A Booster Dose!
How does a leader influence everyone around & enable them to function smoothly? Is it just about a few regular steps or intermittently peppering some of those booster doses? What works & what doesn't?
1.0 Background
A really long time ago there was a mental toughness and personality awareness workshop conducted. In as much as it happens with 98+% of the population attending workshops everything right from the central idea being projected, peers, conductor(s), conversations had over the course of the (n) days spent there remains forgotten, totally wiped out but for just one thing that sticks permanently in my memory.
And, that often happens to be one of those examples / narrations used by the conductor over the sessions to explain a point so that we could understand the inherent concepts perfectly well.
I’d like you to go down memory lane and think, you’d be really surprised as to how you remember one / many such narratives used over those sessions when you would have forgotten almost everything else around it.
The Narrative
It was a bunch of 15 people in the hall attending the workshop and it was that time of the noon post a heavy sponsored lunch when almost everyone was mentally half-present with the other half sleeping happily. The conductor who was rather soft-spoken wanted to wake us all up at once and he couldn’t have done any better over a lack of his baritone.
He wrote a sentence on the whiteboard and started off by pointing to one person sitting at the back benches.
So, look at the board and tell me now,
- “How many English words containing 3-letters or more do you think you could form out of the sentence written there?”
The guy thought for a while and said,
- Well! I’d say about 30.
And, the exercise continued over every person present there in the hall, turn-by-turn.
The highest claim raked in by one of the front-benchers was perched at 60.
Next up, when everyone was given 5 minutes and asked to get down to the task of actually writing those words down, a bit of a realization had sunk in collectively in the hall with the actual count shooting up at least by 200% in each person’s case.
The motto, almost clear and evident to everyone present there was:
“You don’t know what you are capable of until you have to do it.”
And, when you get down to actually doing it, is when you get to unlock your superhuman capabilities. And, that is the real step-up transformation that helps you scale great heights.
More often than not in reality, it becomes important to buckle down and realize the importance of gauging one’s own capability and it becomes the responsibility of the leadership to constantly motivate and influence people over recognizing the fact that they don’t have a hang of their real ability and to push them to realize their actual potential which is truly unlimited and start firing all cylinders.
2.0 Leadership Styles
The common reason people feel leadership is difficult is because of the fact that they have to motivate and influence another team member to put in the best of efforts and this pinch could be more pronounced if one had made that transition more recently from a previous IC role.
Firstly, leaders need to be self-aware and carry / project high levels of empathy at all times putting aside all other purposes / cross-purposes and have a clear understanding of the goals and break them down tying them to specific outcomes. Not all situations that a leader steps into is the same always and that’s why there is no real adherence to one single style of leadership which again accentuates the rationale behind having many styles to it.
Some well-known styles of Leadership are: -
Authoritative / Commanding
Democratic / Collaborative
Delegative (Laissez-Faire)
And, as much as there are these styles, it is just also the widely accepted gospel truth that many a times a leader will have to take to each of these styles depending on the audience and the situation.
One thing abundantly clear from the graph above is how leadership evolves in itself starting from: -
Directing as in spelling out the specifics, telling people what to do
To Coaching as in mentoring & intermittent hand-holding to a large degree
To reach a stage of Supporting where they’d make themselves scarcer by being available only at those crucial junctures when they think their inputs are needed to define the next steps / phase
To finally reach a stage of Delegating where they define the outcomes and completely entrust their team / members to do a good job of it
Also notice how the effect it bears on the mentees / members is represented over a continuous state of evolution right from an Under-developed / Developing to a completely Developed state.
“A seasoned leader knows how & when to delegate whilst also constantly being aware of the proceedings in gauging their alignment over the required outcomes.”
3.0 Leadership => To Influence
So, it’s a given that leadership and a leader’s journey would start off by working closely with and getting people / teams to follow him / her gradually evolving over phases with peers requiring lower support -> higher support -> autonomous / independent level of decision making and taking up tasks head-on executing them.
To achieve all of this, at all stages a leader would be required to rely on various levels of influencing.
It has become all the more crucial with more and more product-based organizations especially in the start-up space leading the way by onboarding themselves onto the way of product-led-growth and moving towards more of an open / collaborative culture at the workplace where the boss-subordinate / manager-team member relationship has almost gone inexistent by hopping onto the Agile bandwagon and building iteratively in silos.
But, people who have had even a small stint to an elaborate experience over it know that it is more easily said than done. It really goes much beyond the framework of rules that’s been laid out. Some kind of a booster dose may be required from time to time to get everything back on track.
So, here is a list of factors that contribute towards building one of the most sought-after abilities required for a leader’s survival – Influential Ability.
Let’s explore each of these factors that could help in building this trait.
3.1 Build Connections
Make sure you spend time with the team members esp. those who are immediately reporting to you over building an understanding of who they are, what their aspirations are. Build a bond, a connection with them at a professional level so that both of you could hinge on that as and when required. You could connect with them by actively involving them in a few of your decisions / thought processing exercises.
3.2 Totally empathize with their thoughts & needs
The only way you can get anyone to feel more belonged and respected is by giving them their due at all times by giving them their space to present their thoughts, listening to them with absolute keenness whilst noting them down and branching out into detailed discussions if needed. Many people prolong their stay at an organization because of the great team they want to be a part of as they hit a great rapport and that converts into impeccable camaraderie with even the manager they report into as they receive the required recognition and a platform to harvest their futures on.
3.3 Listen to their side of the story first (Never start with persuading)
All members of teams are individuals and are prone to possess an opinion over anything that is either work-related or not. There may be cases where leadership may have to enforce a few things as it may be the need of the hour. During such instances, never ever start off with “Ok, you all are supposed to do <x, y, z> in that order” and then counter argue with your team / persuade them to prove that you are right and they have to follow you.
Better approach is to say, “We may have to do something like (x, y, z) and now we need to figure out how to go about it, lets’ discuss”. Always make it a point to start with their thoughts, their side of the story and who knows post that exercise your path as a leader maybe so clear and it may require no persuading whatsoever.
3.4 Ask questions to get to the bottom of the issue they’re facing
Every one carries a different train of thought and sometimes it may be the case that those thoughts don’t really match over a given wavelength or could even be completely polarized. One would obviously resort to complaining as he would tend to feel that his thought process is being attacked which is only a natural course of action that the human defense system is prone to choosing.
When someone presents their thoughts over a certain topic especially in the negative or the affirmative, it is important to first understand their motivations in trying to get to the bottom of the issues they are facing.
3.5 Mind your body language
Many people behave differently over different situations and there could all types of people in a team, some very calm and composed when some really aggressive who press the panic button really very fast. It becomes crucial to maintain a really positive and confident body language over maintaining consistent movements, gestures that abundantly show your interest in engaging with, being very approachable and open with all your peers and team members.
This has taken all the more prominence with the turnout of events in a post-covid world we are living in today.
3.6 Always use an empathetic tone
About 20 years back it was very common to see and often times it also happened as soon as someone used to transition into leadership where their whole tone would go from being normal to commanding. Not anymore, they don’t work in today’s world.
It’s all about exuding empathy and trying to dig in to understand what someone thinks and how they respond to it. And to do it you obviously need to work a lot on your tone as it needs to be soothing yet motivated enough to be driven towards the outcomes you’re governing.
3.7 Build an understanding based on strengths / weaknesses
Familiarity may have been known to breed contempt. But, it is important to solve that and beat that down by employing a certain degree of curiosity wherein you’d probe to understand the strengths and weaknesses of team member(s) and you’d facilitate that by being very observant, taking notice of / special care to know the teams, maintaining a level openness built over a system of giving and receiving feedback whilst keeping a tab on how it is being factored in.
3.8 Form a few alternate strategies (Plan A, B, C)
The best of leaders would have scoped the problem, spent enough time around the people concerned, stakeholders both internal & external in order to assess the impact of it whilst also have an inch-deep mile-wide view of how their proposal / suggested course of the solution is going to affect everyone around who is concerned with it.
It is a highly recommended exercise to take some time before those important meetings / calls / briefing with your teams to curate what may be few alternative strategies plans of A, B, C alongside having an estimation of the benefits & pitfalls whilst being prepared to take in questions and discuss what that crucial direction to take should be and why.
3.9 Recognize talent and aspirations
Wherever you are working as a leader it always boils down to working effectively with people. To garner efficient and seamless collaboration one would have to contribute wholesomely to the goal, be it over a short / long term. For that to be possible a leader would need to have to take notice of what talent, ability each of his immediate reports possess.
Also, to have a long-term work relationship and retain the team over a period of time, a leader would have done exceptionally well to go a level deeper over understanding the aspirations of his team members and fostering a culture that underpins individual growth over laying out a clear path for them. That would not only give them a sense of belonging but also send a strong message that their leadership cares about their personal growth and well-being just as much as they care about the goals, outcomes, deliverables within the purview of their jobs.