Subscribe to RSS

Jo Owen
Leadership expert and author

How to become a leader, not a follower

Posted: 20th January 2012

Business Today asks business management guru Jo Owen about the art of successful leadership.

Can anybody become a good leader?

 

Yes, anyone can lead. The bad news is that not many people in leadership positions are really leading. Leadership is not about position: it is about performance.

John Major was famously attacked for “being in office, not in power”. And that came from his own colleagues. He was in a leadership position, but not leading.

At the other end of the scale is William Rodriguez. He was a janitor. He happened to be a janitor at the World Trade Centre on 9/11. He was the last person out of the centre, because he had been guiding and helping many other people to safety that day. He was not in a leadership position, but he was leading.

Henry Kissinger defined leadership as “the art of taking people where they would not have gone by themselves”. William Rodriguez passed that test easily. It is a test that any manager in a matrix organisation also needs to pass. You do not succeed by managing the status quo. To be a leader, you have to make a difference. And in flat organisations, that means making things happen through people you do not control: colleagues in other departments, customers, suppliers, bosses all need to be influenced and led in a direction that you believe is right.

What are the main qualities of the best leaders?

 

Typically, successful leaders have three qualities:

Vision. This is not Martin Luther King and “I have a dream…”. If you stand on your desk and tell the office you have a dream, you may not be seen as a leader. For leaders, a vision is much simpler. It is a story in three parts: “This is where we are; this is where we are going; this is how we will get there”. Most of us can manage a three part story. And if you want to make it really motivational, add a fourth part: “This is your very important role in helping us get there”. Make your vision personal.

Motivation. Motivation gets us into the territory of men in white suits flapping their arms on stage and urging us to believe in ourselves and to drink the Kool Aid. Clearly, there are dozens of things you can do daily to motivate or demotivate your team. But one thing consistently comes out as most important: show that you care for your team member and their career. This takes time and effort, but is an investment which pays out time and again. And it is not about being nice and buying favours. Caring means that you are prepared to have the difficult but constructive conversation early, so that you give people a chance to improve. If you want to be liked as a leader you will be weak: you will always compromise. To paraphrase Machiavelli, it is better to be trusted than to be liked. Being liked is fickle; you will be liked only until the next favour is granted. Trust is the true currency of leadership and influence.

Decisiveness, especially in crises. Crises accelerate careers: you succeed fast or fail fast. Most people are risk averse and quietly hedge their bets when the inevitable moment of truth arrives: they play for time, deny the problem, point the finger elsewhere or wait for a consensus to emerge. These are good survival behaviours, but they are not good leadership behaviours. Crises make leaders. In a crisis a good leader will recognise the problem early, take control and act. Oddly, it does not always matter what the leader does, as long as something happens: any decision is better than no decision. The important thing is to build momentum and build hope. If you need to change direction later on, followers may grumble, but they will follow.

How important is charisma?

 

As a good leader, you will quickly learn to see what is not there, hear what is silent and read what has not been written. So you will have noticed that charisma and inspiration are leadership requirements. That is good. I would not accuse the thousands of leaders I have met of being charismatic. And most of us are not born charismatic, and the NHS has not invented a charisma transplant service yet. Instead, if you have a clear vision, you are motivational and you are decisive you will find yourself being surrounded by willing followers. They may even call your learned professionalism “inspirational”, because it will seem to be inspirational relative to the poor levels of leadership most people endure most of the time. What are the main mistakes made by aspiring leaders?

Typically, aspiring leaders fall into one of at least three traps. The deadliest is the problem of the leader in the locker room. Look at sports and you find many great managers who were journeymen players, while many great players could not run a bath, let alone a team. Doing and leading are different. The job of the manager is not to make every tackle and score every goal. The job of the manager is to pick and train the team, decide the tactics. And yet many people, when they are promoted, fall into the trap of the player who is made manager: they have a success formula based on playing, tackling and scoring goals and they assume that this is what is required at the next level up. So they work harder and harder at tackling and scoring goals, and then they are fired because they are not leading properly.

Do the skills of leadership change the higher up you go?

 

Yes, all leaders discover that the rules of survival and success change with each promotion. What works at one level will not work at the next level. Typically, when people start their career they learn a technical skill: law, accounting, researching, marketing, teaching. But technical skills become less and less important the higher you go. Instead, people and political skills become more important. People skills are about making things happen through other people, rather than doing them all yourself. Political skills are about handling ambiguity; dealing with crises and conflicts; building power and influence; doing deals; aligning interests; picking your battles; and changing things for the better.

How important are respect and being liked for leaders?

 

Weak leaders like to be liked; strong leaders build respect, trust and influence. Being liked is an optional extra. Ineffective leaders think that title and leadership go hand in hand. Effective leaders do not rely on title to lead: they make a difference wherever they are in the organisation.

What about the UK’s record for producing leaders?

 

Some groups emerge into leadership positions more than other groups. In so-called global organisations, it is remarkable how often the leader of the global firm comes from the country where the global firm originated. Perhaps the biggest exception is the UK, where London in particular has been Wimbledonised. Wimbledon may not produce many home grown winners, but it is the destination of choice for many global champions. The same is true of London: many of the leaders in London and UK firms may not be British, but we are able to attract the best talent from around the world. It would be tempting, but wrong, to say that this shows British leadership is failing. By choosing to compete on a truly world stage, Britain can only succeed by attracting the best talent in the world: we should feel encouraged, not discouraged that so many top leaders choose to work here.

Why are there not more women leaders?

 

Women are under-represented group at the top of the leadership tree. We can blame the male culture club in many firms; we can blame the need to choose between family and work. But there is another element which has become clear in work I have done preparing people to become head teachers in challenging schools. Male candidates put themselves up for headship even when they are only 60 per cent ready; they pitch themselves confidently and often get in and succeed. Female candidates, in contrast, often want to be 95 per cent or 100 per cent ready to lead before they apply for a headship. But in reality, you can never be 100 per cent ready for the leap to headship: it is always a shock. There is no reason either sex should be better as leaders, but as long as men are ready to bully their way to the top, they will tend to dominate the top positions. Leadership is rarely given: it has to be taken.

This article first appeared in Business Today, Issue 4. To read the entire publication, click the ebook.