As a leadership coach, trainer, and specialists I am always surprised at how easy it can be to improve performance in most teams. That is perhaps because so many people in business are not engaged. Industry consensus is that the main reason for that is poor leadership. Managers do not really understand leadership. I guess that this is even more true among the technical and engineering teams that I work with, since so many of their managers rose from engineering ranks and probably didn’t set out to be people leaders.
Leadership always starts with followership. As the song says, “We all gotta serve somebody.” So there is always a tradeoff between serving yourself and serving others. To do this well requires a host of skills.
First of all knowing your own values. Then connecting with a vision you feel contributes in the world so that you can align your personal values with that vision.
This means you need the communication and questioning skills to elicit and understand exactly what those you serve want so that you can use that as guidance to align your own goals with theirs. This is one of the top areas where most people fail. Can you define what those you serve want to see, hear, and even feel that will let them know you are successfully helping them? For that matter have they even defined it?
Many bosses treat your services much like art, they know it when they see it, but they couldn’t tell you exactly what makes it it is bad or good.
To be a leader you have to know how you and those you serve will define success.
Another key skill of leadership is the ability to negotiate commitments. To be successful with those you serve you need detailed specifications for your agreements. Otherwise you will get to the end and find you have built the wrong widget or delivered the wrong service.
You also need to be able to create a vision for the delivery of some products or services that your boss or customer wants and is willing to pay for. This means that you must always define what you want in relationship and reciprocity to others.
Then you have to generate and communicate a meaningful sounding vision to those people you enroll to help you deliver on your commitments. You have to help them understand what is required and sometimes even how they must go about providing it to you. You negotiate agreements and commitment from the people you enroll so that you can assess whether they can and will deliver and to make sure that they do so in a timely manner and with an acceptable level of quality.
These negotiation and assessment skills will make or break you your success.
Leadership comes down to a set of learnable personal and interpersonal skills.
- Relationship skills to get to know people, establish rapport and trust, and build alliances with others so that you can communicate accurately and work together smoothly
- Questioning skills to discover and specify reciprocal needs and desires
- Alignment skills to bring your work in line with what is desired
- Visioning skills so that your work is useful, makes a difference, and feels worthwhile to you and your bosses. and enroll others to help you deliver on your vision
- Negotiation skills to establish measurable commitments
- Management skills to keep the work on track while your people make it a reality
- Assessment and communication skills to provide appropriate feedback to steer the work and make sure that your people deliver on their commitments so that you can deliver on your own.
- You encourage your people and reinforce desirable results to strengthen relationships and increase engagement among your team members.
To do this well you organize, plan, and execute a series of personal habits that support achieving those goals you have negotiated. In this way you deliver on the commitments you make and therefore build trust with those that you serve. It is a whole lot more than simply being able to articulate a worthwhile vision and enroll others in that vision.
You can learn about these key success habits but to make them your own you need to practice and drill these skills until they become automatic.
That is what I am thinking about today. I would like to know more about what you think of these ideas. Drop me a note or leave me a comment.
