Leading with influence is real leadership. It’s the only leadership that matters.
But how? It’s simpler than we sometimes think, so let’s just keep it that way. No need to complicate things unnecessarily. Three areas to focus on:
Know your audience. Influencing at a senior level is not the same as doing so for a more junior audience. Senior folks tend to grasp concepts and ideas more readily, while our up-and-comers can focus on our specific words so closely they can sometimes lose sight of the big picture.
Keep it intentional. Leading isn’t an offshoot, an unintended consequence, or an afterthought. It’s your primary focus, as should be your efforts to influence. Make your intentions known – no one should have to guess. Do good things, then move on without fanfare. Be the example, not the excuse.
Be aware of your impact. Like it or not, you’re always “on.” Effective leaders don’t get to have bad or “cheat” days. Those you lead need you at your best – or at least your apparent best – all the time. Be mindful that your influence doesn’t lead to unintended consequences.
Leading with Influence is simply “be the good example” on steroids. Exemplary, intentional behavior along with clear language on expectations and results gets us pointed in the right direction.
Auntie Em, Uncle Henry…you’re not in Kansas anymore!
Coming out of the chaos of the last 18 months, I’ve noticed that the people I work with have changed somehow. They sound the same and look pretty much the same, but they seem different. Kinda like Dorothy’s friends in the Land of Oz.
Has anyone else noticed it?
No, really. In the whirlwind that took us from Spring 2020 to Fall 2021, it feels like they changed while we were apart. Or was it me who changed?
What’s really changed is the workplace. While the difference may not as drastic as it was between Kansas and Oz, it may feel like that in some companies. Change is inevitable, yes, but poorly led and managed change on such a large scale can be the beginning of the end for previously well-led organizations.
The most obvious change is whether people are still working entirely at home, full-time at the office (if there’s an office left), or a hybrid of the two. Whatever the new work policies are, and how we came to the decisions about them, there’s a good chance we’ve alienated a fair portion of our workforce. So, what does the workplace of the future look like?
Lots of people are anxious about getting back out there after such a long time in some state of isolation. Just
getting back into an office with co-workers in close proximity and a commute that suddenly feels awkward can be intimidating, but having to sit in a meeting wondering who others have recently been exposed to can be downright paralyzing to some. Not to mention trying to avoid controversial topics in casual conversations in the breakroom.
That doesn’t bode well as we approach the end of another year and are trying to play catch-up to reach our 2021 goals.
So how do we as leaders decide what our future workplace is going to look like and how we’re going to ensure our teams can meet expectations? The first thing we have to remember is that nowhere in our organizations, departments, sections or teams does one size fit all. Where they work is different, what they do is different, and what we expect of them is different.
Start by focusing on what kinds of interactions between our workforce is critical to the success of the team (however we define it). Creativity depends on a different kind of interaction than routine information exchange. Some departments can get by mostly using phones and computers (HR and accounting come to mind) requiring much less face-to-face time in the office.
If it doesn’t matter what time of day (or night) a person’s work gets done as long as it meets expectations and is completed on time, why should we care when or where it gets done? Just one consideration as you decide who needs to be on-site daily.
Choice is important… within limits of course. The days of believing that everyone is more productive at the office than at home are long past. Does that mean each employee gets to decide where they’re going to work and on what days? The best answer I can give is maybe. It’s at least worth having the conversation.
Employees’ sentiments change over time, so what they wanted in 2020 might not be the same at the end of 2021. What won’t work is re-establishing the old schedule with strict daily attendance policies.
Just be transparent in the decision making. Regularly listen to others to generate ideas and gain a higher level of buy-in.
We’ve gotten used to virtual meetings; do we have to go back to sitting around the conference room table?
If we’re still measuring a meeting’s success by who attends rather that what get accomplished, we’re still doing it wrong. And if we haven’t figured out how to have hybrid meetings by now, the IT team isn’t doing their job.
Speaking of meetings, what about reacting to the boss’s ever-changing meeting schedule? I would argue if that kind of flexibility is required, it’s easier to adjust virtually than physically, especially in the case of geographically separated offices.
Finally, we have to be willing to make different decisions when new information comes to light. I wasn’t alone in thinking – initially anyway – we were returning to some semblance of normalcy earlier this summer. My kids are mostly grown, so I didn’t consider the ramifications of a parent having to stay home with a quarantined school-age child – or two back-to-back.
If we can let people work from home when their kids are sick, what’s keeping us from letting them work from home when their kids are healthy?
One last thought: talk to each other! No one in our generation of leaders has faced a global disruption in the workplace that we have – and are still having. You are not the only one having to make hard decisions about what the new normal will look like; others in your C-level and executive leadership circle are facing the same kinds of tough choices. Ask others what’s working for them and share what’s working for you. Together we can build a better workplace for the future.
There’s no clicking of heels and wishing things would go back to the way they were. It doesn’t have to be as crazy
as the Land of Oz, but we’re never going back to Kansas again.
This is an interesting and pertinent topic to me, as many of my clients – some aware, some not – suffer from
the micro-managing malady. Are you micro-managing??
It’s been my experience that micro-managers do so from perceived need. At least in their minds, they feel they have a need for acute attention to detail in one or more functions, or with one or more (or all) members of their staffs.
From my experience, the underlying reasons driving this perceived need come from
real or perceived lack of competency of employee(s)
real or perceived lack of trust, and/or
an overdeveloped personal ego/sense of self-worth.
Realize that most people want to achieve the same results with fewer efforts, and micro-managing takes more effort, not less. The dangers to me are straightforward: in times of economic scrutiny, we need employees to be thinking more, not less.
So, how can we tell if we’ve crossed that line into micro-managing? What do we look for, and what can we do? Some indicators (and suggestions):
You frequently get questions about problems without recommended solutions. Employees–even really good ones–tire of doing the legwork for a micro-manager, so will simply ask questions instead of problem-solving. “What do you want me to do?” is a typical question, and they are essentially absolving themselves of all ownership and accountability. You decide, you own. They screw it up, you own it.
You regularly ask successful employees for status updates. Stop it. They didn’t get there by being an idiot, and you frustrating them isn’t helping. Set priorities and deadlines, and then allow employees room to do as you asked. Status updates, particularly those without major project milestones, are simply a display of distrust.
You’re questioning others’ good decisions. Usually because you would have “done it differently,” or are uncomfortable you weren’t involved in the decision. How about just saying “Good work, thanks…?” Learn to shut up; diarrhea of the mouth is a career limiter anyway…
Eradicating micro-managing is the responsibility of both parties–the staffer being micro-managed, and the manager “doing” the micro-managing.
In my upcoming (tomorrow) newsletter, “At C-Level,” I address this topic in some detail. I’d like to cover some additional points, and since this is my forum, I figured I’d just use this… From leadership and performance perspectives, mediocre performance — particularly among managers or key positions — is certainly a critical situation.
There are three real problems with accepting mediocrity:
First, it slows organizational performance. We know that intuitively, though we frequently feel we can “get past that.” We make processes, even hire people, based on some mediocre log-jam that we seem to accept for no rational reason.
Second, mediocrity breeds mediocrity. In other words, if the prevailing culture accepts substandard efforts (in fact, REWARDS those efforts), then those efforts will continue. A basic tenet of compensation: “That which is rewarded is repeated.” In other words, if bad things don’t come to bad people, you can bet their steadily value-sucking performance will continue.
And third, we cannot even KNOW our capabilities or potential when mediocrity is pervasive in the organization. What we view as a challenge – a ‘stretch goal” – may be child’s play for a high-performing organization, yet we’ve accepted that degree of difficulty as a DIRECT result of our culture of marginal performance. Shame on us — we don’t even have a full grasp of where we could be or how high we could go, merely because we allow mediocrity to add weight to performance scales.
Additionally, mediocrity points to two obvious shortcomings with us in senior leadership:
First, the organization cannot be performing at a significant level with mediocre performers. The financial and productive results, then, are obviously less than the potential. Given today’s scarcity of resources, shame on the organization’s leaders for wasting them this way.
More importantly, the leadership team has proven unable or unwilling to manage performance correctly and effectively for the organization to truly realize its success. We have to ask ourselves, if some members of the leadership team are incapable of eradicating pervasively lackluster performance, what else are they “not” doing? What other gaps do we have, that we may not even realize? How much money has flown through the door unchecked?
Mediocrity, either in terms of absolute performance or at least acquiescence/acceptance, begins at the top.
To borrow from some other cause’s tagline: We can eradicate mediocrity in our lifetimes.
I’ve never seen an annual performance evaluation that was worth half the time it took to fill it out. That’s especially true when it comes to evaluating the leaders in our organizations. Have you ever wondered why we even do them?
When we don’t assess a leader’s leadership, we continue to promote weak leaders that are doing more harm to our people and organizations than good. The evaluation is like a sheep in wolf’s clothing: weak and pretending to be something it’s not.
Most companies have an evaluation system to justify the subjective decisions the boss is going to make in the first place. HR may not like that statement, but damned near everything about an evaluation is subjective. What we measure is subjective, how we measure it is subjective, and how we weight that measure is subjective. And then we pretend to make turn it into something objective by assigning a number to it.
Then we use it, not for developmental purposes, but to justify a salary and an end-of-year bonus. We kid ourselves into thinking it’s meaningful for the receiver when it’s anything but.
Except for the money it represents.
I only had to suffer through 27 of those evaluations in my Air Force career (along with another dozen “training reports,” equally as bogus), and not one of them made a bit of difference in my progression up the leadership ladder. And none of them gave me a single developmental goal for the coming year, and none told the whole truth about what an annoying SOB I was (they used words like tenacious). Most just said I didn’t get the soles of my boots wet when I walked on water.
Okay, that last part was because I wrote so many of them myself.
We all get asked for our self-assessment in preparation for our annual feedback session, so we provide the inputs in a format that exactly fits the form the boss has to fill out. Seems like a no-brainer. I once got a boss at the Pentagon to sign off on a bottom line that said, “This guy’s so good I should be working for him.” His boss gave it serious consideration.
Why can’t we just use the evaluation for what it is and grade what’s important for leaders in the first place… leadership?
Sure, there are areas we want a leader to be successful in like financial success, goal achievement, innovation, internal and external processes, etc., but where and how does a leader’s leadership get evaluated so that developmental feedback can be part of that dreaded annual meeting? Stop for a minute and consider your own process to see if you can find a real leadership measurement in the results.
Do we just give leaders credit for the successes of their teams? Probably. That’s how the system works… at least
that’s how I’ve always seen it done. And regardless of the number scale we use, there are only two possible outcomes: meets expectations or doesn’t.
The system won’t get better until we as the leaders’ evaluators are more involved (and I don’t mean in a micromanagement sense) in learning how a leader’s day-to-day behavior and performance affect the team’s performance. And how, leaders of leaders, do we do that?
By talking to people, that’s how.
I’m not suggesting a complicated and time-consuming method for collecting subjective “data” about the leader. I’m suggesting that we have a few 15-minute conversations with some of the people being led. We’ve written about Stop-Start-Continue before, and that’s a good method, but any way we can discern how their leadership behaviors – trust, ethics, integrity, communication, decision-making, inspiring others, etc. – are shaping their team and its success is better than what we’re doing now.
If we want to help a leader develop, we have to give him or her meaningful feedback about their performance as a leader. Sound pretty basic, doesn’t it?
I propose a leadership evaluation form that has two parts: meets or doesn’t meet expectations and developmental feedback. Tell him or her what behaviors they’re doing well and what behaviors could use some improvement. (And maybe set some leadership developmental goals for the coming year?) That would certainly be more useful that the way we do it now.
That idea will never make it past HR, but it’s how we should help leaders lead and, in turn, help our organizations succeed.
