One day Peter Drucker -the guru of modern management- received a phone call from a potential consulting client, and she was asking: “We’d like you to run a leadership seminar for us on how to acquire charisma”. To her surprise, Drucker responded that there was more to leadership than the popular focus on personal “dash” or charisma. He added: “leadership is work”.
What Drucker told his client was affirmed few years later by Jim Collins in his book “Good to Great” where he rigorously researched eleven companies that were able to sustain their superior financial performance for at least fifteen years, and he found out that leaders of these companies didn’t seek fame or huge compensation. Instead, they had one thing in common that distinguished them from the leaders of other “just good” companies: They embodied a paradoxical mix of personal humility and professional will, or what Collins calls: “level-5 leadership”.
So, it seems that being really a great leader hinges more on your thoughts, beliefs, and actions, and less on your inspirational appeal, ability to manage impressions, or rhetoric. This is also consistent with the latest developments in the field of leadership research, namely authentic leadership and positive leadership. But the question now is: What is it exactly, that great leaders do differently?
They focus on their strengths:Great leaders truly know their own strengths (i.e. things they do very well and enjoy doing them). They focus on these strengths, improve them, and get the most out of them. They don’t waste time or energy trying to fix their weaknesses. Mediocre leaders, on the contrary, often try to be good in all areas of leadership, ending up without excelling in any single area. In their book “Strengths Based Leadership”, Tom Rath and Barry Conchie challenge the conventional wisdom which states that: “You can be anything you want to be, if you just try hard enough”, and argue that it is flawed. They assert, instead, that you cannot be anything you want to be –but you can be a lot more of who you already are.
Gallup Inc. interviewed thousands of leaders in business and government sectors over decades, and found that great leaders do not share any particular strength. However, what they all have in common is that they truly know their strengths and they lead by them. It’s ironic, however, how a lot of managers are blind about their real capabilities, or even worse, believe they are good at the very same things claimed by their followers to be their weak points. So, the starting point for you here is to develop a solid self-awareness that helps you realize your own strengths and weaknesses. “StrengthsFinder” is an instrument developed by Dr. Donald O. Clifton, the father of strengths psychology, to help leaders assess their leadership abilities. It has 34 individual leadership themes, which can be categorized under four main domains of leadership strength: Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building, and Strategic Thinking. You can access this instrument via the link: www.strengthsfinder.com
They assemble strong teams that complement their own skills:Knowing that they cannot excel in all aspects of leadership, great leaders surround themselves with strong teams that complement their own skills. This creates the skill diversity that can be even more important than demographic diversity when tackling complex business issues. Mediocre leaders usually commit the classical mistake of staffing people who only mirror their own traits and echo their thinking styles, and hence miss on the opportunity to tap into a richer pool of talents. They only create an unneeded skill redundancy.
Great leaders also use their strength-based approach for developing their followers. They realize that each individual is different, with a unique blend of skills, passions, and motivations. They assign each team member a role that matches their strengths, while at the same time managing around the member’s weaknesses. For example, if someone is not good with numbers, it’s unlikely that they will become a great bookkeeper no matter what amount of training they receive. As advised by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman in their must-read book: “First, Break All The Rules”, there are three ways to manage around worker’s weaknesses: 1) put in place a support process or technology to compensate the lack of talent, 2) find them a compatible partner, or 3) assign them an alternative role.
They spend more time with their best people:This sounds counter intuitive, as it might be widely accepted that best people are already performing so well that they don’t need much devotion from the leader, and that a leaders has to spend more time with the strugglers in the team to develop them and make them more productive. Gallup’s researchers Buckingham and Coffman Revealed that this is not what the best leaders do. Best leaders try to spend more time with their stars to let them know they are their best people and to pamper them to maintain their top performance. Besides, leaders can learn what works well only from their top performers, while spending the time with poor performers will merely allow them to know what doesn’t work.
Another practice of great leaders is assigning their best people to the greatest opportunities, not the greatest problems. They understand that assigning best people to solve issues - hoping to turn around the bad situation- may pay off, but they also know that solving issues will just lead to an average performance, and that it’s the pursuit of great opportunities that will yield great results.
They face the reality of the situation:Remember that great leaders are humble, so they do not get blind by success, and they do not just ignore facts because these facts are uncomfortable to them. They also possess a strong professional determination, so they always want to face the reality of their situations since they realize that this is the only way to make quality decisions. They acknowledge that they neither have all information nor possess all answers. So, they listen carefully and respectfully to their people, rationally challenge the assumptions that lie under the surface of the conversation, pose questions that trigger the most insightful debates, attend to discussions with no preset decisions or judgments, and tolerate or even stimulate opposing views.
When evaluating decisions they or their organizations have made, great leaders adopt an objective and honest perspective, create a climate of accountability, and seek to identify learning opportunities, rather than trying to shift the blame or look for a scapegoat. This has a dual positive impact on their followers and their organizations: Followers will perceive them as trustworthy, credible leaders and will become more motivated to follow them. Organizations will actually learn from events, accumulate useful experiences, and eventually will break free from mediocrity.
They spur optimism and hope:After almost a century of his risky voyage, the story of Sir Ernest Shackelton, the legendary Antarctic explorer, continues to inspire other leaders on the role of optimism in effective leadership and in crisis management. Interestingly enough, the mission that earned Shackelton his reputation as a great leader was a failed mission. Polar ice crushed his ship, the “Endurance”, but he managed to return all his men safely despite the lack of supplies and the loss of contact with the outside world. In a gallant act, he and a few men of his crew sailed a small lifeboat for 800 miles from Antarctica to a whaling station on South Georgia Island to bring back help. Even in these terrible circumstances, Shackleton never whined or showed fear or frustration, and his men credited his optimism and resourcefulness for saving their lives.
The CEO of Disney, Robert Iger, confirms this notion when he says:  “What I’ve learned over time is that optimism is a very, very important part of leadership. However, you need a dose of realism with it. People don’t like to follow pessimists”. Gallup Inc. has recently offered the empirical support to Iger’s belief when it surveyed 10,000 employees from 2005 to 2008 and found that around 70% of those who feel optimistic about their future prospects at their companies become fully engaged in their work.
They handle negativity quickly:Having one unhappy or unmotivated team member, who chronically complaints, and is self-centered, uncooperative and unproductive, can have just the same effect like a bad apple, by drawing energy out of other team members. And, if left unhandled, their negativity can spread and damage team spirit and cohesion. While many leaders may prefer to avoid dealing with people with negativity or ignore them on the hope that they will change by themselves, great leaders confront negativity with no procrastination. They try either to win those people over, or at least defuse their negative energy and contain their effect.