The two golden rules of leadership: it’s all about you… and it’s not all about you

The first is this:

It is all about you

Studies show that our direct experience of a line manager or team leader in the workplace accounts for the vast majority of our engagement – or otherwise – with a role. Leaders and managers account for over 70% of the climate or environment that we experience at work and in turn that environment and our experience of it is what makes the difference to our levels of motivation, commitment, enjoyment and ultimately performance.

Hay figures suggest that employee experience of the workplace accounts for up to 30% of additional discretionary effort – that means that as managers and leaders, it is within our gift to unlock the best from our people.

So where do we start. Well, start close to home. How well do you know yourself? Be honest. Do you know what you like doing? Where your strengths are? Where you are at your best and most comfortable? How does that show up for you in terms of your leadership? How can you use that knowledge to support your team?

And what about the less attractive stuff. Do any of your strengths ever reach a tipping point where they stop working for you and start working against you? Many of the well-known and well researched psychometric frameworks available today posit that when taken to extreme, our strengths can actually be our undoing. A leader who is decisive and confident for example can in extremis – often when under stress or pressure – become overly controlling, rigid and demanding. Similarly, a laid back, gregarious leader who builds rapport easily with his/ or her team can become laissez faire and may struggle to keep the boundaries between manager and team member clear.

This part of the puzzle is all about self-awareness. It’s about knowing what makes you tick and then applying that knowledge to your behaviour. What do you know about your internal value system, about your innate drivers and motivations, about your social traits and behaviour patterns that make up your unique leadership style? Where is who you are and how you are helpful to you in terms of creating that all important climate? Where could you make different choices to get different results?

Coaching is a great way to get to know yourself better and in a safe space consider forensically and strategically what you already know about yourself as a leader and what more there is to discover. One of the most powerful questions I have heard asked is, when you are not in the room, what do people say about you? Maybe you have a high degree of self-awareness and are fully versant about how others receive and perceive you. Maybe there is more you can do to uncover blindspots and find those helpful nuggets that allow you to manage yourself differently.

Ok, so that’ the first rule of leadership. We know that the leadership journey demands that we become more aware of how we are, because how we are has such a direct and powerful impact on the results that our team – and ultimately us as leaders – will be measured by.

 So, what is the second rule?

Well, it is this:

It’s not all about you.

That’s sounds contradictory right? We’ve just explored how important it is to understand how our personal style has a direct impact on results. True. But it is just as true to say that, as with any relationship, leadership requires two sides of the dynamic. The leader and the led.

As a coach and leadership trainer, I meet some fantastically self-aware leaders who have done admirable amounts of work on themselves. They understand at a deep level who they are, what they bring, what they stand for. Often they are living by the golden rule: Treat others as you would like to be treated yourself. It serves them well as a philosophy, but it does not always get the results they really want to see.

So here’s an alternative to the golden rule. The platinum rule: Treat others as they would like to be treated.

You see the golden rule presupposes that everyone is like us. That everyone we interact with wants to be handled in the exact same way and as we ourselves like to be handled. That because we value opportunities to be stretched and challenged and love a good rigorous debate, that that is what everyone else is seeking from us too.

Of course, that can’t be true. Not everyone is the same. And while some people will love to be stretched and challenged in the workplace, others of our teams may want smaller, more discreet, stepped goals with clear and attainable outcomes.

The point is that we are all different and whilst it is absolutely the case that in order to become the best leaders we can possibly be, we need to know ourselves well, it is also true that to create a truly thriving performance eco-system, we also need to put our attention and focus on those we manage and lead. We all need to become better people barometers, taking the temperature regularly to check that we are managing our people in a way that genuinely enables them to be their very best.

So how can we know what people need? Well, there are lots of ways to work this out. The key thing is that we have to be open to getting to know our people.

In today’s remote and virtual team-place, it can be hard to develop working relationships that go beyond the transactional to the meaningful. And if you have worked hard on yourself and discovered that building relationships often sits lower down your priorities than getting the job done, you may need to spend time considering the value of investing in getting to know your team. (Think back the stats at the beginning of the article – getting this right could result in a 30% uplift in performance across your team!)

Here are some tips for deciphering what other people want from us as leaders:

1Ask them! It is often overlooked and a missed opportunity, but we can ask our people what they need from us. How do they like to be managed? What works best for them in their experience?

2Pay attention to what is not being said. We are expert intelligence gatherers. Since we were born, we have been developing the skills of hearing subtext, reading body language and tone and reading between the lines. What are our people really saying they need from us to get the job done?

3Be clear about expectations and invite questions. The two biggest reasons why people don’t perform as we expect or would like them to are that a) that they aren’t clear on what the outcome needs to be b) they aren’t clear on where this sits in terms of other priorities. As leaders it is within our gift to help on both fronts.

4Use a team coach. Coaches are skilled in eliciting information and insights that can help a team coalesce around optimal ways of working. They are an agenda free soundboard and can help leaders develop a deeper understanding of themselves and their people.