We all want to do well and create better companies for all shareholders, especially with the help of tips for leadership. But as we look back at the last five weeks, there are five habitual rationalizations that often stand in our way:
- The myth of the mandate
- Excessive tolerance
- Going native
- Dismissing the devil you know
- Reporting enmeshment
Rather than rationalizing to ourselves and others the limits of our leadership, what can we do to move beyond these mental blocks and create leadership tips for new leaders?
Accepts Mandates as Invitations, Not Marching Orders
Your arrival into the executive ranks is further compounded by whether you are arriving as an outsider or an insider. Each has its own unique challenges. Beyond managing the initial shock of the new altitude and avoiding the mandate fallacy, here’s some leadership advice: it is imperative that you intentionally plan your entrance into the organization.
Effective Leadership Begins Before You Walk in the Door
One of many leadership tips for new leaders is to think about your entrance. An effectively entering executive arrives as a true anthropologist, setting aside preconceived notions and hypotheses about what she will discover and truly seeks to “learn” the organization and its people.
The notion that this could be done even in ninety days is foolish, but at least keeping an open mind for that long while allowing new ideas and assumptions to form, and building factual conclusions about the context and its people, will take you much further in the long run than trying to hit the ground running on the fumes of foregone conclusions that later prove unsound.
Here’s another piece of leadership advice: a great executive knows that she is not just sizing up the organization for what she can or needs to change within it. She is also sizing up how she will need to change and how the organization will change her in the process.
Most leaders don’t bargain for that part. They enter under the presumption of change agent, not change beneficiary or change casualty.
Your success in your new position will be tied to your ability to accurately capture changes in both internal and external environments. Therefore, in another of the tips for leadership, remember: it is vital that you mine experiences for wisdom while you are having successes, not in retrospect.
These “field notes” should be more than a travelogue. Ask yourself what went well and, most importantly, why things went well. Then when you reach back into your track record for learning, cull out the principles, not recipes—among the best leadership advice.
You must fully understand the context in which you are working systematically and shape your leadership and your solutions to it rather than stubbornly trying to bend it or expecting it to bend to you. All great leaders understand who they are and work hard to understand when and where they are.
Another of the leadership tips is to remember that this takes time and do not fall prey to the temptation of a quick fix. Set aside preconceived notions and hypotheses about what you will discover and truly seek to “learn” the organization and its people.
Learn How to Sharpen Your Leadership Thinking:
Leadership Tips: Sharpen Accountability and Send Clear Signals that You Mean It
You must use symbols (sometimes painful ones) very early in transformational efforts that you mean it, and that your will won’t be tested. A leader’s discontent is one of their greatest assets for driving change. Reminding people of your will and the “fierce urgency of now” ensures that people see the necessity of change.
The best leadership advice says to make sure to hold people to account for the commitments they make, and when actions don’t match words, make your discontent felt. This accountability may feel brash, and you will inevitably fear the public perception following your actions, but it is vital to the success of your leadership.
It will be lonely. But loneliness due to the decisions rendered and costs paid are worth the success of the transformation you have committed to. Remember that the greater your responsibility, the rarer your fans.
Measure Progress and Monitor Your Own Operative Narratives
To avoid going native, you must be aware of your own operative narratives. Make time to decode the unhealthy culture so that when you face it, you can name it. Also take the time to encode how the organization “ought to be.”
Quickly set up checkpoints and regular meetings to monitor your progress on what ought to be so that even though there is not seismic change, you are aware of the rumblings of change.
When things are off kilter, you must respond immediately and not lose precious time. When something isn’t working, give it a fair shot by course correcting and making adjustments, but when it’s clear it won’t work, abandon it and find a new way – don’t stick with ineffective approaches too long.
Remember that change is iterative, and change-resistant organizations are entrenched in their previous and unhealthy ways and well versed in self sabotage.
Evict the Devils
The plain truth is not everyone can or should make the journey. There will inevitably be some who won’t, and if there aren’t, you haven’t turned the heat up enough. If you rationalize others’ choices for them, refusing to see them for the saboteurs or passive aggressors they are, you will lose.
Leaving people in roles for which they have neither the competence nor commitment to succeed is not compassionate; it is cruel. It sets them up to fail, it drains the organization of hope as they look at those people and say, “why do they get a hall pass,” and conclude that you obviously aren’t serious about change.
Another of the tips for leadership is that it signals different standards for everyone and undermines the credibility and integrity of your leadership and the transformation.
A leader must not only bear the weight of such decisions, but the feelings of knowing others’ disappointment. Remember that periodic, acute pain is better than the chronic and debilitating pain of not pulling the trigger on a difficult personnel decision.
Tips for Leadership: Dislodge People from Comfort Zones and Move Talent Around
Remember that successors and their seniors are prone to mimesis – the senior often trying to make them in their image, and the successor mirroring their every behavior. Each leader has a unique style and voice, and the primary way these are formed are through diverse learning experiences. If you want to develop talent and keep them for the long haul, be courageous in your deployment of them.
When you see promising talent, move it around. Do it early and often. Don’t assume the talent becomes vintage by “deepening in place.” It atrophies and becomes less agile, not more. Assign high potentials to a failing business or an intrapreneurial venture.
The more of the organization they see, the more they will understand, and the more they will have to offer. You may also broaden exposure by rotating people into assignments of organizational counterparts or to build bridges across rival functions or businesses.
Hopefully you’ve winced once or twice as you’ve read this series, recognizing your potential dangerous proclivities to these rationalizations, or perhaps even your indulgence in some of them. For your sake and the sake of the transformative efforts you dream of leading, finding the resolve, the courage, and the honesty to face the risks of your rationalizations and choose the path that will lead to real and sustained success.