Leadership tips - 3 things you should be doing
I was recently asked to share my top three insights by someone who was just about to begin their first significant leadership position. This made me stop and consider what advice to give, as there is so much material available on leadership. A quick search in Amazon, for example, suggests there are more than 100,000 book titles that would fulfil the brief. Not wanting to waste mine or the intended recipients time, I needed to make my answer standout from the more generic and mainstream sources available. I decided to go with a ‘top tips’ approach that I believe all leaders should remember. These were gratefully received, and I thought worth sharing in a wider post.
Provide the Energy. It’s amazing how quickly your initiatives, shiny new processes and even grand plans, seem to slow down or grind to a halt the minute you take your eyes off them. Atrophy can sneak in and prevent progress, so you need to continually add energy. Groups, projects, initiatives, morale, culture, they all lose momentum when someone isn't adding energy to them and it is the responsibility of any leader to provide that energy.
Create an environment in which people can succeed. Your role as a leader is to get the best out of people; to make it possible for them to do their best work and to create an environment where they can succeed. Always try to provide autonomy and empower people; let them go, but be careful they don’t feel abandoned. It is the responsibility of a leader to establish an environment which encourages talent and quality and is hostile to impediment and waste.
Provide a higher motivation. Building on the previous point, everyone needs a purpose which transcends their job description; the reason to be here, in this job, working for this company. As an example, developers aren’t here to simply write code to build a website; they're here to make new car buying easier for everyone or to provide life-saving intelligence to GP’s. The better you get at describing their role and why it matters for customers, the closer people get to doing their best work. It is the responsibility of a leader to favour being highly descriptive over being highly prescriptive, because it creates the space for teams to contribute on another level and not just to follow orders.
Bonus Tip
You can’t over-communicate. The Technology Chief interviews with Phil Pavitt, Steve Plunkett and Steve White, all specifically talk about communication being a key skill for technology leaders to develop. Communication, as you can imagine, is a whole topic in itself, but my tip for any leader is to make it a daily habit. Communicate your strategic goals to as many people as you can in lots of different ways.
Book recommendation
Picking a leadership book, when you consider Amazon’s 100,000+ titles, is clearly a challenge. I can say that, of the considerable subset of those available that I have read, I often find myself recommending “Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action” by Simon Sinek.