Leader Moments Online

Fear is not an effective leadership tool. Courageous leaders grow courageous followers, and benefit from it. (click to Tweet)

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Leadership has evolved over the last several decades as the baby-boomer generation moves out of the workforce and is replaced by Generation Y. Where leaders used to be able to give directives and get compliance without question, increasingly today workers want to understand the reasons behind the directive, want to be part of the decision-making process, and want to know the value that their contribution brings to the whole. As a result, positional leadership has become less effective, and leaders today need to have more and more tools in their toolbox to customize to the situation and maximize their influence.

More than ever before, employees want to understand the company’s values as well as the values of their leaders. These values aren’t just something to put on a PowerPoint slide or to use as a promotional tool with your clients. They shouldn’t be aspirational, but rather should be part of the fabric of your culture, guiding us as leaders in our priorities, decision-making, and our interactions with employees and clients. It is up to each individual leader in your company to understand and internalize the values so that they show through in your actions and interactions. If you don’t, those on your teams will recognize the hypocrisy and will start to “check out”.

Beyond the corporate values, people on your teams need to understand what your values are. They shouldn’t be inconsistent with the corporate values, but they also should be tailored to your team and situation. Each member of each team needs to understand what the values mean for them, and you may have additional or more detailed values within your group.

Leaders who don’t have clear values are likely to change their position with each new fad or situation. They become inconsistent with shifting positions, generate confusion instead of clarity, and create a climate that fosters unproductive politics instead of clear guidelines. Values serve as a guide or rudder to steer the leader and provide clarity of direction to the followers. Values don’t just support the culture, they define it.

In addition, if leaders aren’t clear about the values for their teams, people will interpret them for themselves based on what they think the leader values, or worse, what is in their self-interest. In general, people want to act in ways that please their leaders and improve their standing in the company, so communicating your values becomes critical to helping them do that. And then communicate those values again, and again, and again.

If you want to know how you are doing in the area of communicating your values, ask the people on your team what they think your values are. You may want to call them “hot buttons” or simply ask “what do you think is important to me”. If the answers lack consistency, then the onus is on you as the leader to create that consistency by communicating your values. I often ask these questions when I visit plants. In some cases, employees can communicate the values clearly and consistently. In other cases, they either can’t communicate the values or the responses aren’t consistent. Invariably, there is some direct correlation to plant culture and performance. Where teams don’t know what the leader values or expects, they struggle with consistency in actions, decision-making, and how they treat each other and the client.

Creating clarity around values and leading with those values is not necessarily difficult. Yet it is one of the most important and neglected responsibilities of the leader. Make sure you have defined your values and communicate them regularly with your team. Lead with values.

In a past article I used the definition of leadership as “influence”. That means we all are leaders, because we all influence others. Whether you are a manager leading a plant or division, a supervisor leading a team of operators, a technician with a great idea to share, a parent trying to mold young children, or a friend trying to convince others to help with a cross-town move, we all are put in a position where we attempt to influence and lead others. Positional leadership has the advantage of the resources and the “stick”, but people only follow to the extent you can influence them.

I also talked about the important responsibility that comes with your power of influence. You can influence in a positive way or you can lead others into bad behaviors and patterns that will hurt the team. Your motives for influencing play a huge part in your ability to influence now and in the future, and people will sniff out selfish motives and put their guard up.

That makes your style of leadership – your method of influence – critical to your ability to lead and influence. You likely have heard the term “servant leadership” over the last few years. Some will hear the term and light up, while others may scowl and dismiss it. We may have had experience with a “servant leader” that empowered us and brought out the best in our performance, or we may have seen a weak or “touchy-feely” leader who provided no real influence at all. So before you dismiss the idea, let me define it.

Servant leadership is first and foremost having others as your priority. It turns out the opposite of servant leadership isn’t command-and-control leadership, but rather “self-serving leadership”. Given the choice, I don’t know anyone who would follow a self-serving leader over a servant leader, yet we certainly have seen leaders who exhibit behaviors and make decisions that reveal that they are in it for themselves. They seek privilege and accolades, see people as tools and resources at their disposal, take too much credit for things that they had too little real impact on, and so forth. Self-serving leaders are not inspiring, and can influence only to the extent that they use their positional or resource power or hide their real motives.

In contrast to the self-serving leader, the role of the servant leader is really twofold. First, the servant leader is responsible for communicating the mission and vision. This role follows the traditional hierarchical organizational pyramid. The leader, at the top of the pyramid, sets the mission and vision for the team and needs to communicate that vision down through the organization. This is a critical function because you can’t reach your destination if you don’t know where you are going. This has to come from the leader, and the servant leader understands the importance of getting this right and getting it ingrained through the team and organization.

The second role for the servant leader, once vision has been set and communicated, is to turn that organizational pyramid upside down. Leaders don’t accomplish the vision, the whole team down through the organization does. By flipping the pyramid so that the leadership is on the bottom, the idea then becomes that the leaders serve the team to accomplish the vision. That services comes in the form of removing roadblocks and providing resources to reach the vision, providing guidance as needed to keep the team on track towards the vision, providing recognition and encouragement to stay energized, running interference as needed to eliminate things that detract from the mission and vision, etc.

It turns out that the two-fold role of the servant leader – communicating the mission and vision, and then flipping the pyramid to support those who will execute the mission and vision – requires a strength in leadership that few have or are willing to exercise. Mark Miller, an executive with Chick-fil-a, calls servant leadership the highest form of leadership, far from being a weaker or inferior method. A servant leader must be strong enough in conviction to drive the mission and vision into the organization or team and to clear the path and get the resources needed to be successful. The servant leader must also be strong enough in character to be willing to serve, understanding that they have more potential as a star-maker than they do as a star, and recognizing the critical importance of that serving role in allowing others to do the work.

While the idea of servant leadership may seem counter-cultural today in a time when self-glorification and narcissism, fed the platforms of social media and the false idea that the leader deserves all the credit, are becoming more dominant. Yet you don’t have to look far to find the failures of self-serving leaders in business and politics. Conversely, the servant-leadership model is seeing successful results that are making the business world take notice. It’s no coincidence that most of the top 10 Furtune Magazine’s “Best Companies to Work For” are publicly practicing and promoting servant leadership, and some of the most admired leaders from Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. to Herb Kelleher (Southwest Airlines), companies (Wegmans, Zappos, Whole Foods, Marriott, Nordstrom, Starbucks, etc.) and experts (Patrick Lencioni, Ken Blanchard, John Maxwell, etc.) all advocate using the servant-leadership model.

As you recognize your leadership potential as the ability to influence others and as you examine your motives to decide how you will choose to use that influence, consider the serve-first ideal. Your influence will soar as you show others your interest in the vision and team and as you demonstrate your desire for a better leadership.

The definition of leadership has been explored and debated forever, and yet our perception of leadership, especially at work, is that it is something that is done by managers and executives. We tend to think of leaders as those with a title, authority and power, directing others and writing their performance reviews. The bigger the title and the higher in the organization, the stronger the leader.

But the reality is that regardless of title or authority, a leader is made by the followers. It has been said that if you think you are leading and turn around to see no one following you, then you are just taking a walk! We all have seen “leader” who are just taking a walk, or “followers” who have no heart in it, just going through the motions to satisfy the boss.

I think a more appropriate definition of leadership was coined by John Maxwell, considered one of the top leadership experts in the world: “The true measure of leadership is influence – nothing more, nothing less.” That profound statement expands the definition to all of us, because we all influence others at one time or another and in one way or another. We influence our coworkers to support an initiative or to take action. We influence our boss to buy into our new idea or to go a different direction. We influence our friends and family and we influence our kids in many ways on a regular basis. You have probably experienced a time during a meeting when the participants looked not to the manager for direction but instead to the operator, technician, or accountant because they had the needed information or they had the demonstrated knowledge and wisdom to lead in that situation. In short, we all exert influence regardless of our position or authority, and that makes us all leaders.

With leadership, however, comes choice and responsibility. We sometimes call it the “Spiderman Principle” – With great power comes great responsibility. Whether your influence comes from your position, experience, knowledge, passion, or just having a great idea to convey, you have a choice in how you lead. You can influence positively or negatively, for the good of others and the team of for self-good. How you choose will be closely related to how others will follow and how effective your influence will be in the future.

That means that motives are critical to your influence and the outcome. People sniff out self-serving motives quickly, and when they sense that a person is trying to influence for their own benefit, the guard goes up and the ability to influence goes down. When my son volunteers to do the dishes or vacuum the house, I know that a self-serving request and attempt to influence will soon follow. When you walk into the car dealership and the salesperson strolls up and offers a hearty handshake and specialty coffee, we have already steeled ourselves for his “leadership” in our car-buying process. When a boss is more interested in their preferred parking spot or the vendor golf outing than what the team needs to be successful, we tend to hunker down and take care of our own. Motives matter, and motives deeply impact your influence and ability to lead.

The first step, then, in broadening your influence is to recognize you have it. We are all leaders because we all have influence. The second step is to follow the Spiderman Principle and recognize that with the influence we have comes responsibility. Our leadership influence increases or decreases by how we choose to use it. Finally, we need to check our motives and choose service over self-service. Our influence and leadership potential will grow as we put the interests of the team ahead of ourselves and as we show through our actions that we are worthy of being followed.

Take some time to think about your own spheres of influence. When you look back, who has followed you? Why did you try to influence them and in what ways were you successful? What are your motives to influence and lead others? How will you use your influence to lead others going forward? We are all leaders. How we influence and where we lead depends on us and our motives. Take that responsibility seriously and influence for the good of others.

Something that has been studied and proven consistently is that leadership is best developed through practice, not study. Going through training, reading a book, and similar activities can equip you with new tools for your leadership toolbox, but if you never practice with those tools you won’t be able to use them effectively. In fact, leadership experts Barry Posner and Jim Kouzes (“The Leadership Challenge” and “Learning Leadership”) claim that for most leaders it isn’t a matter of not doing the right things, but simply not doing them enough. Challenge yourself and your teams this week, this month, and this year to put leadership tools into practice. When you learn something new or are reminded of a leadership principle, force yourself and your team to use it in the coming days and to report back on your experiences. Putting to practice new learning reinforces the teaching and allows you to learn how to use it in the real world. As they say, practice makes perfect. What are you practicing this week?

Leader Moments Online was launched to help people become better leaders, one Moment at a time. With a weekly “Leader Moment” to provide tools and engage thought on leadership, along with other material from time to time, my hope is that you find it useful in your continuous journey toward good leadership.