The Keynote Season Part 2: The Leadership Contribution
Our mindset and our attitude toward chaos is one-half of the problem with the title. But the second half of the problem is, what is leadership actually? Because it defies definition. And if you look for definition and you went into Google today and type in the word leadership, you’re going to get somewhere in the region of 6.4 billion results.
If you reduce it down to leadership books, it will reduce it down to 3.5 billion results. Some of these resultant titles come with very interesting labels. For example, two of my personal favourites are the art of executive junk juggling work, life, and chainsaws or leadership lessons from my cat. Unleash your inner feline in the boardroom.
If my old Latin teacher was still alive today, he would have three words for these: Reductio ad absurdum. Like many aspects of life today, leadership itself has been trivialized to a point of almost frothy irrelevance. But how can we talk about leadership and what it is or isn’t if we don’t have a definition that’s common?
So, as with all of these things, we actually are all experts at what constitutes effective, positive leadership because we’ve all had direct experience of what it’s like. We have probably had more direct experience of what not to do than we have what to do. So I always defer to the source.
And for the last 30 years, we’ve asked the question in leadership groups, where we’ve been doing development, we’ve asked them to identify the best leaders in their experience. And to, from that, extract out the characteristics that made them choose those people.
Over years, we’ve harvested this data. And what’s very simple and very easy to define, is there are three categories of response that people come up with.
The first is, there’s one category which is technical expertise. So somebody who’s really brilliant at what they do. They understand the craft. They understand the industry. It’s the art of the deal. They are great at advertising because they have a sense and understand how it all works. Or they’re brilliant at tax advice because that’s what they really do. So this technical, whatever the technical skill is that people are leading in, they just have a brilliance around it. So that’s one category.
A second category is IQ for the simple, simple label of somebody who’s really, really smart. They are the smartest person in the room. They get it at a level that other people don’t. They’re three jumps ahead of everybody. They can visualize and imagine, and they have a brilliance and a radiance that comes from their natural intelligence.
And whilst both of these categories are very important when it comes to leadership. They are both outstripped by the third category, which actually has got more content in it and more contribution in it than the other two combined.
About 70 percent of the responses to, what are the characteristics that define your best leader, fit into the category of what I loosely term emotional quotient or EQ. And it’s loosely the traits and characteristics that enabled the leader to connect with me in a way that caused me to be inspired to go beyond and reach into my deepest capability.
Some examples of what fits into this category are: the person was tough but fair, they trusted me, and I trusted them. They were constructive in the way they dealt with me. They were very clear in their communication. They gave me responsibility. I knew they had my back.
Yet even though these emotionally intelligent skills are more than twice as important as the technical or the smarts, business organizations still to this day far prioritize the technical and the smarts over the development of the emotional skills that are going to be necessary in order to inspire and lead people effectively.
In my first ever job, in sales, selling U.S.-made cars to U.S. troops during the height of the Cold War in southern Germany, I got promoted to being a sales manager because I was really good at selling. But as soon as I got promoted without any support or understanding of what managing people and territories meant, I very quickly ran into difficulty, and I bombed.
Turns out the best salespeople don’t make the best. It turns out the best footballers don’t make the best football managers. Just think about Rooney or Lampard or Gerrard or Keane. It’s a lesson business organizations have still yet to learn. And the Peter principle, which is getting promoted to the point of your own incompetence, is absolutely alive and well and true in corporate organizations.
The best tax advisors. Get promoted to head of tax department. The best coders get promoted to being head of the coding division, but they hit a ceiling because in spite of the smarts, in spite of the technical skill, they don’t know, or haven’t learned how to lead and manage, they’re missing the human ingredient.
But in the world we live in now, and into the future, Technical skills are going to be a commodity. IQ, intelligence, you can do nothing about. The one area that you can thrive and the one area that’s going to become critically important is the ability to lead and manage, and influence others, and that’s EQ. As the entrepreneur Jack Ma describes, the more digital the world becomes, the more we need to emphasize that which makes us human.
So leadership is really a contribution. And if the leader is ultimately responsible for the overall performance of the team, then a leader needs to do two things as part of their unique contribution. The first is they need to identify what a better place looks like than where we are today. And the second thing is no point in being very clear on that vision ourselves if we can’t inspire and mobilize other people to move to that better place.
So if that summarizes the leader’s responsibility and their role, then the contribution that they make is under two headings. The leader is really the CCO x 2, chief clarity officer. You need to be able to provide clarity at all times and chief commitment officer. No point in having clarity. If people aren’t committed to what it is you’re clear about, people need to be motivated to act.
A failure by the leader to provide the right level of clarity. And inspire and engage with people in ways that makes them committed to the cause to take action. Results in serious consequences for performance.
