Top 3 things I expect from a good leader

Disclaimer: These are my personal opinions.

• That means it has heavy bias from my own experiences.
• That also means by no means this should be considered as either necessary conditions, or sufficient conditions. This is by definition an imperfect list.

Throughout my career, I've observed many good leaders and bad leaders. As I became a leader, I've also set expectations on myself. The following is what I generally assess / differentiate a good leader.

#1. Unblock teams

This is my absolute #1 criteria for a good leader. In my mind, a leader's top #1 job is to unblock their team.

You might say, so that means when team is blocked and asks for help, the leader should provide the help - but isn't this obvious and doesn't everyone do that, right? What's so special about this?

Yes, when the team is aware of them being blocked, they ask for help, and a good leader should help the team. That's indeed obvious. But that's only level 1.

The nuance comes in when the leader themselves don't know how to unblock the team. This is where you'll see drastically different results among different leaders.

• A good leader will relentlessly try different approaches, until the team is unblocked. They get in the trench with the team to work through the issues and eventually move forward.
• A not-so-good leader will make attempts, and silently drop the issue if the first few attempts didn't work. They let the team struggle. (They don't feel good about this either - not intentional, but the outcome is still that the team struggles.)

In other words, helping unblock teams even if the leader themselves don't know how to, that's level 2.

Level 3, and the ultimate level, is when the leader helps the team before the team is even aware they are or will soon be blocked. A leader at this level of unblocking teams, often get no credit from team, because team isn't even aware. Only after a long period of time, team just feels things always go smoothly here.

If you have that feeling in your current team that things always go smoothly, congrats, likely you have a leader at this level somewhere in your reporting chain. Cherish it.

#2. Make HARD decisions, when needed

Leaders are meant to be making decisions. However a good leader first delegates decision making. Any decision that can be delegated down should be delegated down.

What leaders need to do is to make decisions when the tradeoff is not obvious, and the team doesn't feel comfortable making the decision. If we need to trade off X with Y, but we have no idea how to compare the relative importance between X and Y, how do you make that decision? This is where leadership is needed. A good leader either identifies a framing that allows that comparison, or brings other data / insights to help estimate the relative importance, or just makes a gut feeling bet (and takes accountability for it). These determine the complexity level of a decision.

Another key angle from this is a good leader needs to properly assess when this isn't their decision. This again has 2 sides:

• Don't delegate up if it should be decision at their level.
• Delegate up when it's "above their pay grade".

Sometimes, deciding on which level should make a decision is itself a hard decision. :)

#3. Build the right culture

There's a saying, "culture is determined by the worst behavior that's tolerated". Most people resonate with this statement, but in real life it's much more challenging to handle it than to observe it.

When a good leader observes a bad behavior, they know if they tolerate this, this sets the bad culture. But how do they "not tolerate" it in the right way?

• How do they know their judgment on the "badness" is correct? They show empathy to understand what led to the behavior (if it's indeed a bad behavior).
• If it's confirmed as a bad behavior, do they call it out in the public? Or in private?
• If in public, how would others react to it?If in private, how would others learn the lesson and not repeat?
• Do they talk to the person who showed bad behavior directly? Do they talk to their manager? If yes, do they go manager first, or manager later, or together?

There are no one-size-fits-all answers to these questions. These are all case-by-case. A good leader learns from experiences (and mistakes in these experiences) what likely will lead to a good outcome, and even that, there's no guarantee they will get it right every time.

Summary

I'll stop at these top 3 things. Attributes from a good leader run much longer. But to summarize them all, my one-sentence summary is "a good leader adds value".

But again, what is considered "value add" is probably a billion dollar question by itself too. :)