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Great leaders are committed to developing other people as leaders,
which often means putting them in positions where they might fail.
Encouraging them to step outside their comfort zone and
helping them learn from setbacks and mistakes as opposed to punishing them for
setbacks and mistakes immediately.
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Great leaders also really internalize the responsibility to embody the culture and
to walk the talk.
It's a truism in organizational life that sort of the values plaque,
the principles that we put up on the wall is kind of BS.
And I think that's because in a lot of circumstances people see a big gap
between the plaque on the wall and the leaders actual behavior.
They are finely tuned to have moments where the leader is not acting
in alignment with those principles.
And so I think great leadership really means committing to understanding those
principles, internalizing them.
And being very deliberate about following through on them, especially when they
don't align with what the leader believes to be their self interest.
If a leader is going to follow the values on the plaque on the wall only when it's
personally expedient, I'd say that creates, very toxic environment in which
people realize those values on the wall are not going to be followed.
They're not ones that we need to listen to either.
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A theme that comes up a lot in my practice is that leaders occupy a particularly
important symbolic role.
And I think this is often neglected in contemporary organizational life.
We tend to think of leaders as decision makers,
we think of leaders in a very strategic sense.
They're going to determine the course of the organization,
and they're going to set strategy, and they're going to allocate resources.
That's all true.
It's also very cognitive.
I think what that leaves out is the emotional impact that a leader has as
the symbolic leader of the tribe.
The symbolic dimension of organizational life is one that comes up quite a lot in
my practice.
People join organizations and feel committed to organizations to a certain
extent because of the feeling of community that they enjoy among their colleagues.
And the commitment that they feel from the leader to sort of invest in the health and
development growth of that community.
It doesn't mean that a leader is obligated to solve for those factors, but
recognizing the leader bears a unique responsibility to help that community feel
a sense of collective identity and growth.
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Great leaders are also able to make a distinction between leading and doing.
Many of the people I work with have a technical background,
either as coders or developers, as investors or financial analysts.
And they've achieved their leadership position by virtue of their technical
prowess.
And that is often very useful in the early stages of a company's development because
other people are looking to leader for that kind of technical expertise.
And yet if a leader remains stuck in the process of doing,
if they are essentially the doer in chief.
If their leadership rests on their ability to be the most effective person at that
particular technical discipline or the proverbial smartest person in the room.
Then they're going to cap the organization's ability to grow.
They will inhibit the organization's capacity to scale.
So a transitional phase that I help a lot of leaders navigate through is
this period of being the most technically adept person in a given discipline.
To a phase in which they're actually adding value,
not on the basis of their technical expertise, because they're
hiring people who have deeper expertise in their particular discipline.
And so the leader is not adding value by telling that technical expert how to do
their job or by, even worse,
kind of shouldering that person out of the way and doing their job for them.
But by bringing a group of technically adept people together and
helping them operate as a team, ultimately that distinction between leading and
doing is how a leader truly helps an organization scale.
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