Jay Garing, Manager, IES Cloud Engineering, Whole Foods Market
Do you have a vision of the kind of leader you want to be? Have you considered that having such a vision might be what’s holding you back from being a great leader?
What does greatness even mean in the realm of leadership? Is it about bending other people to your will? Is it about inspiring people? Is it about trust? How about showing people the right way to get it done? What about holding people accountable to high standards? Do great leaders demand outcomes that they know will be tough to achieve?
The truth is that it’s all of these things, including the ones that make you uncomfortable. In fact, greatness in leadership is especially about the ones that make you uncomfortable.
If you think leaders should exude competence and knowhow, there will come a point where you end up in charge of something you don’t understand. If your vision is to rally top achievers, you’ll have a cynic that doesn’t respond to inspirational rhetoric and doesn’t come around like they do in the movies after a leadership montage. Do you trust your staff to handle the details? There will come a time when someone quite quits because their side gig starts making them more money than you pay them.
Are you ready for all these situations? Or is the hard truth that you are only ready for the situations that align with the kind of leader you want to be? Think back on your career… Was there a situation that didn’t go well for you? Ask yourself this question: Were you using your default leadership style in a situation, and it didn’t work? Were you trying to impart know-how to an experienced pro that turned out to know more than you? Were you trusting a newbie that was not confident in the role? What do all these situations have in common? The hard truth is that all these are failures of leadership, not the individual contributor.
“An expansive vision is needed to be comfortable with any leadership style, to be pretty good at knowing which one is needed, and to admit it when you get it wrong”
As leaders, we don’t reflect often enough on this question: How many times are we the problem? We like to think we are setting our teams up to succeed, but how many times do we unknowingly set them up to fail? Let’s suppose you have a younger staff member struggling to make successful changes to the app. What would a leader do vs. what would a great leader do?
A leader responds with their default style. If they see themselves as the guardian of high standards, they might respond with a new KPI about change success rate that everyone will be held accountable to. If they see themselves as an inspiring coach, they might respond with a locker-room halftime speech. If they see themselves as someone who develops people, they might respond with targeted skills development. What’s missing in all these approaches? The employee.
Any of these approaches might work if they align with what the employee actually needs. If you think back on your career, how often did you get situations like this right by chance? A great leader gets it right by design. A great leader understands this fundamental truth: It’s not about them. It doesn’t matter what kind of leader they want to be. All that matters is what the staff needs. Do you take the time to know your people and offer some measure of personal connection? Do you pause and consider a thoughtful course of action that’s based on what they need, as opposed to what you are comfortable doing? Do you even know what they need?
You have to practice all the leadership styles to the point of being pretty good at them. If you don’t like being a micromanager, are you going to set your employee up to fail when that is what they need? Or are you going to step up and start micro-managing things? If you aren’t an emotional person, are you going to set your staff up to fail when they need inspiration?
Are you worried you might be bad at it? Consider this: We are all bad at things we haven’t practiced. No one is born knowing how to do this stuff. Leaders have to learn how to lead, same as anyone else. The key is to listen for when you get it wrong. If you are authentic and you allow a rapport to develop for staff that wants that, your staff will tell you when you get it wrong. Are you strong enough to hear that your locker room speech sucked? Or are you defensive? Hopefully, it’s the former. That’s how you learn. You’ll gain that much more experience with that uncomfortable style for the next time it’s needed.
A great leader doesn’t have just one narrow vision of what leadership is. An expansive vision is needed to be comfortable with any leadership style, to be pretty good at knowing which one is needed, and to admit it when you get it wrong.
