Leadership

The Number One Failing of Really Useless Leaders

Now I’m sure you’ve read Stephen Covey’s excellent book ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’. But if you haven’t, you should. It’s an inspiring summary of the seven simple but motivational things you need to do to be an inspirational leader. And it can help you to build an inspirational leadership style.

I mention Covey’s book because my recent research tackles the other end of the scale.
I’ve been looking at ‘The Seven Failings of Really Useless Leaders’. You’re probably asking how a study of the failings of really useless leaders can help you: it’s just another angle on leadership, right? Well, I’m sorry, but you’d be wrong if you thought that.

Because unlike other leadership research, this does NOT concentrate on good or great leadership. Or even on getting from good to great. You don’t need to copy all those inspirational leaders out there, because copying other people blindly just doesn’t work.

And there’s a better reason why you shouldn’t concentrate on these brilliant role models. You see, we learn much more from our mistakes than from the things we do well.

Some years ago it occurred to me that to become better leaders we should NOT look at a handful of inspirational leaders – such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Mother Teresa. Don’t get me wrong – these folks ARE inspiring. It’s just that I believe we can learn far more, and far more quickly, from assessing the damage done by poor or appalling leaders.

I’m lucky. In my job as a business school professor I get to work with the best of the best. But I also hear about, and see, many things that don’t work so well in firms: things that destroy value.

Now don’t misunderstand me – I can’t reveal the specific inside information from my coaching, teaching and consulting work – that would be unethical. But I can summarize for you the seven key things that seem to occur time and time again – things people do that have a direct impact on the bottom line. I CAN tell you about those.

To some people, the Seven Failings of Really Useless Leaders may be blindingly obvious. But, believe me, my research shows me that there are THOUSANDS of managers every day who continue to DEMOTIVATE their colleagues and subordinates, destroying bottom-line value. They are uninspiring, to say the least.

So here is the first of the Seven Failings of Really Useless Leaders: Really Useless Leaders kill enthusiasm.

I have discovered that uninspiring managers actively shut down the enthusiasm of their staff. Most people are naturally enthusiastic about their jobs: after all, it’s what their training and experience have prepared them for. But we kill that natural enthusiasm by interfering far too much in the nitty-gritty of their day-to-day workload. ‘Don’t do it like that,’ I hear people say. ‘Do it like this.’

Why do we do this? The best leaders find the best people, train the heck out of them and let them get on with their jobs. Uninspiring managers hire good people and then tell them exactly how to do their job.

So why do we interfere too much? I believe what we’re most worried about is only a question of style, how we think the work should get done. But, frankly, as long as the objectives are met – and met well – then who cares how?

Of course, in some roles – in the service industries – the style, the ‘how’ of the task, is all that matters. But that doesn’t mean that every little task needs to be micro-managed by us as leaders of the business.

Frankly, we have got to stop micro-management in its tracks if we want to boost the performance of our people. You buy 51% of your people’s effort through their pay packet. But if you want that other 49% of effort, you’re going to have to earn it.

Motivation and truly effective delegation are the answers. You’ve got to know your people and you’ve got to know how to motivate people. Let’s take these one point at a time:

1. Know your people. One great idea is to issue a short questionnaire to your new recruits – ask them these simple questions: how do you like to be managed? And how can I get the best from you? You give it to them during induction or the early days of their work with you and they complete it. You can then discuss the issues they raise and talk about your leadership style.

Why not use this with all your team? Issue the survey to your immediate direct reports and get them all to complete it.

The upshot is you’ve got to know how your people are motivated – ‘what do you need from me to get the best out of you?’ You’ll probably be surprised by the answers you get.

2. Excite your people. If Really Useless Leaders kill enthusiasm, inspirational leaders must excite and enthuse their people. We know that enthusiastic workers, happy workers, are productive workers.

You must build a workplace where the climate is one where people are willing and able to invest their best effort. You have to set the scene, you have to lead the way. Because leadership is exciting other people to higher levels of performance.

If it’s your job to deliver performance through others, then it’s your job to create the enthusiasm. The key point to ask yourself is: do people know me as someone who can create enthusiasm in the workplace?

If you want the leadership success you deserve, get the leadership training you deserve. Download more free articles and leadership training videos from Steven Sonsino, an international business school professor and author of the Amazon bestseller “The Seven Failings of Really Useless Leaders”
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Leadership Lessons from the Presidential Election

Business executives don’t have to win votes to get appointed. But to be a successful leader, in the corporate world or the political world, you need to know who you are and what you stand for.

Even if you’re not the next president of the USA, I urge you to spare five minutes to read these questions. It’s a challenge, I warn you.

The Center for Public Leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Governance developed 15 questions for presidential candidates. It might be worth taking a look at the HowYouLead website.

But if you don’t have time to review the site, here’s the list of 15 questions, translated for managers and leaders in business.

Who Are You Really?

1. Values: What are your five core values and how do they shape how you lead?
2. Attributes and Competencies: What are the attributes and competencies you value most in yourself that will serve you well in your role?
3. Weaknesses and Mistakes: Recent history has many examples of leaders whose weaknesses brought them down. What are your tendencies that could cause your leadership to fail?
4. People I Have Learned From: What figure from your past has exercised leadership in a way that you aspire to? What were their strengths? Tell us about a situation that tested their leadership.
5. Multicultural Experience/World View: What experiences have helped you deeply understand the mindset and values of other cultures?

Who Will Be at the Table With You?

6. Building a Team: Tell us about a high-performing team that you’ve built. What made it high-performing?
7. Coalition Building: Can you share some examples of when you were a catalyst who brought groups with polarized opinions together so that all voices were at the table?
8. Increasing Participation: The internet and technology have flattened the business playing field, allowing for more participation and collective decision-making. How will you create a more participatory business and give people the opportunity to influence decision-making?
9. Increasing Participation: Young people are coming into the workforce in greater numbers than ever before. Please give us some examples of how you have listened and responded to the next generation in your leadership. How will you keep the next generation engaged?

How Will You Decide?

10. Decision-making Style: The leader’s role requires decisiveness. Please share some examples of your ability and willingness to be decisive. Can you tell us about a time when a lack of decisiveness got you into trouble? In retrospect, what would you have done differently?
11. Judgment: Tell us about a time when your judgment was tested in crisis. What do you want us to appreciate about your judgment?

How Will You Act? And What Will You Act On?

12. Leading Change: Can you give us an example of how you have overcome resistance to bring about a needed change?
13. Innovative Thinking: How will you create an environment for innovation within your leadership team?
14. Building the Confidence of Others: What are the first few things you’ll do to raise confidence inside your company and outside?
15. Indicators of Your Values: What leadership skills and values do you bring to the challenge of leading your business in a way that puts people first? Can you point to three things in your past that will help us understand that you care about this challenge?

These are the things that the voters need to know about a potential president. Most business executives may be relieved that they don’t have to undergo similar scrutiny when they are appointed!

If you want the leadership success you deserve, get the leadership training you deserve. Download more free articles and leadership training videos from Steven Sonsino, an international business school professor and author of the Amazon bestseller “The Seven Failings of Really Useless Leaders”
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How to Learn from Your Leadership Mistakes

We learn most from our mistakes. It’s true. But problems occur for us when we forget this. Or when we deliberately deny that we made a mistake. And – if we’re honest – most of us do this, from time to time.

So in this article I want to share with you the IMPORTANCE of learning from your mistakes. AND how best to learn from your mistakes.

These ideas were first captured for me in a little known book by Calhoun Wick and Lu Leon way back in 1993, but their thinking on how to learn from mistakes has never been bettered, so I want to share my views on this with you now.

The key point I want to get across is that that success stops you learning. The main suggestion I want to put to you here is that, when we take action and we succeed, we just don’t learn. We don’t bother. We say things like – ‘I always knew I was going to succeed’. Or ‘I’m clearly the best’. Or ‘what’s next in my in-tray?’

This is the case unless you actively build in time to review that success. Most of us, however, prefer to push on to the next challenge, perhaps never being really clear HOW we succeeded. For most of us, just winning is enough.

This mindset creates a major problem for us. Because when we fail at something, when we don’t meet the expectations we set out at the start, it’s a shock, a major setback.

Now the good news is that this sets up the possibility of learning. So the second key message is that, in the same way that success kills learning, failure kickstarts learning.

However, there is a problem; or rather, three problems. There are three things we tend to do when we discover that we made a mistake somewhere along the line. Let’s look at these in sequence.

First, we don’t admit we made a mistake. It’s a natural habit, not to admit we made a mistake. Actually it’s more likely that we can’t believe we made a mistake. Our subconscious mind is trying to protect our ego, to save face. So we just don’t admit we made a mistake. Big mistake.

Secondly, either subconsciously, or worse still consciously, we try to conceal or minimize our mistake. To bury it so no one can find it. Find a shallow grave somewhere…

Now, I’ve seen this in a major restaurant chain. They reported their weekly sales figures to head office and they were rising. But this masked the fact that the number of people attending the restaurant, the number of covers, was actually falling.

To mask the fall in customer numbers someone just increased the menu prices to make up for the shortfall. No one noticed that the number of covers, the people attending each week, was falling off dramatically.

The third problem is blame. If you actually do admit you made a mistake, but then you start a witch-hunt, you’ll kill learning. The sole purpose of a witch-hunt is to blame someone else, to direct attention away from you, to someone in the team or in another department, perhaps. ‘Who did this?’ we say. ‘C’mon, who did this?’

So let’s recap: there are three situations where you have the possibility of learning, but your action – how you respond to the mistake – can kill learning.

1. You can kill learning if you don’t admit you made a mistake.
2. You can kill learning if you try to minimize or conceal the mistake.
3. You can kill learning if you admit there’s been a mistake, but try to blame someone else.

But there’s something even worse just round the corner. If you don’t tackle these three problems, the mistakes won’t be fixed. This could happen all over again tomorrow.

The only surefire way to learn from our mistakes is firstly to admit there’s been a mistake and then to act differently next time.

Don’t waste energy and emotion on finding the culprit to blame them. By all means find the weak link in the chain of command, so you can help, but don’t focus on the past, on what happened in the past.

Instead focus on the future. What needs to happen next time? Then just do it. Act differently in the future.

Successful learning involves analysing the past and present, yes, but it’s mainly about acting differently in the future. Learning is about change. And to lead change successfully you need to accept that we’re human and we make mistakes.

Use the way that you personally deal with mistakes – your own and those that others make – to inspire your team. Don’t blame them – build them up – improve their skills or knowledge for the future. Remember the words from the immortal song – it ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it. That’s what gets results.

Learning – your learning, your team’s learning, your company’s learning – demands change.

How much change are you prepared to embrace when it comes to admitting mistakes? What’s your mistakes policy? If you haven’t got one, get one.

If you want the leadership success you deserve, get the leadership training you deserve. Download more free articles and leadership training videos from Steven Sonsino, an international business school professor and author of the Amazon bestseller “The Seven Failings of Really Useless Leaders”
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The Ultimate Leadership Strategy

Put people first. It’s the great cliche, isn’t it? When a business school professor like me asks you ‘what’s the most productive leadership style?’, you know the answer don’t you? Put people first.

But if everyone knows the answer, why aren’t more people doing it? Why aren’t executives focused on motivating and inspiring their people?

The reality is that people put profits first. They focus on the short-term financial gain without realizing that there is a direct link between putting people first and building outrageous profits.

In one of the very few great books on this topic, ‘The Human Equation’, Jeffrey Pfeffer from Stanford Business School paints a simple and striking picture of how to build profits by putting people first. I don’t have a lot of time here to recap the whole book, but if you want some bald statistics, if you need numbers to justify putting people first, then get this book.

Pfeffer tackles head-on some of the sacred cows of many CEOs today – he particularly challenges the view that downsizing, competing on price, and operating globally are really necessary. It’s very thought provoking.

One of the most striking pieces of evidence Pfeffer cites is a study of one thousand large US companies. Pfeffer found that investors place a much higher value on companies that improved their bottom line through revenue growth, rather than cost cutting.

Why? Well, investors want growing companies not shrinking ones. You can only cut cost once, says Pfeffer, or only a limited number of times, before you bite into the muscle of the business. Cut too much and you lose the competitive edge that makes the company great.

You might be wondering at this point, though, isn’t downsizing something that the US does a great deal? And isn’t the US one of the most competitive and innovative countries in the world? You’d be right. So there’s an apparent paradox here.

Not so, says Pfeffer. He reminds us not to confuse success that occurs IN SPITE OF what leaders do, with success that comes BECAUSE OF what leaders do.

I love this idea. That not everything you do leads to financial success. If you are successful enough – and profitable enough – that success will mask some of the mistakes you make.

Probably the most significant practical key of this story is for me captured by a quote from Sir Richard Branson, founder of the UK’s Virgin Group. At Virgin, says Branson, the people come first, the customers second and the shareholders third.

In a speech to the London Institute of Directors, Branson said: ‘In the end, the long-term interests of shareholders are actually damaged by giving them superficial short-term priority.’

And this is the key point, isn’t it? Customer satisfaction generates recommendations and gets our clients back for more. That’s what it’s about, after all.

But to get great customer satisfaction you need great customer service. And to have excellent standards in customer service means having staff who are proud of the company they work for and who respect the managers of the business.

Pfeffer closes the book with a key quote from Sam Walton, who built the Wal-Mart empire. ‘The more you share profits with your people, the more profit will accrue to the company. Why? Because the way management treats its people is exactly how its people will treat the customers.’

If you want some bald statistics, or if you need numbers to justify putting people first, you must get this book. Then convince everyone around you, who isn’t already doing it, to read it too. Let’s really try to put people first. It will be profitable.

If you want the leadership success you deserve, get the leadership training you deserve. Download more free articles and leadership training videos from Steven Sonsino, an international business school professor and author of the Amazon bestseller “The Seven Failings of Really Useless Leaders”
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Three Steps to Unleashing Your Team’s Potential

Most people could perform at a much higher level than they do if their boss created a suitable environment for them to flourish in. In many instances, it’s the boss who is holding the team back by trying to control it too closely.

So ask yourself, do you set unnecessary boundaries for your teams? If you have no idea, maybe you should ask them. “How am I holding you back?” you could ask.

One useful technique to adopt is a KISS strategy: use it in this discussion and you won’t go far wrong.

Ask your people these four questions:
1) What should I KEEP doing?
2) What do I need to IMPROVE?
3) What should I STOP doing?
4) And what should I START doing?

What else can you do to unleash the potential in your people? It’s about open conversations. I call these ‘No Limits’ conversations.

This is what you should do:
1) Keep your people informed with face-to-face briefings. This helps them feel useful and important. Clear and open communication is critical.

What does this mean? It means you’ve got to make sure you have a great team briefing mechanism in place. The Work Foundation in the UK (formerly the Industrial Society) has a useful team briefing mechanism you should consider. It’s simple, powerful and effective. Visit the Work Foundation’s website for details of ‘Managing Best Practice No 72 Team Communication’.

2) Listen to your people and act on their objections when they have good ideas. Do it graciously and make sure folks know whose the idea was.

If, after listening to the objections, you decide not to change your plans, say why you won’t change them. Try this kind of statement: “I can see that you’re not happy with the process, but until we come up with a better one, I’d like to stick to this one for now. And if you have suggestions that will improve it further, do please let me know.”

3) Let people decide HOW to do what you want. The toughest thing you have to do is let your people exercise as much self-direction and self-control as they can on routine things. You may need to say exactly what you want them to achieve or do, but please let them decide how to deliver it.

If your early indications are that what they’re doing isn’t going to hit the target, ask them whether progress is on target. If it then doesn’t actually work, tell them it didn’t work. Some managers assume their teams will know or find out, but this is not always the case.

Ask them what they’re going to do next time. Ask what they need to do differently.

You’ve probably noticed that my suggestions involve talking to your people. You need to create an open environment, where everyone’s ideas are welcomed and explored. And you do that by starting the conversations yourself. YOU are the one who has to change the way things work.

Your team has to know that you’re interested in what they’re doing, but that you’re willing to let them get on with it.

Structured brainstorming techniques are needed here, not just haphazard ’shouting out’ at meetings. I’ve got a great one I use called Nominal Group Technique but there are hundreds out there.

This ‘No Limits’ conversation policy is based on different assumptions about why people do the things they do. Great leaders assume that people actually want to contribute to their jobs. They know that people are ‘pre-motivated to perform’. The trick is how do you get the performance out?

Secondly, great leaders know that the more people are involved in designing and managing their work, the better they will perform.

And thirdly, great leaders know that good and meaningful performance leads to job satisfaction – which creates an even higher performing team. You create a virtuous circle of performance that reinforces your leadership success and the success of your team.

If you want the leadership success you deserve, get the leadership training you deserve. Download more free articles and leadership training videos from Steven Sonsino, an international business school professor and author of the Amazon bestseller “The Seven Failings of Really Useless Leaders”
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