Mastering the Seven Dragons of Leadership
by Janet Britcher
Being a leader is being on an adventure, whether you’re an entrepreneur or a leader in someone else’s organization. In enduring stories of old, the adventurer had to face many challenges, or dragons, to keep the kingdom safe, and also for the personal learning, and personal development which was achieved.
Today’s Leaders are today’s heroes – entering into the unknown, multi tasking, racing to stay ahead, facing unexpected hurdles, relying on courage and quick thinking to come up with solutions under pressure. Decisions must be made with insufficient information, just as in the classic stories of dragons, raging fires and slimy snake pits. The lives of others will be impacted, and the hero’s life – the leader’s life — will be changed and transformed forever.
The leader’s journey involves achieving victory over seven significant challenges. Though they may not really be raging waters and hostile natives, they are necessary stages for a leader to face in order to create and sustain an effective organization. As any business person today knows, no matter what happens with the business, you are guaranteed to learn a lot about yourself, and what’s meaningful to you about the work you do.
Each hurdle requires effort and discomfort, obstacles to overcome, yet yields a prize: skills, insight, self-confidence, maybe even wisdom.
The issue of retention has to do with effective leadership. Those on your management team who are not a good fit, or don’t get to make meaningful contributions, or get to offer their greatest value, or get recognized for their contributions, leave. Retention directly relates to selection and then the quality of authentic leadership.
These seven stages are:
- Recruitment & Selection
- Delegation
- Feedback
- Accountability
- Teamwork
- Agility
- Authenticity
Recruitment & Selection
The first obstacle, the chasm, represents closing the gap from being an individual contributor, to hiring and working with others.
So the first hurdle is recruitment and selection – without this of course you remain an individual contributor, maybe brilliant, possibly rich, but not building a company or a department. The key to effective recruitment, is to turn everything you have heard about trying to match a person to the job spec, and turn it on its head.
Hiring the first few people can be a scary thing. There is a tendency to over rely on a resume, and sometimes to over rely on finding someone whose strengths are the same as yours. What I recommend is finding someone whose values are a fit: innovation, work ethic, appetite for growth, focus on productivity, whatever that is for you, the values fit is the most important selection criteria.
The second cut is skills. Of course skills matter. The reason this is second filter, is that values and motivation are innate, they are part of a person’s personality. Those you want to select for a fit because it’s less likely that that can be learned or changed. Skills like spreadsheet use, reading financial statements, software development, engineering, those are learned over time. If you need a skill that has been learned, remember that it can be learned in the future. Nobody was born knowing how to develop new pharmaceuticals. The same is true with industry knowledge. Hiring someone from a different industry can be enriching to your team – and your perspective. The single biggest self-imposed constraint among hiring managers is limiting candidates by industry and job title. Other factors that don’t show up on the resume can be just as essential to finding a good fit, such as what is the person’s ideal boss. Another reason these qualities are more important than skills is that companies changes course. So you want to choose someone who will be able to do that with you.
The jargon for this type of selection is “core competency” and the process for finding out about it is called Behavioral Event Interviewing. It bring the focus to the experiences a person has actually had, rather than how they think they might hypothetically in the future handle something they currently know nothing about.
Recruiting summary
- First select for values
- Second select for skills
- Focus on core competency (not company names or industry)
- Focus on innate qualities, don’t eliminate a person who may need additional skills which are learnable.
- Use behavioral event interviewing “Tell me about a time when…”
The “prize” of victory in this stage is:
- Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know
- Don’t be afraid to trust your gut
- Choose someone you’ll want even when the business plan changes.
Delegation
The second hurdle is delegation. This is the raging waters, requiring the help of others. In my experience delegation requires a continual adjustment, like flying an airplane. Maybe you know the amount of time a plane is on course: only 20%. The rest of the time it is off course, making adjustments, off course, making adjustments. It’s a great metaphor for delegation.
Sometimes you over-delegate and lose track of what is required and come back in 3 months to find the person way off course. Sometimes you micro manage which carries two costs: you aren’t doing what you are best at because you are too close to the task you have delegated, and presuming you have a qualified person in the role you are very likely irritating him or her. Delegation is hard because in this country we have two models which tend to pull us away from empowered delegation. One model or metaphor is a deep cowboy culture, an independent John Wayne style. The other is a caretaker/provider metaphor. Both of those pile too much responsibility on the leader. It’s not the leader who suffers – it’s the other capable professionals who could otherwise grow and flourish.
Delegating is hard for another reason. The other person doesn’t have your brain, and that’s disappointing. If you are going to delegate, it would at least be nice for them to have had the exact same parents as you same schooling, same previous job, same values, and same temperament. Be able to read your mind, for example.
Another obstacle is, if you haven’t managed a lot of people before, it can seem like shirking. New (and even some experienced) managers often have the mistaken idea that doing their “real job” is the individual contributor task, and all those interruptions aren’t productive. Learning to manage interruptions, perhaps restructuring them, but recognizing that managing is real work, is an important passage.
To take courage when delegating, and it is a risk, remember that if you want to grow it’s the only way to become scalable. To grow your capacity. Delegate a little at first, a small risk, then bigger and bigger as the person demonstrates their abilities. You decide what the outcome should be but let the person decide how to get there. Remember that the goal is to delegate responsibility, not just the task, although you may have to work up to that.
There is nothing inherently wrong with doing all the work yourself. It’s just that at a point people sometimes burn out, or find they have shrunk their vision for their future to a tiny spec on the map which may not have been what they wanted in the first place.
Although this does not work for everyone, I strongly encourage a regularly scheduled meeting, whether that’s once a week for half hour or once a month for an hour and a half or something in between. In my experience the open door policy is a thought the leader has, doesn’t really work. Staff find it too ambiguous, and only use it for quick clarification rather than increasing scope of responsibility.
Delegation summary
- Think “scalable”
- Establish milestones
- Take bigger chances each time
- Decide the “what”, delegate the “how”
- Delegate responsibility not just task
Delegation “prize” when you achieve victory over this challenge:
- Even though you’re the best — you can’t grow if you do it all.
- The more you delegate the more you can do your best work where you add value.
- As you increase delegation, you are developing your staff for greater things.
Feedback
Feedback is like a riddle, a riddle the wizard demands that you solve.
Giving feedback is one of the most difficult day-to-day jobs of a leader. All leaders I work with know the benefits of giving good clear feedback. Every group I have ever worked with can easily list the reasons to give good feedback, and can even more quickly list their own procrastination tactics. The thing about procrastination is it is corrosive. It makes it harder to address, you get more angry, the message is not as effective, and you reach what some call a Stack Attack: things have stacked up until you can’t take it any more. Feedback actually does get better with practice so here is the guideline for feedback.
In order for it to be effective it has to be specific, concrete and descriptive – that’s to keep you from being judgmental about the person. People can take feedback if it’s not an insult, like “you lazy slug.” Although you have to touch down on the past event, more focus should be about the present or the future because we can’t change the past.
One more thing about feedback. You know how you sometimes think you are saying something nice and glossing over how irritated you really are? Your feedback has to genuinely be accepting of the mistake and the person, and open to the probability there will be an improvement. By the way it turns out many managers have as much trouble giving positive feedback as negative.
The other big riddle for a leader is to be willing to take feedback from others. The dilemma is that some leaders fear that hearing feedback somehow lowers their stature. That is not the case. Openness builds trust and trust builds stature. You can require that the feedback be given in the same respectful way that you give it, see above, and you can also be clear about what parts you may be willing to accommodate and what parts you aren’t.
Feedback tips:
- Be honest and clear
- Be willing to deal with conflict
- Be specific, concrete, focus on present and future. Include impact to company.
- Be willing to hear feedback FROM others
The prize for success when you give feedback
- Direct information builds relationships
- Procrastination has a high price.
- Productivity and job satisfaction for others often increases
- Accepting feedback from others gives you the option of changing.
Accountability
Naturally accountability is represented by raging fires because it tests your mettle. Now there’s a phrase we don’t hear every day. Accountability applies to you and to how you expect others to behave. One area of difficulty, for holding people accountable, is when the other has more expertise in an area than you do – which they should. That’s why you hire. In that case think in terms of outcomes. We all hire people, a plumber, a tax accountant, a mechanic, who have knowledge that’s better than ours. But you have an outcome you want and you’re clear about it.
Similarly when you have an expert on your team, maybe a software engineer or chemical engineer or systems analyst or sales manager, you need to convey what outcome you expect, and even engage that person in a dialogue to mutually set the outcomes and find out what they are willing to be held accountable for.
Surprisingly the generation called Millennials, or Gen Y, say that their managers don’t exercise enough authority. That’s an element of accountability.
If you don’t have as much background in an area of expertise, be clear that even though you’re the leader, you’re also being in effect tutored by the person.
The hidden message in holding people accountable isn’t that you mistrust them, it’s that there are always an infinite number of forks in the road and you want to be sure you and your staff person are taking the same one. It’s a way of being clear. And it requires constant reinforcement.
Accountability summary
- Rely on others’ expertise while being specific about outcomes.
- Be clear about which of your thoughts are ideas, future remote possibilities, and specific expectations.
- Holding people accountable clarifies your priorities and goals, and the reasons you choose certain forks in the road.
Prize for squelching this fire.
- Accountability builds excellence.
- People deliver what you expect of them
- The more you expect the more they deliver
- Growth can be managed.
Teamwork
Hostile natives – this is what you get if you pit one executive against another. It’s what I sometimes call the hub and spoke form of leadership, where you are the focal point and all questions and ideas must come through you. But what happens to all these spears when you do that – they point at you.
The dangers of the “hub and spoke” style of management, is, a leader who becomes the axis around which every thing turns covers no ground. Look at the axis. It doesn’t move. It’s almost stationary, except for going in circles. It’s only when all the spokes work together to form the circumference that some territory gets covered. That’s when there is productivity and progress.
Teamwork can be difficult to foster because it means that sometimes you are out of the loop, as your team is working out their relationship and their ideas without you. That’s a necessary part of the process. You also have to be willing to be very open to the idea of being pressured by two or more people, to take on a new course, a new direction. Remember in the back of your mind to appreciate the team aspects of this, even if you disagree with the recommendation or veto the outcome. And the rewards need to be in line: if you want team work to work, a portion of financial rewards has to be based on the team effectiveness.
It can feel, to the faint of heart, like giving away the keys to the castle, to entertain the ideas of objectors, of “revolutionaries.” But then you remember, it’s really to the artisans and generals. You’re giving the keys to the castle to the people who also live here. Who work with you to create this organization.
Volumes of books have been written on teamwork. Here are the highlights in my experience.
Teamwork summary
- Encouraging dialogue between management team members
- It’s a victory when others combine forces to suggest a solution.
- Reward what you say you value – be sure team results are a component of compensation.
Prize for fostering teamwork, and including the hostile natives
- Combined thinking produces better ideas.
- Teamwork builds trust & productivity, and job satisfaction.
- You get to do more high-value activities.
Agility
Snake pit requires agility. Picture Indiana Jones dancing around the snakes.
You hear a lot about goal setting and focus in leadership. One of the biggest challenges today is to be able to change on a dime. Which is the opposite of clear goals and focus. It is a strength not a weakness, to be able to change course with sufficient information. Balance tenacity with flexibility and opportunism. And keep taking in market information, including your own clients, market trends, and competitors. So many of us are caught up in the all American work ethic that we can forget, the course with less resistance can be right.
Keep in touch with the outside world. Attend conferences, send your associates to trade shows and professional associations. Keep the information coming in.
Agility summary
- Balance tenacity with flexibility.
- Keep taking in market information.
Prize for agility
- Nobody knows the future anyhow so trust your knowledge and instincts.
- Be sure to use mistakes for all they are worth.
- Sometimes the easier course turns out to be right.
Authenticity
Be yourself. The journey of leadership, especially entrepreneurship, is to discover all you can offer. It’s really a fantastic opportunity to envision a bigger you. To test yourself in ways you would never imagine. I love the energy and innovation and courage of entrepreneurs so I listen to a lot of their presentations. Each story of course is different but this common theme emerges: first comes the anxious joke: if I knew what I was getting into I would never have done it. Then comes the voice of experience: I wouldn’t have traded this for anything. And that’s even from the people whose company did not strike it rich. Because the richness, as they knew in the way back long ago stories, comes from the journey. The most important part of the prize is your own enhanced sense of yourself, the challenges you stood up to, the people you met, the things you learned, the friendships you formed and the insights you earned all along the way, you get to keep forever.
- Be willing to be uncertain
- Be willing to be very curious
- Pay attention to gut instincts – they usually have important information
Prize for authenticity
- You survive
- You thrive
- You grow
You get to keep all the things you learned – forever.
Janet Britcher first presented this at the Entrepreneur’s Network, part of the IEEE.