Continuing the dissection thread of last week, that is, “words we throw around a lot,” casually drop into conversations, and don’t give a lot of thought to what they actually mean, let’s take on “leadership,” shall we?
How many of you have read The 7 Habits by Stephen Covey, or Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg or any of the other, literally, thousands of offerings on leadership you can find with a quick Google search? With certainly no intention of reinventing any wheels, we thought we’d look at leadership through a FIG lens, read: a human lens. Are you with us?
As you might expect, FIG’s approach to teasing apart the hominid components of leadership begins, as always, with you; Always you first: why do you want to be in leadership? What are YOUR goals professionally? What do you want to DO with the position? What are your objectives? What are your specific plans to achieve them? How will you coordinate your team and their individual skills and expertise? And then the broader questions: why are you addressing yourself to the challenge (make no mistake, it is a challenge, involving a ton of extra work if you want to do it well, particularly on the front end: setting clear expectations etc.)? Is your “why:”for the good of your organization? For yourself and own growth professionally? A personal/professional challenge? To develop and teach those in your charge? To advance a common narrative and/or direction? To leave the position, organization and team better than when you found them?
OR
Is your goal simply checking a box in the climb to ‘success’? Getting noticed? Making more money? Resume building for the title? None of which, honestly, are good reasons for entering leadership, in our humble opinion. There are certainly other ways to accomplish these goals and objectives without involving others - others who are relying on you to learn, develop professionally and grow. By all means, “you do you,” but to hold yourself out as a leader (a person who has authority or influence with others in their charge), probably isn’t a well suited aspiration to manage and lead others, just sayin’.
I recently had an interaction with a client who is in her 30’s, clearly intelligent with at least 7 years of experience in her field. She had left her previous job because - paraphrasing - she hadn’t been recognized as the leader she thought she could be by her then current leadership. She had expected for her then current leadership to see that she was ready to move up, recognize her potential and promote her. They didn’t. She sought employment elsewhere.
Right. A lot to unpack here: a lot of assumptions, a lot of miscommunication, a TON of misunderstanding and some fairly questionable leadership and expectations. On both sides, neither of which actually asked the other about any of it.
This example is by no means unique. As you also might expect from FIG, allowing yourself the time to actually consider your goals, reflect on how you want to achieve them, how the pieces of the puzzle fit together tactically. Taking the time to speak with your team members, learning their strengths and what they indeed wish to achieve and accomplish? How do their unique contributions play a part in your vision and stated objectives? Where are the inherent strengths of your team, and where are there opportunities for you to help them evolve, advance and develop? How can you add value to their journeys and evolution as professionals?
Weighty questions, indeed, and all are questions we as leaders ought to be thinking about and considering before taking on the daunting and exhilarating task of leadership, and it IS a challenge: one with multiple moving parts, personalities, skills and differing perspectives.
FIG’s Marketing Manager, Sarah, (yes, I asked for permission to tell this story) is expanding her business (she has other clients besides FIG and her client base is growing) and has hired her first staff member (her first experience with leadership!). She was anxious about it and, as some of us tend to do, researched sample job descriptions and employment agreements online and adapted and modified the examples to fit her work. Yes, she got in the weeds of legalese:”‘very important” sounding and somewhat scary language (“employee shall be responsible for”….”if he fails to accomplish - whatever it is - the company reserves the right to discipline up to and including termination” etc.), which she asked me to review before sending to her new hire and I did. My response was fairly simple: What do you want him to DO? What do you want to teach him? How do you want to frame the way YOU approach business that is so different from that of your counterparts in the industry? How do you see your business 6 months from now? 3 years? 10 years? How do you see him being a part of and sharing in that evolution? To her immense credit, she “round filed” her original online research, had a conversation with me as a trusted advisor and mentor, fleshed out her thoughts, ideas and intentions, came up with a document that faithfully described exactly how she saw the position and its role in her company’s evolution and sent the revisions off to her new employee. He signed it secure and comfortable in his job description and able to onboard seamlessly. He’s doing a brilliant job by the way……
Vision, setting clear expectations, setting examples and modeling them (none of this “do as I say, and not as I do” nonsense!), taking the time to know and understand your team, practicing empathy, collaboration, strategy, planning, and establishing a clear plan with enough flexibility to be nimble enough to change course when warranted, and of course, adopting a genuine interest in adopting team members’ input - but only after clearly defining YOUR goals and intentions to get there.
Leadership is a responsibility to develop, expand, cultivate, nurture, create an intentional clear mission, insisting on a collective effort that requires progressive movement, and not simply a mandate.