7 ideas to take your leadership to the next level

Having been a leadership development consultant and coach for over 25 years I have born witness to my share of both effective and ineffective leadership styles. Some leaders will champion their people, others will espouse old world management models and drown you in cliches. I’ve heard phrases like ‘my customers come first’ and ‘I’m not here to be your friend’ but I’ve also heard questions like ‘how can I help’ and ‘what do you need from me’. At its heart leadership is a choice and people’s motivations for aspiring to leadership roles are dramatically divergent. Some do it for personal growth, some for power and prestige and, every so often, you encounter those who do it because they truly want to help people.

Whatever your reasons, once you attain your goals and you step into your first leadership role there is one very important thing you should know – you now have a deep and abiding responsibility to those for whose care you have been charged – and it is a responsibility you should never take lightly.

Warren Bennis started writing about corporate leadership in the 1950s. If Peter Drucker was the man who invented management then Bennis is the one who invented leadership. Let’s consider that for a moment, the notion of management and leadership was invented. This idea didn’t sprout up from nature. It didn’t evolve naturally. It was invented as a concept, a vision for the future of all organisations globally, big or small, public or private. Bennis and Drucker both wrote extensively about management and leadership, always echoing a core theme: - ‘managers are people who do things right while leaders are people who do the right thing’. But, if this was a concept presented to the world in the 1950s, why is it so many leaders still seem to do it so badly? I’ve heard many people talk about what a great leader looks like and I’ve likewise heard stories from people at all organisational levels recounting situations where they’ve dealt with truly great leaders. But for all that, I’m perplexed that so many people will still complain about how their managers don’t get them or how the leadership in the organisation tells them they should be more creative amid processes that smother individuality and flexibility, the cornerstones of creativity. This narrative seems to repeat itself everywhere: - the leadership of the organisation is disconnected and they don’t understand what it’s really like at the coal face.

So, what’s to be done?  Well - perhaps we should be shifting our perspective. If leadership can be invented, then it can also be re-invented. Back in the 1950s, before Bennis’s introduction of the leadership concept, management models were simple and authoritarian. A person would, for example, gain an entry level position at an organisation. Following a period of service in that role they generally got a promotion to a higher role. In other words, they did their time and got a promotion, then did their time again and got another promotion and so on. This kind of reward-for-service practice tended to create traditional models of management. The person at the top of the organisation would commonly fit several managerial stereotypes:

• They were primarily male.

• They were older than everybody else.

• They had been with the organisation longer than everybody else.

• They knew more about the company than everybody else by virtue of having worked all the way through it.

The result? A management structure where orders came from the top and those orders were carried out without question. Fast forward to the late 1990s and early 2000s and management models are very different. To begin with, they are now called leadership models. These models of leadership were better placed to deal with the diverse generational factors impacting the corporate climate at the time, but they were impeded – to a point – by the egocentric leader who had grown up in the shadow of managers who doled out criticism without praise. Now, I don’t mean to suggest for a minute that all leaders at the time were bad leaders, but I do think many of them were moving up through these organisations with old school managers as their role models. Yes, they tried to put their individual stamp on leadership but too many of them learned too late that they were equipped with the skills to manage the organisations of the past, not to lead the organisations of the future.

During this time a focus on efficiencies led to a period of cost cutting and gave rise to the spreadsheet manager. Somewhere along the way there was a shift in focus. Managers moved away from concentrating on people and directed all their energies to the bottom line, a doctrine that remains in many organisations to this day. I’m not disputing the purpose of business, in most cases, is to make money but is trying to push your staff to do more and more with less and less really the best way to achieve that? What are efficiencies really? In a technical sense, it can be defined as an organisations ability to achieve its goals while minimising the expenditure of resources. But the need to minimise shouldn’t be interpreted as unlimited reduction of resources. So, efficiencies should be defined as the organisations ability to achieve its goals utilising the applicable expenditure of resources. Amid this efficiency drive I’ve seen many companies, big and small, telling their people they need to be passionate about their organisation, but it isn’t enough to just tell people they need to be passionate. These same companies bury their people in processes and rules that show little respect for them as adults leading to an overall drop in engagement levels. In fact, the Gallop State of the Global Workforce survey of 2024 shows only 25% of the Australian workforce is engaged, with 75% being either not engaged or actively disengaged. This, coupled with an abrasive leadership style driven by a singular focus on the bottom line, has seen a global decrease in organisational productivity and, since the great global pivot to working from home during the pandemic, we have also experienced the onset of quiet quitting and bare minimum Mondays. Christine Porath, tenured professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, advocates the benefits of respecting people in the workplace. Porath and Christine Pearson conducted a study that highlighted the impacts of uncivil behaviour in the workplace. Participants in the study were exposed to various forms of uncivil behaviour, the results of which showed:

• 66% of employees cut back their work efforts.

• 80% of employees lost valuable time at work worrying about the interaction.

• 12% of employees left their job.

The results here are clear – it is requisite for leaders to direct a greater focus on treating people like adults and working with them to achieve common goals. As Patty McCord, former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix says, “The job of management isn’t to control people, it’s to build great teams”. But what about the leadership models of today. Younger generations, particularly Millennials, are entering the workforce in huge numbers and with a set of challenges no other generation has faced, at least not to this level. It has been said millennials have limited social skills coupled with an inflated sense of entitlement and that this is a dangerous combination of flaws in a generation struggling to find their place within the corporate system. However, Alec Levenson, in the journal of Business and Psychology, proffers this question about the millennial challenge:

Sure, I have encountered my share of millennials who fit the socially inept, self-entitled construct but I have also met many of them who are pragmatic, kind, well rounded individuals who, like the rest of us, are just trying to make their way in an increasingly polarised world. For all their perceived faults the millennials are caring, culturally aware, tech-savvy and diversity inclusive, all traits with which some other generations have struggled. Whether the challenges of the Millennials are perceived or real, the fact is the needs of this new generation of employees is pushing against our existing models of leadership and, albeit slowly, forcing a change. So here are 7 ideas I think leaders can incorporate into their organisations to engage their people in a more meaningful way.

1. Lead by walking around

This is hardly a new concept but one the leaders of tomorrow will need to practice as a matter of routine. Millennials want flatter organisational structures. Of course, they understand the need for leadership levels but leaders need to be accessible. Good leaders will get out of their office at least once a day to talk to their people and connect with them in a personal way.

2. Your people are adults, don’t treat them like children

It’s time to revisit a lot of our organisational processes. Don’t drop people into procedural quicksand. Step back and let them work to achieve something great. True leaders will set the vision, ensure their people can see that vision and then step back and let the people decide how best to achieve it. We should be creating environments that allow people to ask as many questions as they need, where they know they will be met with patience and understanding – and this can hardly be a bombshell, but people are human beings and human beings make mistakes. Show me a CEO who has never made a mistake and I’ll show you a person who focuses on blame whenever something goes wrong. Someone in fact who walks around with a gigantic blame-thrower. Let your people make mistakes and help them learn when they do. I cannot stress this enough…DO NOT punish people for making mistakes.

3. Develop corporate parenting strategies

This may be considered one of the more radical concepts, but the fact is we are going to need to develop strategies that allow leaders to help people grow and build new skills across their professional and personal lives. The millennial generation has been said to have been subjected to ‘failed parenting strategies’. The absence of scoring on the sports field, the equitable distribution of participation ribbons after a race and myriad other strategies have yielded a harmful side effect. We raised a generation of individuals who lack the experience and resilience necessary to deal with adversity. So, when young people encounter roadblocks it isn’t their fault when they don’t know what to do or how to get around them. Leaders need to become proficient in helping young people build resilience and coping mechanisms, and acquire critical thinking skills, so they can stand alone as confident, free-thinking humans.

4. Live the values

If you truly want people to live the values set down by the organisation, then every leader must make genuine and conscious efforts to live those values themselves. Let us be brutally honest here, when an organisation sets a value like ‘respect’ and then has leaders who consistently arrive late for meetings then those leaders are not living the values. When an organisation sets a value like ‘innovation’ and represses their labour pool with rigid processes then the organisation is not living its values. When an organisation sets a value like ‘open-mindedness’ while its leaders shut down the suggestions and opinions of their people those leaders are not living the values. I could go on here…but I think you get the picture.

5. Decide what authentic trust looks like and move towards that vision

Much has been written about the importance of trust in the workplace and with good reason. We are operating in a time when trust seems to be eroding quickly. We also need to separate the two motifs of liking and trust. It is very possible to like someone and not trust them. Your leaders may say they are well liked but you cannot, with any certainty, extend that to a belief that your people trust them. Authentic trust requires the careful development and cultivation of an environment that allows people to behave naturally and without fear of reprisal, or where people can take ownership of their mistakes because they know, with 100% certainty, how their leaders will react. This, put simply, is called ‘predictable leadership’. Organisations don’t want boring, uninspiring leaders who don’t take any risks and don’t innovate but neither do they need volatile unpredictable leaders who react to situations accommodatingly one day and aggressively the next. This is not about the leader being uninspiring or volatile, it is about the people in the organisation knowing with complete certainty their leaders will react the same way each time to a given stimulus. In other words, if you want me to trust you, it is your consistent, repeated actions that will show me you are trustworthy. When you identify what those actions look like make sure your leaders are committed to moving the organisation towards that Utopian vision.

6. Ditch the annual performance review

Can we talk about feedback for a minute? Why do so many organisations still roll out clunky annual performance review processes that rate people on their past performance? In 2016 the Corporate Executive Board (CEB), now Gartner, surveyed 13,000 people worldwide to get their opinions of annual performance reviews and identified some surprising statistics.

• 90% of HR professionals do not believe their companies’ performance reviews provide accurate information.

• 66% of employees felt the performance review process interfered with the productivity.

• 65% of employees stated the performance review wasn’t relevant to their job.

• 95% of managers said they were not satisfied with their organisation’s performance review process.

Employee scoring was also in accurate with only one third of employees who get the highest ranking on their performance review actually considered to be the organisations top contributors. I am not advocating for organisations to throw out their feedback processes altogether, but I do think we can do better with what we have. We should be eliminating the annual review in favour of more frequent informal discussions where genuinely helpful feedback is given to employees about what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong in the moment they are doing it. You can still keep a record of those discussions. Additionally, I think we can move away from terms like positive and constructive feedback in favour of the more simplified ‘helpful’ feedback. We should also be implementing open feedback loops that allow employees to provide helpful feedback up the line in an environment of safety and trust.

7. Just be a nice person

I am so tired of hearing people say nice guys finish last. Indeed, my experiences with senior leaders across multiple organisations ostensibly reinforces the belief that the higher you get within an organisation, the more ‘managerial’ you need to be. I can only think of one clear response to this. This is utter and complete garbage! What makes leaders great is not their ability to take command and make swift and confident decisions, it is their ability to adapt their behaviour to best suit whatever situation, person and/or challenge they are dealing with in the moment. If leaders truly want an organisation that fosters a caring, nurturing culture then that begins and ends with the leader. There are leaders all over the world engaging in wonderfully simple leadership practices that genuinely inspire engagement and a true sense of belonging. People like Bob Chapman at Barry-Wehmiller and Doug Conant, former CEO of Campbells Soups have demonstrated the value of treating people like people. Of being, in Conant’s own words, “all-in” with their employees and opening themselves up to really listen. People like L. David Marquet, former US Navy captain, who understands and espouses the benefits of using the right words to really empower people.

In the words of Waren Bennis, “the manager has their eye on the bottom line, the leader has their eye on the horizon”. It is time for organisations around the world to take a step back, look at the horizon and get their people moving towards that Utopian vision. After all, organisations don’t achieve organisational goals, their people do.

REFERENCES 

Chapman, B. Sisodia, R. (2015). Everybody Matters. The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family. Barry-Wehmiller Group, Inc and Rajendra Sisodia Penguin supports copyright. USA.

Levenson, A.R. (2010). Millennials and the World of Work: An Economists Perspective. Journal of Business and Psychology (2010) Issue 25. Pages 257-264. Springer Science and Business Media, LLC.

Marquet, L.D. (2019). Talk Like a Leader. How Small Changes in What You Say Can Make a Huge Difference to Your Team’s Results. Penguin Books Ltd. London. England.

Marquet, L.D. (2012). Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders. Penguin Books Ltd. London. England.

McCord, P (2017). Powerful. Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility. Silicon Guild. USA.

Murray, A. (2011). Mind the gap: technology, millennial leadership and the cross-generational workforce. The Australian Library Journal. Issue 60:1. Pages 54-65.

Pearson, C. Porath, C. (2009). The Cost of Bad Behaviour. How Incivility is Damaging Your Business and What to Do About It. Penguin Group. New York. NY. USA.

Porath, C. (2016). Mastering Civility: A Manifesto for the Workplace. Grand Central Publishing. New York. NY. USA.