Show them who’s Boss!

This was the title of a UK TV programme featuring Gerry Robinson, formerly of Granada fame. It probably goes a long way to demonstrate his style of leadership yet, here in 2014, this style seems to have lost its place in the Leadership of today’s talent. With generation Y fast becoming the majority of potential employees, the need for change is even more pronounced. Time magazine described them as the Me, Me, Me generation. They don’t want to be told what to do, they want to be a part of it, in fact, they’re probably less interested in running your business, they’re far more likely to be interested in running a business of their own. They want leadership in the workplace, but they want it their way. Therefore it follows that the autocratic styles of leadership of our youth are no longer relevant in today’s employer market and as leaders we have to find new ways of engaging employees in our projects and businesses, ways that serve to seek the new ideology of our fast emerging workforce.

I call it the “show them who the Boss is” approach.

What makes great leaders is somewhat of an enigma and as such individuals have adopted their own approach, making Leadership quite a personal matter. A great many leaders are remembered not for their skills but for what they achieved and how they behaved. Great leaders, of which in my opinion, there are truly very few, managed to lead effectively by developing followers. Getting people to do the things required of them, not because they were asked or told to, but because they wanted to. It all seemed to come down to a matter of personal taste as to who you followed, yet one thing remains true, people always followed people and less so their job title or position. Therefore in order to inspire followership, Leaders more and more will need to show who they are as people, to demonstrate that they can be trusted and that they are the right person to follow, given the circumstances. They need to demonstrate their credibility whilst not railroading followers in doing things their way, they need to show empathy and a broad perspective, including the ability to change direction given access to the knowledge and experiences of the people that they lead. In truth, this is probably a lot different to the approaches they adopted to get in to a position of leadership, but once there, the new leader needs to adapt.

The essence of Leadership lies in the ability to align, engage and harness the skills, personal energy, creativity and commitment of the people in their teams. In short, getting people to willingly take the actions necessary to fulfil the organisations’ goals because they want to.  Because they TRUST you.

The Show them who the Boss is approach requires a certain amount of  self-disclosure, an analysis of who they are and what defines them. Much of what defines who we are is driven by our own personal values set. Those tenets and beliefs that we have crafted since childhood taking influence from our parents and grandparents, siblings, close friends, the church, school and more often today, the media. As with any strong organisation, these values form the strong foundation of our approach to leadership. Herb Kelleher’s, Chairman of Southwest Airlines, Leadership always held true to a value of always treating each person as an equal, something he adopted from his mother. Take a look at Southwest today and you’ll see exactly the same principle applied across the organisation.

This self-disclosure is not a one-time event, rather a discipline that will allow the leader to adapt their communication each time they need to lead an initiative or project. Identifying the appropriate facets of who they are and using those as the basis of their communications. The analysis acts as your internal coach, asking the questions that others would ask of you, so that you can provide the fullest possible description of your initiative together with the reasons why others may want to follow you. The analysis can be broken down in to four interrelated sections.

Credibility and Content

Content forms the basis of the organisation, initiative or project. What is it that you are seeking to do or achieve. Often this is a reason why people join an initiative, to do something new or exciting or challenging. How exciting would it have been to be "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth" in 1961 or “…breaking the land speed record for diesel-powered vehicles” for JCB?

Being able to paint a compelling picture of a desired future state is at the cornerstone of Content. Whilst we don’t all get the chance to create a future so exciting as those above, it is still important to give people a sense of what’s in store for the future, to give followers something to work towards, an idea, a dream, a Vision.

The content of the tasks and projects that people lead needs to have some significance, some importance to those that you intend to follow you. This may be a sense of a ‘New’ future, a new paradigm, or to outstrip the competition or simply create a sense of urgency.

Character

The second principle of credibility follows the fact that people follow people not job titles, so determining your character, again, no different for women, will be an important factor in generating followership. What does so often happen is that women work so hard to attain a leadership role, they can over use their positional power now that they have achieved it. It is important for all leaders to let followers and potential followers know who they are, their strengths, weaknesses and their own personal motivations. Knowing how to answer the question, ‘why do you care?’ in a way that personally connects them to the task is a great way to demonstrate your own personal character.

And to top it all, signalling your own commitment to the changes that you are advocating, showing that you have real personal commitment to success and that you have some ‘skin in the game’. Declare to followers, what you have got at stake in the project or task and what you are willing to do regardless of others.

Competence

Demonstrating that you’re good at your job with stories of success, learning, previous track record, career history are all important factors to weave in to ones communications. Again it is tempting to overplay this and subtlety and humility is vital to avoid sounding like a know-it-all.

Communication

Finally, the last principle is communication. Communication to engage others in the journey you’re advocating. Anticipating and recognising others’ concerns, not everyone we lead will feel like us, think like us and that needs to be spoken and the reasons for our journey spelled out to them. Show them the maths about how you came to the conclusions that you did, spell out the benefits and the consequences of action/inaction. Acknowledge the risks in the journey so that everyone else has the same history and context of the changes that you’re advocating. And last but not least, tell followers every day, why their work is important to success. Make their work worthwhile and meaningful, thank them sincerely for their input and be specific. If I had a job where I couldn’t make the link between what I do every day and the definition of success, I’d find that work meaningless.

What managers’ need is belief and backbone, belief that they can be a great leader and achieve success through others and not through themselves, which ironically is how we get the senior roles,

we the need to change the way we lead. And backbone, giving the leader the courage to make that change to show up personally at work and to begin leading from the heart!