What is great leadership? It’s not what you might think . . .
Author: Max Shkud

What is great leadership? It’s not what you might think . . .

Good leaders want their teams to exercise greater responsibility, ownership, and self-accountability, think critically about the whole business, and prioritize valued customer outcomes over internal metrics. They rightfully reason that strengthening these capabilities in their people would lead to greater alignment, focus, and overall performance.

Paradoxically, many of these same leaders unwittingly diminish these crucial capabilities in their people—by doing the thinking for them.

How does this happen? Well-intentioned, progressive leaders often try to provide more clarity to their people, inspire them, give them direction, remove obstacles for them, shield them from anxiety and stress, champion their careers, give advice, and provide answers to difficult questions. While these acts stem from goodwill, they inadvertently foster dependency and a learned helplessness rather than developing the necessary capacity within teams.

Now, picture a different approach. Great leaders place thinking challenges back where they belong—with their teams. In this way, they seize every opportunity to grow leadership capacity in everyone. Here, leadership becomes a thinking partnership. As a thinking partner and resource, the leader is not the source of answers. Instead, they guide individuals back to themselves as the source of ideation, decisions, implementation, and evaluation, enabling them to find their own wisdom and make discoveries without being burdened with the leader’s certainties, biases, and projections.

By remaining steadfastly committed to cultivating whole-business thinking, self-mastery, and customer-consciousness, great leaders build agency and self-determination in their teams. They foster growth by posing thought-provoking questions that encourage reflection, challenge automatic thinking and hidden assumptions, and use systemic frameworks that reveal the subject at hand from a more holistic and comprehensive perspective.

Great leaders build leadership capacity not only out of care for their people but also because they recognize that in a culture where everyone is a leader, the entire business and everyone within it thrives.

Sharon-Drew Morgen

Sharon-Drew is an original thinker and author of books on brain-change models for permanent behavior change and decision making

11 个月

A very simple axiom: if a stranger walks into a room where a group sits, if s/he notices 'the leader' their not doing their job. Good leaders serve and enable the 'followers' to be their best, and just 'hold the space'.

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Erica Lerro

Head of People Experience Programs - Amazon Entertainment I Executive Coach I Executive Talent Management

1 年

Wholeheartedly agree. And to make an even finer point, unintentional disempowerment by 'solving for' can prevent the building of leaders and delivering better/bigger results AND, can chip away confidence that causes career derailment and personal mental well being. Empowerment - crucial to professional and personal success.

Cristina Redko, PhD

Global Health | Community Development | Regenerative Development | Community Health & Well-Being | Cross-Functional Collaborator I Critical Thinking | Creativity | Mentoring I Adaptability I

1 年

Playing devil's advocate, I challenge Max to imagine a software development team with diverse experience, expertise, and cultural backgrounds. How can the "thinking partnership" leadership be successful when team members have differing skill levels, communication barriers, and difficulty establishing a shared vision and purpose? ??

Sunil Acharya

Leadership @Aurora

1 年

Well written Max Shkud! I draw so much from your insights and it helps me tremendously. Thank you.

Indeed! Surrounding yourself with thought partners, whether on your team or adjacent, allows vulnerability to be accepted and even encouraged. It fosters new ideas, unconstrained thinking and absolutely develops strong leaders.

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