Anatomy of a Turnaround - Part 3: Leader Behavior

A leader's behavior is guided by three critical realizations and pre-considering these makes the difficulty of facing a hard organization easier.

1) Your people cannot follow someone who isn't going anywhere. You MUST study greatness well enough to be able to guide them there.

I think a lot of leaders think the job is to report performance of their organizations and manage the assets and how they're allocated. And, yes, those are components of the job. But that won't make anything great. 

To be a leader, you have to chart a course to some destination and lead a team to go there. 

Leading, as a term, implies organizational movement. And, presumably, you will want to lead your organization to be better than it is.

I've long contended that a worthy goal is to try to lead your team to be the best of its type in your company, the world, etc. You're going to be there every day. Why not try to be great?

The first person who has to know where the team is going is you. You need to put in the work to know what "best" looks like so you can chart a path. Invest the effort to be a world class expert at what you do if you want to lead a team to world class performance.

Once you know the necessary knowledge you have to sell that vision to your team. And that vision needs to be a part of the relationships you build with your team. That vision is loaded with expectations from both you and them and the sooner everyone knows that vision the better off everyone will be.

And don't be taken aback if people laugh at the vision. It's actually a good thing.

If they're laughing, they're talking and thinking about the goal. That levity is not a bad thing.

You should keep in mind that they already want to be great. The workers in your facility long for greatness, purpose, and pride more than you do. The laughing is just their fear of looking foolish for buying into what you're selling before you've proven the will and skills to deliver.

It's hard to make a worthwhile goal that's not somewhat audacious and even a lofty goal will seem quite achievable once they realize you're making progress and delivering on your promises.

Choose a vision of greatness. Your people are willing to be great. But step one is to teach yourself what greatness looks like (which is a lot of work) and to describe it to them.

A good leader bears the burden of the trust he hasn't earned yet. Once you know what right looks like, you have to lead that change. This brings us to the second thing a leader must do.

2) Leaders build real, honest relationships.

Relationships are the currency a good leader deals in. The best vision in the world still has to be sold and it absolutely cannot be realized, even partially, until one's people invest in it.

How do we do that?

The foundation of any healthy relationship is trust. If your people find reason not to trust you they will never invest in your vision. But, if you conduct yourself as worthy of trust and you show you're invested in them by talking to them and listening to them, they will give you a chance.

Thus, you must always do what you think is right.

And for your people to realize you're trying to do the right thing, you need to be talking to your people. You need to talk to your first level reports every day about their issues and what you need from them to build the changes you're trying to achieve. You need to talk to and listen to your second level reports at least once a week. 

You need the entirety of your team to know their part of your vision and to feel invested enough in you to participate in building it.

Focus on listening first. You need your people more than they need you, so it's on you to earn their trust. Listening is more important than talking for building trust. 

Also, you actually do need to know what they think. They all see reality from different points-of-view and their information will be critical for decisions you will need to make.

Your talking needs to be absolutely genuine. Even if the relationships are built on purely professional grounds, a genuine relationship of a purely professional nature has value and will make sense for both parties. 

Simply asking people how you can help them (and attempting to deliver) is a good "in" to a relationship that is fully worthwhile for both parties.

3) How do we carry ourselves? Besides putting in the time to learn what it takes to be the best, what additional discipline must we internalize?

Leaders must remain calm and empathetic in all communications because that is the state in which listening is done best. 

When we communicate, we need to always be aware of our responsibility to be the leader from a behavioral standpoint. 

This requires that we understand the principle of "emotional reflection." 

Emotional reflection is the concept that emotion is contagious and that people will feel whatever emotions they can see others feeling. As a leader, your emotion will have an amplified level of contagiousness. 

For this reason, anger, frustration, contempt, and other negative emotions in leaders are purely destructive as they will be mirrored in the organization. These emotional states are barriers to listening, thinking, and clear speaking. They elevate error rates and produce consistent negative effects if they're common.

As a leader, regardless of how contentious the situation is, one can serve all parties best by being empathetic, kind, soft spoken, and a good listener while still serving one's duties (which means unwavering willingness to deliver accountability).

One can deliver accountability faithfully and can do so with the honest stance that you want the best for them. And I should want the best for them while still delivering on my duties to the organization faithfully. 

This eliminates the process of the "butt chewing" and replaces it with a clear and kind discussion about performance and accountability. This replacement is necessary.

The Pygmalion Effect is the phenomenon where seeing the good in someone brings it out. This is a real and relevant psychological phenomenon which leaders should use to elevate their teams. Tell your people they are good. Tell them that they can become great. Provide them with a vision. 

The Golem Effect is the phenomenon where seeing the bad in someone brings it out. Tell your team they're lazy, slow, poor performing etc and they will meet your expectations.