely gracious when someone gets a promotion that you wanted, for instance). While I certainly don’t think all of this made me the perfect leader, just thinking about these issues, asking people the questions and building real plans to get better on my weaker points has helped me immeasurably at becoming better.

Learning leadership skills really isn’t that different from learning a technical skill set. If you wanted to figure out how to get better at Microsoft Excel, you’d like take some sort of assessment of your current skills, understand where your gaps are and then build development plans with concrete actions to improve the areas where you weren’t already proficient. Leadership development needn’t be any different.

So, to summarize:

1. Find an effective, non-intrusive way to get feedback from subordinates, peers and superiors on your leadership effectiveness
2. Understand both on an absolute and on a relative basis how each of those groups rank you and where you fall on the matrix above
3. Build concrete development plans to address the group with whom you are the weakest.

Nobody should want to be a body bag collector - if you are abusing people more junior to you to achieve your goals, you are not only not a very good person, you will not succeed over the long run. Likewise, nobody should want to be likable non-influencer - it may feel better to be on the side of the “little guy”, but if you don’t have any organizational influence to actually help the “little guy”, you aren’t doing right by him or her.

In Lin Manuel Miranda’s award winning musical Hamilton, there is actually a fantastic case study in evolving through various leadership styles. Hamilton is initially an Ineffective Revolutionary, having no time for either authority or peers. As George Washington teaches him some tough lessons throughout the war, Hamilton eventually grows in how he manages upward and becomes a Competitive Non-Collaborator. He ultimately realizes that he needs some of his peers too and cuts a deal with rivals Jefferson and Madison to relocate the capitol to Washington DC in exchange for support for his Treasury plan, showing a glimpse of Great Leadership. Ultimately, however, it is that peer competition that comes back to bite him as he is slain by Aaron Burr in a duel. Even founding fathers needed leadership development and even some of them struggled!

I wish you the best of luck on your own leadership growth….and I certainly hope it does not end in a fatal duel. Have a great day.