Thoughts on Leadership

I was asked recently to share some of my thoughts about leadership.  This is more or less what I had to say.

This is a little bit of a challenge for me.  I never spent much time studying leadership principles or trying to figure out what differentiates good leaders from bad ones.  I don't consider myself an expert on the subject.  In the last 30 years or so of my career, I have, however, been fortunate to have been on teams that were led by some awesome individuals.  Most of my personal philosophies on the subject have come from watching excellent leaders and trying to model the behaviors I found helpful.  My leadership style is mostly derived from what I've learned during those experiences.

In a very simple way, I see a leader’s first order of business as the communication of the mission, the goal, and the objectives to the team in a clear and unambiguous way.  The last order of business is to say thank you.  In between, the leader’s purpose it to remove obstacles to progress, enabling the team to do their jobs and achieve success.

In my way of thinking, the responsibility for setting the long-term goals of a team falls to the leader.  Every organization's goals derive from higher level organizational goals.  If I am doing my job well, I will have articulated that connection and every team member understands what we are trying to achieve, why we are trying to achieve it and generally how we plan to measure our progress along the way.  I seek input from the experienced team members when setting goals, but it is ultimately the leader's responsibility to get the ship to the right port.  A well-executed plan that achieves the wrong result is a leadership failure.

Once there is a goal, some interim objectives and a general plan of attack, the leadership role becomes one of facilitation.  Here my job is to remove obstacles to success.  Many things can impede success.  The particulars are as unique as every combination of team and goal. My job is to identify the hurdles and remove or at least lower them.  It may be that there is a need for a tool, or there may be a training issue, there could be personality conflicts within the team or priority issues.  Sometimes the process isn't working and needs to be modified, sometimes the team lacks information or may be distracted by too much information.  Finding and removing obstacles to progress is complicated but is a critical part of a leader's responsibility.  General Colin Powell once said that "Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership." 

Finally, at the end of the day, it is important to take the time to say thanks.  I will always remember a story that one of my team leads told me about when he came to understand this.  This happened when I was a very junior member of a relatively small but highly successful team at IBM.  Our team leader was invited to the big annual IBM corporate sales meeting in some exotic location.  It was a hard-earned and well-deserved honor and our team was proud to be represented.  At this meeting, there was a session on leadership.  At the start of his talk, the speaker asked the people in the audience who were being honored for their leadership to stand.  Twenty or thirty individuals from all over the corporation stood and there was a lot of applause.  After things quieted down, the speaker told them to look around the room and then he asked "Where are the people who got you here?"   The speaker went on to talk at length about the connection between leaders and the teams they are members of.  When our team lead returned, she made a point of letting each of us know how much she appreciated our individual contributions.

My point here is simple, there can be no success without the efforts of the individuals on the team.  In our environment, where we have so many highly functioning and effective teams, we must remember to turn to each other and say thanks when we achieve our objectives.  As leaders, we are responsible to provide the reminders.

We have an awesome team.  We are passionate about what we do.  As I see it, my role is to help encourage and channel that passion so that the teams continue working together on a common set of objectives towards a common goal.