What Do You Need From the Team You Lead
When you feel compelled to remind everyone else that you’re the leader, it sounds more like you’re trying to convince yourself.
Photo by Fokusiert
One of my favorite quotes on leadership comes from Margaret Thatcher: “Being a leader is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are one, you probably aren’t.”
I’ve worked with people who regularly reminded their direct reports who the leader was. I always thought this was senseless because they were already the leader. Did they think everyone else forgot? When you feel compelled to remind everyone else that you’re the leader, it sounds more like you’re trying to convince yourself.
I’ve worked with others who just led, and everyone else just followed. They had the greatest influence, though they weren’t the smartest, the loudest or the most dominant. Sometimes they even had the title to go with it, but not always.
This is an example of how leadership behavior can expose the nature of leadership identity. What would motivate someone to consistently advertise his/her organizational authority? It could be a host of reasons, but a likely one is that his/her leadership identity is built around recognition and affirmation of others.
To say it plainly, some leaders base their leadership identity on the responses of those they lead.
“They had the greatest influence, though they weren’t the smartest, the loudest or the most dominant.”
And Your Point Is...?
When it comes to leadership, you can't authentically influence someone when you also need something from them.
So What?
It’s the same dynamic that's in play with codependency: It's dysfunctional to be in a relationship where you give something to someone to justify your need for getting something from them. It also shows up in parenting: It’s hard to develop children into adults when you also depend upon their affirmation.
Depending upon our team’s affirmation to define our leadership identity is an example of what I call an “Outside-In” approach, where we rely on the circumstances and relationships in our external environment to shape our internal leadership identity.
“It’s dysfunctional to be in a relationship where you give something to someone to justify your need for getting something from them.”
The opposite, more effective approach is “Inside-Out.” Being clear on our leadership identity—who are and who we want to be as a leader—positions us to genuinely influence them. It’s not about what we can get from them, it’s about what we can provide for their benefit.
The Big Picture
This Inside-Out approach supports the identity of servant leadership, where we lead with our teams’ interests and well-being in mind rather than our own. It’s not an identity we quickly or easily embrace. But it’s counter-intuitive, and it’s the most effective and influential identity a leader can have because it operates exclusively Inside-Out.
“It’s not about what we can get from them, it’s about what we can provide for their benefit.”
Your Next Step
Take some time at the end of each work week to reflect on how you interacted with your team, and take note of any time you become aware of needing affirmation from your team to feel better about yourself—whether you got the affirmation or not.
“It’s counter-intuitive, and it’s the most effective and influential identity a leader can have.”
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10 Reasons We Don’t Get Better as Leaders
The Navy SEALs say that in a crisis, you don’t rise to the occasion. You sink to the level of your training. What’s true for special operations is true for leadership as well.
Image by Kanawa_Studio
Leadership is a challenge. If it was easier, we’d all be great leaders. So why is it so hard to step up to the challenge and get better? Great question.
This is where a proverb from the Navy SEALs gives us some insight:
“In a crisis, you don’t rise to the occasion.
You sink to the level of your training.”
In a leadership crisis, we can only be as effective as we’ve intentionally prepared ourselves to be. But the reality is, most of us haven’t developed our leadership behaviors. We just go with whatever comes naturally, and hope that we can somehow, magically, rise to the occasion.
I’ve identified 10 challenges we must train through to get better as leaders. I’ve listed these challenges as “Levels”—think of these as floors that you reach by riding in an elevator. The elevator stops at each floor, and you can’t move up until you’ve trained through the challenge on that level. If you decide not to train yourself to overcome a specific challenge, that’s where your development—and your leadership effectiveness—will stop.
Level 1 – Mindset
This is the ground floor, where the challenge is embracing the mindset that getting better as a leader is normal and possible. To get beyond this level, you have to actually believe that there is leadership competency that you’re leaving on the table if you don’t choose to develop—and this has to bother you. If you don’t believe this (and if it doesn’t bother you), then get comfortable in the lobby because you’ll never even get on the elevator.
“You have to actually believe that there is leadership competency that you’re leaving on the table.”
Level 2 – Complacency
The level above the lobby is where we deal with indifference. After all, development takes effort. If there’s no urgency to become the best leader you can be, then you’ll avoid the effort to objectively assess yourself to learn how you might improve. You’ll not discipline yourself to read and reflect, or develop the transparency to pursue mentoring or coaching. You’ll settle for the results that come from operating at level 2.
Level 3 – Poverty of Time
After complacency comes the management of your bandwidth for development. Everyone’s under pressure to do more with less in today’s marketplace. But when we don’t set aside focused time and energy to develop, we simply don’t improve.
In truth, poverty of time isn’t a reason for a lack of development as much as it’s a symptom—a result of a lack of urgency and/or priority. More to the point, it’s an excuse.
So do you aspire to improve? If you do, you’ll create at least some margin for it and move on to the next level.
“Poverty of time isn’t a reason for a lack of development as much as it’s a symptom.”
Level 4 – Positional Authority
It’s easy to mistake the use of positional authority as leadership because it’s so easy to leverage our position in the org chart to get people to comply with our direction. After all, title is not a leadership competency.
Consider this: How would you influence people if you didn’t outrank them? What if the only leverage you had was the relational capital you’ve invested in them to earn their trust and respect?
When we use our positional authority muscles, our relational competency and emotional intelligence muscles atrophy. Want to stay stuck at Level 5? Then keep exercising your positional authority. Want to be genuinely effective as a leader? Let positional authority go and work on building relationships.
After all, everyone already knows you have the title; reminding them won’t help you.
Once you train yourself to move away from using positional authority, you’ll be ready to move to Level 6 and start seeing real development.
Level 5 – Aiming for the Wrong Target
If we’re going to get better, we have to accurately define what we’re trying to improve. In my experience, leadership is most commonly and broadly thought of as “getting stuff done.” This definition may bring you results in the short-term, but eventually it falls apart.
“Everyone already knows you have the title; reminding them won’t help you.”
This is where I lean on one of my favorite Peter Drucker quotes: “The function of leadership is to create more leaders, not more followers.” The role of the leader is to cultivate an environment where the team members …
Are intrinsically motivated to perform on their own initiative
Have the autonomy to make decisions about their work
Are equipped to make good decisions
Collaborate together, creating synergy instead of competition
Equip others in a similar approach (to build leadership capacity in the organization)
Defining leadership as getting stuff done is the ultimate myopic approach to leadership because it puts the focus on you (your performance and ability to control) instead of where it should be: on the team.
If you want to move beyond this short-sighted approach (see David Marquet’s Turn the Ship Around for a great resource), then change your definition and you’ll be ready to move to Level 6.
Level 6 – Success
Most leaders are in their roles because they’ve had some level of success. But often this success is the result of natural characteristics (e.g. personality, work ethic, intelligence, experience, wit, etc.). While these can contribute to leadership effectiveness, they usually aren’t the product of intentional cultivation. This creates a couple of issues:
It’s easy to over-rely on these characteristics, creating an imbalance in our leadership behaviors.
Success often removes the urgency to get better, creating a don’t-fix-what’s-not-broke mentality.
Both of these together cause us to plateau in our leadership effectiveness. Recognizing that effectiveness comes from moving beyond past successes to hone our leadership craft, we’re finally in a position to see what’s on Level 7.
“The function of leadership is to create more leaders, not more followers.”
Level 7 – Blind Spots
Every leader has blind spots. A minority of leaders actually seek them out and expose them. Make no mistake: You can’t fix what you can’t see.
Blind spots are what the Harrison Behavioral Assessment calls “derailers.” They often come from an over-reliance upon a certain behavior trait that’s assumed to be a strength.
The Harrison Assessment’s use of paradoxical leadership behaviors reveals how this works. For example, one of the Harrison’s 12 paradox traits is Respectful Candor, a pairing of the traits of Frankness and Diplomacy. Because these traits appear to be opposites, it’s easy to default to either Frankness (“telling it like it is”) or Diplomacy (“being politically savvy”). Doing so overuses one trait at the exclusion of the other, creating an out-of-balance behavioral blind spot.
When this blind spot is revealed we see that being both frank AND diplomatic is a higher-order leadership behavior. That assumes, of course, that we are prepared to look for it.
Exposing our blind spots reveals leadership potential we didn’t know existed. This gives us the courage to move to the next level, where we gain awareness of what’s behind many of our limiting behaviors.
Level 8 – Fear
Level 8 houses the stuff that few leaders are willing to admit: fears. Obviously, leaders need to be careful talking about fear. Mishandled and haphazardly exposed, fear can be cancerous to a team’s effectiveness. But leaving fear unaddressed and unrecognized is just as dangerous, and it will ultimately reveal itself in destructive ways when we least expect it.
Some of the blind-spot biases we dealt with in Level 7 are sourced in fear. Things like fear of how others will perceive us or the of loss of relationship. Some fear the loss of control. For those leaders who have a competitive bent, the source of their competitive behaviors is often fear-based. It’s not uncommon in my coaching experience to have leaders admit to being afraid of failure or the loss of status. Some fear that they don’t measure up to expectations.
The goal of development is to maintain leadership effectiveness while shifting away from fear-driven motivations. As Jack Canfield says, “Everything you want is on the other side of fear.” Once we get on the other side of fear, we’re ready to move up to Level 9.
“Everything you want is on the other side of fear.”
Level 9 – Ourselves
Getting to Level 9 requires not so much hard work as it does brave work. Level 9 is all about our character, which means using a mirror to accurately see the issues that most profoundly shape our leadership as a legacy. This includes things like pride, self-interest, consumerism, etc. Training through these issues moves us from being expedient and opportunistic as leaders to being truly impactful.
We must be willing to change ourselves. This usually requires additional outside perspective (an accountable peer, coach or mentor). It must also be paired with an internal conviction to do the right thing, purposefully, for the sake of others’ best interests, all the time—especially when everyone else chooses not to.
Once you can commit to leading out of character, you’re at last in a position to elevate to Level 10.
Level 10 – Identity
Are you the leader you want to be? I don’t mean your performance, I mean your identity: Who you are. It may be tricky to separate identity from performance, but you’ll need to in order to navigate this Level.
Performance, after all, is an external, situationally-dependent outcome. Identity is … you, who you are as a living soul. The two couldn’t be more different. Behavior (i.e. performance) is an outflow of our identity, not the source of it. Identifying yourself by your performance means you’ll never be the same person one day to the next—which is nonsense.
“Behavior (i.e. performance) is an outflow of our identity, not the source of it.”
Leaders who get to this level sometimes say, “This is complicated.” Actually, it’s not … in fact, it’s pretty simple. But it does take courage. Because when you’ve identified yourself by your performance all your life, to make a sudden shift in identity means you’re stepping into the unknown: You’ve haven’t really been you yet.
Making this change opens up whole new possibilities you never knew existed. Fear goes way down. Concern for others and for timeless values goes way up. You don’t worry about yourself nearly as much because you’re thinking more about everyone else. You’ll stop chasing situational success and be free to engage more with purpose than self-preservation and self-interests. Knowing your identity lets you become an authentic servant leader.
Want to Know Your Identity and Live Your True Purpose?
How to Be a Leadership MVP
One key basketball statistic reveals the players that most help their teams win. See how this is also a primary leadership principle.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Like many others, I love the game of basketball (particularly at the college level). The recently-completed NCAA tournament showcased the truth that teams that play great together beat teams of talented individual players—every time.
That’s why I’ve come to appreciate basketball’s plus-minus statistic, which measures the difference in score when a player enters the game and when that players exits. It reveals how the team performed when that player was on the court. Many times, a player has a significant plus-minus impact, even though he/she isn’t the most talented or scores the most points.
“Teams that play great together beat teams of talented individual players—every time.”
And Your Point Is...?
Players who score the most points usually get the highlights, but players who make their teammates better are the reason the team wins.
So What?
A pattern that I see so often in small to midsize companies as they grow reveals how we’re missing the leadership plus-minus effect. Typically, the highest performers get recognized, rewarded and then promoted to manage their departments. But high individual performance doesn’t equate to management competency. In fact, the very talent and behaviors that made them good performers can make them ineffective managers.
“High individual performance doesn’t equate to management competency.”
If you’re a business leader in a midsize company and need to build your leadership team, look first for people who have the most leadership development potential. In short: Who is making everyone else better? Sometimes this may be the highest performers at their job, but not every time.
If you’re an employee with aspirations for promotion, look first for ways to make your teammates better. Become a resource for them. Collaborate with them. Serve their interests, not just your own. Investing in them as people builds trust and respect, which you’ll absolutely need if you become their future manager.
The Big Picture
A recent AXIOS article summarized it well: If you want to be a manager who makes a difference, make your people better. Make it more about the team and less about you.
“If you want to do well in that role in the future, it’s best to start practicing now.”
Your Next Step
Read about how to lead in a way that makes others better (see my book below for an example). One I'd recommend is Turn the Ship Around, by David Marquet. It hits the leadership nail on the head.
Be self-aware. Make the investment to assess your leadership behavioral tendencies using a tool like the Harrison Behavioral Assessment, and commit to changing the behaviors that are getting in your way. Contact me if you want to get started.
“Who is making everyone else better?”
Looking For a Resource?
Lucky on Leadership
What leadership principles will you rely on when everything is blowing up and the bullets are flying? It helps to talk to someone who has been there before. Allow me to introduce you to John “Lucky” Luckadoo.
Some leadership challenges are greater than others, and some simply can’t be anticipated in advance—especially during times of crisis or emergency. How will you lead in these challenges? What leadership principles will you rely on when everything around you is blowing up or the bullets are flying from all directions?
It helps to talk to someone who has been there before. I recently had the privilege of meeting WWII veteran John “Lucky” Luckadoo, a B-17 pilot and operations officer in the 100th Bomb Group. The 100th flew 306 daytime raids out of England deep into enemy territory and against high-value targets between June 1943 and the close of hostilities in April 1945—an average of 1 mission every other day.
“What leadership principles will you rely on when everything around you is blowing up or the bullets are flying from all directions?”
The group earned the nickname “Bloody Hundredth” for the significant loss of planes and crews during their operational history. It was one of the most brutal and costly operations in the war. The average lifespan of a crew during John’s tour was eight missions—hence his nickname “Lucky.”
“Sunny II” Crew: The first 100th Bomb Group crew to complete a combat tour of 25 missions. Lucky is kneeling, on the far right.
Learning Leadership On the Fly
Lucky was thrust into an immediate and overwhelming leadership challenge. Barely out of his teens, John completed flight school and was assigned as a replacement co-pilot. Not only did he have to learn how to fly the large, four-engine Flying Fortress (he’d only flown a two-engine plane in training), he was thrown into a crew that had already gelled and trained together for many months.
With no prior experience or training in crew leadership, he few his first combat mission at 21 years of age. John learned about leadership in the harshest of combat situations—quite literally, on the fly.
B-17 crews during this part of the war flew their 8-hour missions in a sub-zero degree, unpressurized environment. They often had to fly without the protection of fighter escort, staying in tight formation and unable to take evasive action from the battle-hardened enemy fighters that flew right through their formation. There was no way to avoid the enemy ground fire (called “flak”) that burst around them, sending explosive shrapnel through the planes’ thin aluminum skin. The “3 F’s” (fighters, flak and freezing) were the biggest obstacles to overcome.
John completed his 25th mission as the command pilot of Alice From Dallas II and the Operations Officer for two of the squadrons in the 100th Bomb Group in February 1944—one month before his twenty-second birthday. Out of the 40 graduates of his flight school, he was one of only four that survived to complete their twenty-fifth mission.
“Out of the 40 graduates of his flight school, he was one of only four that survived to complete their twenty-fifth mission.”
John Luckadoo (left) and William DeSanders at the completion of both their tours (Feb. 14, 1944)
Leadership Q&A
Q: What did you learn about leadership and teamwork from your experience?
A: “Having the responsibility of nine other lives made you an instant leader, whether you had the skills for it or not. The situation demanded leadership. You either led, or you didn’t survive.”
Q: How did you cope with the pressures of leadership in that setting?
A: “I don’t know, other than to say you just did it. Some weren’t capable, others were. It was thrust upon you in such an overpowering way that your life depended on it, and the crew’s lives depended upon how quickly and how well you could manage the decisions that had to be made. Managing the airplane: keeping it working when it was damaged. Dealing with injured crew members: Do you press on to the target or turn back? All the tactical decisions that had to be made, sometimes in a moment’s notice. All of this was pretty overwhelming as a 21-yr old. It was an overwhelming, awesome responsibility.”
“Having the responsibility of nine other lives made you an instant leader, whether you had the skills for it or not.”
Q: What leadership behaviors worked the best?
A: “Leading by example. Treating others as they would like to be treated. Doing things that will make the crew successful (so that no one’s interests—especially those of the leader—are higher than everyone else’s). The crew works together to get the job done, and must work as a unit for all of the crew to survive and succeed.”
Q: What did you do to develop your leadership?
A: “You learn by necessity. You learn by being adaptable, recognizing—quickly—what works and what doesn’t. Again, it’s an immediate issue of survival: Grasp what’s important and get better or you and the entire crew die. Facing death on a daily basis forces you to develop.”
“What leadership behaviors worked the best? Leading by example. Treating others as they would like to be treated.”
Q: As a young leader, what leadership role models did you look up to?
A: “In our group, there was a group operations officer named Jack Kidd. He was an exemplary leader: Handsome, a gentleman, he led all the rough missions, an excellent pilot and individual; great war strategist. He helped me resolve a problem in my own squadron. He ended up as a Lieutenant General. I shaped my leadership approach after him. Another was Curtis LeMay, who eventually was transferred to the Pacific Theater. He was a tough hombre—we called him ‘Iron Ass.’ He was hard, but fair.”
Q: Were there any negative examples of leadership?
A: “Yes. One colonel I had was a Greyhound bus driver before the war. He was so obviously in over his head. I had to follow his orders and make it work the best I could. But it gave me a clear lesson of the kind of leader I didn’t want to be.”
Q: From your experience, what are the most important of all leadership principles?
A: “Putting myself in the other guy’s position. Appreciating what they had to do, and getting them to it in the way that would benefit the team. I didn’t recognize them as leadership principles per se, it just became instinctive: I did it because it worked. If I got mad or let my emotions rule instead of using common sense, it could be a disaster. You learn to grasp the opportunities and make the most of them, but to do so in consideration of the people who depended upon you.”
“Putting myself in the other guy’s position. Appreciating what they had to do, and getting them to it in the way that would benefit the team.”
“In the military, leaders give orders that people must follow. But just giving an order isn’t leading. Those following orders must be able to respect the leader. You gain that respect by putting yourself in their position. You appeal to them and give them orders in a way that their position was valued and recognized.”
Q: What would you say to young leaders entering their first leadership challenge?
A: “You can do more than you think you can. What we went through was an amazing experience of maturity. I became an old man overnight, with what I was confronted with. I remember sitting at 30,000 feet thinking, ‘How in the hell did I ever get in this position? If I live through this, I can live through anything.’”
“You can do more than you think you can. What we went through was an amazing experience of maturity. I became an old man overnight.”
“It’s very sobering and maturing. Some people crack under the pressure. On the other hand, when I ask myself how I was able to psyche myself up to get back in the airplane again … [LONG PAUSE] I can’t tell you. We believed that what we were doing was right, and it had to be done. And so we just did it.”
Q: There’s an old phrase that says “There are no atheists in foxholes.” What role, if any, did faith play in your experience?
A: “I prayed a lot, and I wasn’t ashamed of it. I carried a New Testament in my shirt pocket on every flight. In fact, on one flight a piece of flak came through the cockpit and grazed the cover. I believe that there is divine intervention. That’s part of what I call the luck that dictates whether you survive in a situation like I went through.”
“I prayed a lot, and I wasn’t ashamed of it.”
Final Thoughts
I want to close by giving my personal thanks to Lucky for his many years of sacrifice and service to his country, for risking his life on our behalf. Conversations like these bring a deep sense of respect for those who, as young men, went into harm’s way for the sake of our nation’s values. John: I thank you!
John “Lucky” Luckadoo, now 100 years old as of this writing, has published his autobiography, Damn Lucky. It is skillfully written and retold in the words of Kevin Maurer, the #1 New York Times bestselling, award-winning coauthor of No Easy Day. It is gripping in its scale and detail for what a generation of boys did on behalf of their country. You will come away with a deeper appreciation for their sacrifice.
More of Lucky’s story (and many others’) can be found at the 100th Bomb Group Foundation website: www.100thbg.com. My thanks to the foundation for their photo use permission.
“How in the hell did I ever get in this position? If I live through this, I can live through anything.”
