Callan…Coffee…Contemplation for the Week of March 10th
The Leader as Communicator – Part II
There is such as thing as the language of leadership—a vocabulary peculiar to great leaders and necessary to unleash championship performance. One good way to understand the language of leadership is to understand what it is not: it is the opposite of technical or bureaucratic language. Technical or bureaucratic language (think here of those long mission statements or multi-page policy letters) are overly passive, impersonal, and burdened with complex terminology and techno-babble that neither inspire heroic action nor create a sense of ownership (beyond the person who drafted them). Conversely, the language of leadership uses basic conversational tones; speaks in the active voice; and is highly personal and contextual. The language of leadership uses stories, parables, metaphors, and analogies to create vivid mental images listeners can relate to deeply and feel intuitively. The language of leadership connects the listener to outcomes worth the effort of pursuing.
The Leader as a Beacon – Part I
Because heroic leaders focus on significance as the end state of their leadership, they become beacons to those they lead—true examples of expert leadership. Like a lighthouse on a high cliff, these leader’s example shines through the chaos of the daily grind, pierces the fog of an uncertain future, and elevates above the banal politics of petty cultures. As beacons, heroic leaders stand steadfast as examples of excellence regardless of time, circumstance, convenience, or political correctness. Leaders become trustworthy beacons of excellence by transforming their leadership fulcrum from technical expertise (TE) to emotional intelligence (EQ). Yes, early in our careers we need a firm grounding in cognitive intelligence and TE; however, as we expand our leadership frontage we must move beyond purely threshold technical capabilities and learn to master ourselves. If we are able to successfully navigate this movement from TE to EQ, then we’ll become that resolute beacon, that vital example, because we’ll be firmly grounded in self control, self regulation, and resonant social skills.
The Leader as a Beacon – Part II
One might ask: What if I don’t seek to master myself and move from technical expertise towards the higher ground of emotional intelligence? What’s the harm if I don’t become that beacon of excellence? The answer is simple and stark: You will fail yourself, and you will fail those you lead. As documented by Daniel Goleman’s research on this topic, leaders who failed to navigate the transition to emotional intelligence failed because of self inflicted “fatal flaws.” Like the blind spots on a vehicle moving down a busy highway, fatal flaws prevent leaders from successfully projecting resonant leadership because they destroy the trust and deep bonds necessary for championship performance. Leaders with emotional intelligence nurture things like camaraderie, companionship, mutual affection, and esprit; leaders without emotional intelligence destroy them. And as Goleman also documented, the two primary fatal flaws that ruin such leaders are rigidity (inability to adapt) and poor relations (alienated their teams).
The Leader as an Architect – Part I
It’s essential that leaders first focus on mastering themselves and developing their vision; however, we must then shift focus to execution: How do we realize our plan? How do we make it stick? It’s a mistake to focus only on vision and forget the concrete actions needed to materialize end states. When we move to creating execution plans, we are now moving into the realm of management. Here a leader operates somewhat like an architect, creating the blue print and mechanism to build an organization to last. We begin by properly seeing the organization as a “system of systems,” an ecosystem, comprised of three core elements: (1) an ethos (culture, climate, atmosphere), (2) authority (allocation of responsibility), and (3) technical elements (policy and procedures). As an ecosystem, each of these three elements has its own nature but the entire ecosystem must be understood and managed as a whole. The key architectural action is this: Create mechanisms to measure the entire organization, and create mechanisms that endure. People will leave, mechanisms endure.
The Leader as an Architect – Part II
Previously, we talked about leaders creating mechanisms to measure the entire organization’s health, vitality, and readiness. Why is that vital? Because teams don’t last; people will move on. Moreover, we never want to build an organization reliant solely on one individual leader. Yes, great leaders make a difference, often profound differences; however, organizations dependent upon a single great leader will likely atrophy and collapse once that leader departs if mechanisms are not built to effectively enable succession, knowledge transfer, organizational resiliency, and the creation of internal talent pools of younger leaders ready to assume the mantle of leadership. Enduring excellence cannot rest solely on the back of a single charismatic leader. To ensure a single leader doesn’t ultimately become a single point of failure, we must create, and then align, mechanisms to sustain our ethos, constantly renew the allocation of authority, and adapt technical policies and procedures to agilely respond to change.
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