Leaders need followers, and following is a voluntary behavior. By selectively showing a weakness being irritable on Monday morning, being somewhat disorganized, etc. This builds trust and authenticity. It is obviously important to be cautious and selective when showing your weakness. The authors warn that it is important to test your perceptions with a trusted friend for advisor, and by seeking feedback from those you lead.
Inspirational leaders manage employees with something called tough empathy. Tough empathy means they care intensely about their people, and the work they do. Equally, some well-led businesses do not necessarily produce results, particularly in the short term. Not necessarily. One of the most persistent misperceptions is that people in leadership positions are leaders.
But people who make it to the top may have done so because of political acumen, not necessarily because of true leadership quality. Effective military organizations like the U. Navy have long realized the importance of developing leaders throughout the organization.
A whole cottage industry has grown up around the teaching that good leaders ought to be good coaches. But that thinking assumes that a single person can both inspire the troops and impart technical skills.
More typical are leaders like Steve Jobs whose distinctive strengths lie in their ability to excite others through their vision rather than through their coaching talents. Tough empathy also has the benefit of impelling leaders to take risks. Dyke quickly realized that in order to thrive in a digital world, the BBC needed to increase its expenditures.
He explained this openly and directly to the staff. Once he had secured their buy-in, he began thoroughly restructuring the organization. One final point about tough empathy: those more apt to use it are people who really care about something. They will not only communicate authenticity, which is the precondition for leadership, but they will show that they are doing more than just playing a role.
People do not commit to executives who merely live up to the obligations of their jobs. They want more. They want someone who cares passionately about the people and the work—just as they do. Gender differences can be used to either positive or negative effect. Women, in particular, are prone to being stereotyped according to differences—albeit usually not the ones that they would choose. Partly this is because there are fewer women than men in management positions.
In earlier research, we discovered that many women—particularly women in their fifties—try to avoid this dynamic by disappearing.
They try to make themselves invisible. They wear clothes that disguise their bodies; they try to blend in with men by talking tough. Another response to negative stereotyping is to collectively resist it—for example, by mounting a campaign that promotes the rights, opportunities, and even the number of women in the workplace. But on a day-to-day basis, survival is often all women have time for, therefore making it impossible for them to organize themselves formally. A third response that emerged in our research was that women play into stereotyping to personal advantage.
The cost of such a strategy? It furthers harmful stereotypes and continues to limit opportunities for other women to communicate their genuine personal differences. The most effective leaders deliberately use differences to keep a social distance. Even as they are drawing their followers close to them, inspirational leaders signal their separateness.
Often, a leader will show his differences by having a distinctly different dress style or physical appearance, but typically he will move on to distinguish himself through qualities like imagination, loyalty, expertise, or even a handshake.
Anything can be a difference, but it is important to communicate it. This is a serious disadvantage in a world where networking is so critical and where teams need to be formed overnight.
Some leaders know exactly how to take advantage of their differences. When he wrote his autobiography a few years ago, a British newspaper advertised the book with a sketch of Harvey-Jones. The profile had a moustache, long hair, and a loud tie. The drawing was in black and white, but everyone knew who it was. But he was very clever in developing differences that he exploited to show that he was adventurous, entrepreneurial, and unique—he was John Harvey-Jones.
For instance, Richard Surface, former managing director of the UK-based Pearl Insurance, always walked the floor and overtook people, using his own pace as a means of communicating urgency. Still other leaders are fortunate enough to have colleagues point out their differences for them. What I worry about is that in the process of understanding them you could lose them!
Franz Humer at Roche, for instance, now realizes that he uses his emotions to evoke reactions in others. But there are differences that are more subtle but still have very powerful effects. He is not a smooth city type; in fact, he comes from industrial South Wales. And though generally approachable, Prosser has a hard edge, which he uses in an understated but highly effective way.
At a recent cocktail party, a rather excitable sales manager had been claiming how good the company was at cross-selling products. He even uses this edge to good effect with the top team—it keeps everyone on their toes.
Inspirational leaders use separateness to motivate others to perform better. It is not that they are being Machiavellian but that they recognize instinctively that followers will push themselves if their leader is just a little aloof. Leadership, after all, is not a popularity contest.
Executives can overdifferentiate themselves in their determination to express their separateness. One danger, of course, is that executives can overdifferentiate themselves in their determination to express their separateness.
Indeed, some leaders lose contact with their followers, and doing so is fatal. Once they create too much distance, they stop being good sensors, and they lose the ability to identify and care.
All four of the qualities described here are necessary for inspirational leadership, but they cannot be used mechanically. No one can just ape another leader. So the challenge facing prospective leaders is for them to be themselves, but with more skill.
That can be done by making yourself increasingly aware of the four leadership qualities we describe and by manipulating these qualities to come up with a personal style that works for you.
The question-answer session continued for another 20 minutes, at the end of which the researcher broached the subject again. He marched to the back of the room and displayed his anger before the intellectual brainpower of the entire company. The Sykes story provides the ideal framework for discussing the four leadership qualities. Therefore, his willingness to get angry actually cemented his credibility as a leader.
He also showed that he was a very good sensor. If Sykes had exploded earlier in the meeting, he would have quashed the debate. Since that day, I became interested in leadership and in the power of influence that certain people have on others. Today, with my fifteen years of experience at Danone group, in different leadership roles, I am lucky enough to work as a consultant, coaching leaders around the world. Their most common demand is about becoming more effective leaders.
For me and many researchers agree , an effective leader is one who excels at inspiring people — a leader who succeeds in capturing minds and hearts. But make no mistake here: leadership is also about results. In fact, there is a clear link between leadership and certain factors, such as retention and turnover, employee commitment, customer satisfaction and productivity … and all those factors are linked to the business result.
Effective leadership is not only about performance, nor is it just about power and titles. It is also about meaning. Effective leaders at all levels make a difference to performance because they make performance meaningful. Two internationally acclaimed experts, Professor Robert Goffee and Professor Gareth Jones, from London Business School , have spent more than 20 years researching the characteristics of successful leadership.
Based on their findings, they came up with four key elements that followers want from leaders:. Followers want to feel like a part of a community.
Human beings have a deep-rooted desire to belong, to feel like a part of something bigger, to relate to others. We are social beings who cannot function effectively without a social system that is larger than ourselves. I invite the reader to ask themselves:. The truth is no single label receives the unrelenting and often terse scrutiny public and private than that of a leader.
The pressure is intense, and the risks are high. The good news is the rewards can be tremendous for those who possess the requisite skills and character to not only hold the title of leader but who are also capable of living up to the title. Leadership is about trust, stewardship, care, concern, service, humility, and understanding. If you build into those you lead, if you make them better, if you add value to their lives then you will have earned their trust and loyalty. This is the type of bond that will span positional and philosophical gaps, survive mistakes, challenges, downturns, and other obstacles that will inevitably occur.
Leadership is service. Logic and reason have their place, but they rarely will overcome a strong emotional or philosophical position. Trying to cram your positional logic down the throat of others will simply leave a very bad taste in their mouths. This is a very tough lesson for many to learn, but a critical one if you take your duties, obligations, and responsibilities as a leader seriously.
The best leaders are capable of aligning and unifying opposing interests for the greater good.
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