🎙️ Podcast Link 🎙️

Leadership…

In my newest video, “Leadership Principles and Pitfalls”, I delve deep into the core concepts, misconceptions, challenges and pitfalls of leadership. I cover misconceptions around leaders being the most eloquent or best at the activity they’re leading and the whole nature versus nurture issue; the relationship between leadership and its less glorious partner management; the challenge of getting the right mix of empowerment, guidance, and inclusive decision making, and the critical role that transparency can play through all of this, as well as regular communication. I talk about the impact of leadership on *you*, how being selfless sometimes involves being “selfish”, and the phenomenon that leadership never ends up quite being what you envisaged ahead of time…

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🕒 Timestamps are as follows:

📌 (0:00) Introduction to Leadership
📌 (0:16) You Learn About Leadership By Doing It and Observing Others
📌 (0:49) Leadership Learning is an Ongoing Process
📌 (1:00) This Video: Key Concepts and Considerations
📌 (1:09) There Are Many Forms of Leadership
📌 (1:23) Everyone Has Their Own Take on Leadership
📌 (1:31) Listen Widely And Take Onboard What Resonates With You
📌 (1:43) A Working Definition of Leadership
📌 (2:15) Unhelpful Misconceptions About Leadership
📌 (2:20) Loud, Eloquent Speakers Aren’t Necessarily Good Leaders
📌 (2:48) Much Leadership Occurs Quietly, In The Background
📌 (2:58) Manage Meetings to Facilitate Input From Quiet Leaders
📌 (3:12) Leadership is Primarily About Serving Others
📌 (3:35) The Reluctant Leader Trope
📌 (3:55) An Enthusiasm for Leadership is Also Great, But Beware…
📌 (4:11) Leaders Don’t Have to Be the Best at the Activity They’re Leading
📌 (4:28) Relevant Experience Can Be Helpful
📌 (4:42) If New to the Domain, Lots of Learning is Required
📌 (4:57) Leaders are Made, Not Born
📌 (5:13) Learning Curves Will Vary for Different Individuals
📌 (5:35) Leadership and Management Go Hand in Hand
📌 (5:56) Visionary Leadership is Undermined by Poor Management
📌 (6:10) Good Management Without Leadership is Directionless
📌 (6:19) A Little of Both is Often Better than a Big Imbalance
📌 (6:28) Balancing Empowerment and Guidance
📌 (6:41) Trust People to Try Things and Learn from Mistakes
📌 (6:48) Consider Guardrails To Stop Catastrophic Mistakes
📌 (7:03) Don’t Leave Your Team Without Any Guidance
📌 (7:13) An Introduction to Inclusive Decision Making
📌 (7:29) Practical Limits to Inclusive Decision Making
📌 (7:49) If You Ask for Input, Listen!
📌 (8:07) Transparency Is Also Important for Inclusive Decision Making
📌 (8:21) The Vital Importance of Transparency
📌 (8:32) Example of the Positive Impact of Transparency
📌 (9:38) Be as Transparent as Circumstances Allow You To Be
📌 (9:53) A Leader’s Job Isn’t to Become Friends with Everyone
📌 (10:25) The Importance of Regular Communication
📌 (10:36) Regular Communication Helps Discover Issues
📌 (10:45) Problems Get Worse Without Communication
📌 (10:53) Earlier Conversations Are Almost Always Easier
📌 (11:10) Don’t Oversimplify Issues for Your Team
📌 (11:33) Thinking About Leadership and its Impact on You
📌 (11:38) Being Selfless Sometimes Involves Being “Selfish”
📌 (12:24) If You Burn Out, You’re Not Helping Anyone
📌 (12:39) Final Thoughts: Leadership is Often Different to What You Expect
📌 (12:52) In Leading You Can Learn Unexpected Things About Yourself
📌 (13:00) Leadership is an Enriching Experience – Give it a Go!

Full Video Notes

• Leadership is one of those concepts alongside things like collaboration that you hear about early in your career but don’t necessarily gain a full understanding of until much later, after you’ve both tried it yourself and seen many others do it. At this stage in my career, I’ve been fortunate to have the opportunity to have engaged in leadership of various kinds for around a decade. I’ve also had the chance to be personally led by, and observe, hundreds of amazing leaders, both here and around the world. I’ve seen so much amazing leadership, and also seen lots of examples of what I would call bad leadership as well. I’ve learnt a lot from leading, including all the missteps that come with any journey like this. I expect to keep learning about and working to improve my leadership capabilities and impact for the rest of my career – it’s an ongoing process, like many skills. In this video, I want to share some of the key concepts and principles around leadership I’ve learnt, both from leading myself and from watching others lead. 
• The first, and perhaps most important concept to grasp, is that there are many forms of leadership; each form shares some common properties with the others but also has its own unique ones. Hand in hand with this concept is that everyone has a different take on what leadership is, and what doing it well involves. As with all things, I suggest you listen to everyone, and take on board the things that resonate with your core beliefs and values, to form your own take on what leadership means for you. 
• There are many different definitions of leadership – I encourage you to read a few – but for the purposes of providing a working definition, here is mine: “Leadership is an individual or a group influencing and guiding team members to grow and achieve their goals.” I like this simple definition because it covers key concepts: that leadership involves both explicit guidance but also influence, and that leadership involves achieving collective goals but also the growth that comes with doing so.
• I also need to cover some of the unhelpful beliefs or biases around leadership. One of the most prominent of these is that a leader is the loudest person in the room, the most eloquent at speaking, the person with the most physical presence – even many articles around the relationship between leadership and your height! These are not helpful and are most definitely not true, but they do speak to a natural tendency of many of us to naturally gravitate or listen to the most eloquent person in the room. It’s important to consciously be aware of these tendencies where they exist, and to know that much leadership occurs quietly in the background. When managing an environment, such as a meeting, it’s important that you actively provide mechanisms for those quieter leaders to be heard, without putting them too confrontationally on the spot. 
• Leadership is primarily about serving others. It will of course have some benefit for you – apart from anything else, leadership experience is a part of building your track record for many types of positions. But you, and those you lead, will get the most out of your leadership activities if you take on those responsibilities with the primary intent of serving and helping others. You often hear about some of the best leaders being those who reluctantly stepped up when there was no other option – there’s an element of truth to this, although of course there are also catastrophically bad examples of people who didn’t want to lead being forced into leadership positions as well! On the flip side, there’s nothing wrong with being enthusiastic to become a leader, but beware of those who see a potential leadership role simply as a checkbox to tick off as they race up the career ladder as fast as they possibly can. 
• People often confound being the best at a particular activity and being a good leader of that activity, whether it’s writing, coding or leading a sporting team. In most circumstances, a good leader doesn’t have to be the best at the activity the team they’re leading is doing. That said, usually some level of authentic experience relating to that activity can be helpful. It doesn’t have to be exactly the same activity – someone might switch leadership roles between different sports, for example. Leaders can also take on roles in domains they have no experience in – you often see politicians doing this – but the onus is then on them to take extra measures to learn about the new domain they’re working in, given their lack of experience. 
• As the famous quote goes, “leaders are made not born”. There is often a belief that leadership capability is something that comes naturally – but leading well does involve a lot of learning and making mistakes, like most other activities. It is true that the speed at which different people may initially take to leadership roles vary – I for example found my early forays into leadership roles at a small scale quite challenging at times. But with sufficient interest and persistence, and a good environment to learn in, just about anyone can become a leader. 
• Leadership and management are two skillsets that go hand in hand, although leadership gets all the glory. Management is more about the details: working out who should be doing what in your team, how to schedule a program of work and other day to day oversight of the work your team does. A visionary and inspiring leader with poor management skills is not good – they can set out an inspiring grand vision, but then are unable to manage their team effectively to execute on that vision. Conversely an excellent manager may manage the day to day activities well but will lack the big picture vision for where those activities are heading. You need both, and in most situations it’s preferable to have a little of both rather than an excess of one and nothing of the other. 
• One of the fuzzier concepts to deal with in leadership is balancing empowerment and guidance of your team. Assuming you are in a reasonably functional environment, you should, as much as possible, trust people in your team, give them room to try things and make the occasional mistake and learn from it. If mistakes could potentially be catastrophic for your organisation or your stakeholders, you want to put in some form of guard rails that prevent that outcome, but are otherwise as minimally restrictive as possible. At the same time, as a leader you should be providing some guidance where appropriate – you don’t want to leave your team completely without any form of higher level direction.
• As a leader, you’ll need to make decisions regularly. Inclusive decision making is a process by which you involve and consult with your team and use their input to collectively make decisions together, or at least to guide your decision making. Typically not every decision can be inclusive. Pragmatically, you can’t be running consultation sessions and votes every hour for minor decisions – look to the example of politics where politicians are voted in but then make most of the decisions without any formal vote from their electorate. Where you do engage in inclusive decision making, make sure you actually listen to your team. There’s few things more corrosive to morale then seeking input from your team, them putting in significant energy and time into doing so, and then that input being clearly ignored. Some of the decisions you make will need to be made in a relatively non-inclusive manner – and that’s where an even more important concept comes in – that of transparency, explaining why decisions were made.
• Transparency is arguably one of the single most important concepts to embrace in leadership. When decisions are made, always try to explain why they were made to your team. Some people will always disagree with some of your decisions, and one great way to think about being transparent as a leader is to think about how they would discuss a decision you’ve made they disagree with, when you’re not around. The nightmare scenario you want to avoid is them saying something like, “They decided not to go ahead with the project, and it just doesn’t make any sense at all, and they’ve not said anything about why.” Ill-founded speculation and rumours flourish in such an environment. Imagine instead them saying, “They decided not to go ahead with the project: they said that given the financial outlook for the coming year, we don’t have the resources to commit to an additional project. I think we could probably stretch to take it on, but that was the decision that was made.” The team member in this second scenario still disagrees with the decision, but they can explain the context in which the decision was made, even if they see the context a little bit differently. As with inclusive decision making, you can’t always be 100% transparent – for example if there are confidential matters occurring behind the scenes – but you can always try to be as transparent as circumstances allow you to be.
• Some new leaders naturally attempt to become friends with everyone in their team – this is a) increasingly impractical as your team size increases but more importantly b) not a leader’s job. You can cultivate an environment of respect within your team but by no means are you meant to necessarily become close friends with everyone in your team – and doing so will make it very hard for you to objectively make the decisions you sometimes need to make as a leader.
• With regards to communication, leadership shares the same key concept as most other activities – that regularly communication is vital. Problems and issues can go undiscovered for long periods of time if there isn’t regular, two way communication between a leader and their team. Problems and issues also tend to get worse over time if they aren’t rectified through communication. Don’t put off tough conversations – it’s always better to have a somewhat uncomfortable conversation with a team member earlier, than to delay and delay until the situation is so bad that the chances of a constructive conversation drop to zero.
• When you communicate with your team, you’ll want to share information about what is happening, any challenges or opportunities that have come up, and why certain decisions have been made. You will typically want to summarize and sometimes simplify these topics, but don’t make the mistake of oversimplifying and inadvertently patronising your team members.
• The final set of concepts relate to you as a leader and the impact it can have on you. The first concept relates to self-care. New leaders often throw themselves wholeheartedly into leadership, including activities like providing support to team members who are struggling, both professionally and to the extent that is appropriate, personally. What a new leader often finds is that the amount of support they’ve previously given to the occasional struggling friend or family member does not scale to a large team, and they end up exhausted and sometimes even sick. The phrase I like to use here is that “being selfless sometimes involves being selfish”. Make sure you pace yourself and look after your physical and mental health. While not engaging as deeply as you might have done previously may make you feel like you’re letting a team member down, if you burn out and have a breakdown when you could have taken preventative measures, you’re letting down your entire team.
• If you’re relatively new to leadership, hopefully you’re still interested in giving it a go. I would add here that the actual experience of leading is almost always different to what you envisage it to be beforehand. In leading, you learn new, sometimes unexpected things about leadership, but also about yourself. Leadership can be incredibly eye-opening, fulfilling and challenging, and an amazing opportunity for personal and professional growth. There is much more to learn and think about when it comes to leading than what I’ve covered here, but this video has hopefully planted the seeds of some of the key concepts that come with enjoying leading, and doing it well.