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What Do Great Leaders Do Differently?
What's the difference between leaders that are great and
other leaders? That question has fascinated me as long as I've been in the working world. I've
read all the leadership books I could find for my entire working career. They weren't all
that helpful. They either told me how one leader had done it, or they talked about
leadership traits.
Traits or characteristics are fine and dandy for discussion purposes. It's fun to argue
about whether compassion is more important than mission focus and things like that. The
problem is that those discussions don't tell you anything about what you should actually
do. They don't, and can't, function as a guide to action.
The only books that I could find that were helpful were written by John Kotter, a
professor at Harvard. I asked myself, "Why are these books different?" The
answer turned out to be strikingly simple. While other folks were testing theories in the
best "scientific" tradition, Kotter was watching doing research in the wild. He
was watching what leaders actually did, and then drawing conclusions from a number of
examples.
It seems to me that Kotter started the move toward that kind of research into
management and leadership with his book, The General Managers. Since then, several other
writers, Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, James Kouzes and Barry Posner, and others have done
the same thing. The movement, if that's what it is, was given a boost by Tom Peters, who
does the same thing but talks about it more and more loudly and more effectively than
anyone else.
Anyway, I figured I could do that. Basically, I'm just a dumb preacher's kid from the
Bronx, but I'm not hampered by a PhD or the kind of "physics envy" that tends to
screw up research in the behavioral sciences. Besides, I wasn't after irrefutable
scientific truth that would last the ages. All I wanted to know was how to do what those
great leaders did so I could learn to do it myself and tell others.
I studied thirty-six great leaders from around the country. How did I define great? In
order to qualify as a "great leader" for the study, they had to be rated as such
by their organization, their subordinates and their peers.
That's where I learned my first lesson. I found that lots of folks would qualify on one
of those counts, but not all. Organizations suggested folks that subordinates and peers
simply hated to deal with. They also suggested folks who had performance numbers way below
some other leaders.
All of these folks were responsible for a group's performance. That means they had
three roles to fill: supervisor, manager, and leader. The had to achieve what we defined
as the twin objectives of any leader that I learned in the Marines: accomplish the mission
and care for your people.
The each had the five generic jobs to perform. They had to make sure that today's job
got done efficiently and well. They had to care for the future by planning and by growing
their subordinates. They had to handle critical incidents when those low frequency, high
impact events occurred. The had to do performance interviews. And, they had to create a
great working environment, one where performance and morale were both high.
So, what did they DO different?
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Great leaders show up a lot
Great leaders show up on site. They catch folks in the hall and talk to them. They show
up at the cafeteria, and in email boxes. Showing up a lot is the core, key behavior of top
leaders. They get two benefits from it.
They get to know their people. By being around them they find out who does what well
and who needs attention when. By watching what they do and listening to what they say, the
find out what the real issues are on the front lines.
Great leaders are great communicators and they learn how by showing up a lot. That's
where they learn what communication style each subordinate likes, what matters to them and
what kind of problems each one is having.
By showing up a lot, great leaders get the opportunity to share their ideas about the
direction and purpose of the organization. They get to lead by example, too, showing
people what's important, by what they pay attention to.
There's another, more subtle benefit, too. Because they're around a lot their people
are more comfortable with them. Face it, if the boss only shows up to dump on folks or to
pontificate, that's what folks will expect, and it's not a confidence building
expectation.
Great leaders rehearse mentally
Great leaders think about the kinds of situations they might face. They plan for them.
They imagine the situations in detail. And they run through them in their mind--a kind of
mental practice.
Great leaders rehearse the long term future and they rehearse individual encounters.
They play "what-if" in their head.
Great leaders also keep the future in mind. They remain aware of the future
consequences of their decisions. They think farther ahead than most of their peers.
In recent years, scenario planning has come into vogue. When we first started hearing
about it, we thought that telling stories about the future worked because it was a way to
get lots of information about planning in a small space.
As it turns out, the real advantage of scenario planning is that it helps you recognize
changing future situations.
Great leaders pay attention to the future, because it's their job to choose the path
for their organization in an unfamiliar forest. Without mental rehearsal and thinking
about the future, leaders are forced to rely on precedents to deal with new situations. In
today's rapidly changing environment, that doesn't work.
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Great leaders manage the consequences of
performance
Great leaders don't think in terms of rewards and discipline that they deliver. More
commonly they see such things as the natural result of a subordinate's performance. Great
leaders manage the systems of consequences so that it's in the best interest of the
subordinate to do what's in the organization's best interest.
This starts with clear expectations. Great leaders spend a lot of time making sure that
their people understand exactly what they expect and what the consequences of behavior
are. They do this by spending time with individuals and groups, practicing active
listening and repeating key points again and again. Great leaders seem to understand the
power of frequent communication better then their peers.
They make sure they model the behavior they want. They practice leadership by example.
Great leaders stay focused on performance. You don't hear them talking much about
somebody's "attitude." They don't spend a lot of time on the internals. Instead
they concentrate on the performance they want from subordinates and on the things they can
control
They try to eliminate any excuses and then make the consequences of performance (good
or bad) as inevitable as nature.
Great leaders do lots of performance interviews
A performance interview is an interview with someone who works for you where you have
an objective about changing their performance. Great leaders do a lot of them.
Most of the interviews are short and informal. They last seconds rather than minutes.
Great leaders tend to make small course corrections early, rather than waiting for
problems to develop.
Strangely enough though, it seems that a characteristic of top leaders is that they
take enough time for the interview, no matter how long that is.
I studied a selection of leaders and the time they took with their subordinates on an
annual performance evaluation. The average time for all leaders was 15 minutes. The
average time for the top leaders was 55 minutes.
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Great leaders critique their own
leadership performance
You can't get better at something if you don't see it as a performance issue. Great
leaders believe that leadership is the most important thing they do. They believe that
it's something they'll get better at if they work at it. For that reason, great leaders
are continually doing "after-action critiques" on their own performance.
They pay attention to the items that are under their control and try to do those better
and better and better. They monitor the results they get from their actions and then
modify their actions to get the result they want.
This grows out of the concentration on consequences and behavior. The result is that
the great leaders use a wider array of leadership and communication tools and use them
more effectively than their less effective peers.
These are the behaviors that great leaders do. If you do them you'll be a great leader
to work for. And you'll create a great working environment for the folks who work for you.
Created/Revised/Reviewed: 12/31/00
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