Are leaders made or born? This is the Holy Grail question of leadership development.
Leaders do not arrive screaming onto the Earth with a specific leadership DNA. But it seems that neither can we take people, give them leadership books and Power Point presentations and convert them into leaders.
The propensity toward leadership seems to be a nurturing process, often beginning in childhood and reinforced throughout adulthood. Successful leaders seem to consistently exhibit and reinforce nine values throughout their years.
Studying thousands of years of winning leaders weaves a common thread across time that points to their success. That thread is the nine leadership keys, applied consistently. They are:
- Effective communications,
- Honesty,
- Clear goals and intent,
- Contingency planning (flexibility),
- Leading by example,
- Decisiveness/daring (risk-taking),
- Confident competence,
- Resilience, and
- Delegation of authority, but not responsibility.
There is nothing esoteric about this list. Most items on it do not even require definition. The key is the consistent application of these values — or habits, if you prefer — which become deeply engrained in the psyche of any leader.
What history shows from Julius Caesar, Hannibal and Joan of Arc to Gandhi, Florence Nightengale and Martin Luther King Jr. is that leaders who live by these values thrive as leaders. Those who don’t — don’t.
Consider the memorable leaders from your career. Didn’t they exhibit these values? Now, consider the poor leaders from your experience. Didn’t they apply these habits inconsistently or not at all?
During my military service in Afghanistan, I kept these nine values on a card in my pocket and reviewed them routinely. The nine keys of leadership also formed the basis of a leadership development course I taught at three government “universities.” I had a chance to practice what I preached and what I preached worked.
I used the same keys in the corporate world, with the same positive results.
Let’s put some color — some meat on the bone — for each of these keys:
Effective communication means getting the message across so that all stakeholders’ heads can go up and down or from side to side when asked, “Do we all understand?” This requires communicating with your people and knowing how they get and internalize information, whether through email, phone calls, face-to-face, official memos, Morse Code, smoke signals — whatever.
Usually, a combination of several forms of communication with the same message increases the odds that the information gets through. Most people need to receive a message three times before it truly sinks in. Checking their understanding of your message is a fail-safe method to ensure the message is comprehended.
Honesty seems straightforward, but people employ a nuanced definition of honesty. This sliding scale of honesty goes from perfect, blunt truth to hedging the facts, which brings on a lie, but not quite. A good guideline is following the Stockdale Paradox: “Retain faith that you will prevail in the end, while confronting the most brutal facts of the current reality.”
President James Garfield said, “The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.” A leader caught in a half-truth or an outright lie loses the faith and respect of the team. Honesty is refreshing and the reward is trust.
Clear goals and intent ensure that your team understands what success should look like. Good goals are simple and easily understood from top to bottom in the organization. The intent is the “what” of the goals. This is the spirit in which to accomplish the goals, should a decision point be reached that falls outside your goals. When a plan gets punched in the nose, things fall apart or stop.
Understanding intent helps your team proceed after the blow, take independent action and drive on. Intent goes hand-in-hand with communications. Your team must understand the “what” or they will stop and look to you for guidance at every difficulty.
There is never time or mental bandwidth for a leader to handle all decision crossroads. Conveying intent means the leader’s spirit helps cross every intersection. Without this, plans frequently struggle, stop or die.
Contingency planning (flexibility) is the ability to shift seamlessly as a fluid situation changes. This is the mental ability to envision your plan, but have a plan B as a contingency for the most likely alternative scenarios. Yet, many occurrences will fall outside all plans. This is where having the mental flexibility to take a breath, clear your mind and look at the situation and how your team should respond comes into play.
Lead by example puts the leader out front, literally and figuratively. Teams want inspiration and this happens best when the leader is in front, modeling desired behavior.
The leader who rolls up his sleeves and works overtime on a hard or physical project inspires a feeling of “in this together, through thick and thin.” The leader who is disengaged leaves the team on its own and fosters an "us versus them" environment.
Decisiveness/daring (risk-taking) shows you have the ability to make a decision when the situation is unclear and the stakes are high. It can be a calculated risk. Decisiveness allows exploitation of an opportunity not envisioned during planning.
Confident competence requires some definition. Imagine a time when you realized you had a leadership shortcoming or a capability gap in your career. When you determined fixing the situation required additional study or taking work home on the weekend to overcome this problem, how did you feel when you mastered the situation? Probably, “Ah, now I’m on top of this thing. I got it.” Did you feel more competent? In the aftermath, didn’t you then also feel more confident when returning to work on Monday? That is confident competence. It is the internal knowledge that you have a 360-degree grasp of the situation and that you are good and capable. It is not being cocky or being a braggart. It is the subtle aura of confidence projected, based on personally perceived competence. And people feel it.
Resilience is the ability to bounce instead of breaking under the strains of pressure and adversity. The comparison is a tennis ball versus an egg. A team will seldom exceed the resilience of its leader, so modeling resilience is critical. And a team will bounce only as high as its leader.
Recorded history provides no examples of successful leaders who were not resilient with the ability to bounce and bend as the environment evolved. A mantra for a quick dose of resilience is saying, “OK, this isn’t ideal. Let’s let go of the shock and panic, take a deep breath and tackle the situation with a clear head.”
Delegate authority, but not responsibility means sharing the load. Leaders can be easily overwhelmed by the magnitude of their role. They need not shoulder the entire weight of the team’s success. The leader can designate parts of his or her tasks to trusted team members. These team members will feel valued and more engaged.
Think of a leader’s role as a pie. The leader can give out pieces of the pie, but in the end, the leader is responsible for how the pie turns out. The subordinate handles a piece and reports its progress back to the leader so he/she can assemble it into the whole pie. If the leader gives responsibility away and washes his hands of the task, the leader is susceptible to misunderstanding and lots of finger-pointing. Realize that no leader can handle the whole pie without help from the team. Delegating authority makes leading your team toward success more manageable with less burn-out.
The beauty of these keys of effective leadership is that they do not ask leaders to apply them in a vacuum. It’s acceptable to ask for advice, opinions and help. No leader has all the answers and a team will mistrust one who professes he or she does.
Uplines, colleagues and trusted team members are part of any leader’s decision-making sphere. Using these assets does not make leaders seem weak. It makes them seem wise. There is wisdom in gaining other opinions. Ultimately, the leader chooses the course, but outside input provides a 360-degree view of the situation, which previously may have not occurred to the leader.
If a person comes to leadership later in life, can he or she develop these leadership keys and succeed? History seems to tell us yes, providing that the keys become deeply engrained and are followed consistently. George Washington is an example of a person who came late to these habits. And we know how his story turned out.
The nine keys of leadership apply at every level, from a Little League coach to the CEO of any corporation. Whether our parents instilled these habits or we come to them as adults, we can nurture and enhance our leadership propensity.
