Know Thyself When Wearing Multiple Hats

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”

- by John Quincy Adams

True Leadership… The Best Leader… The Star Leader… A Leader is Not a Manager… Leading from Behind… and the list just goes on for ‘being the best leader’ phrases. “True leadership” is hard to find. What makes it ‘hard’?

Few years back, I used to work in a big program having 300+ human resources. I was one of the youngest project managers. I was looked upon by my team as a role-model on assertive leadership and a can-do attitude. This made me proud, but I later realized failure to understand the pulse of my team. I also went through a 360-degree leadership assessment during this period. I got my anonymous review comments (from my team) as part of this assessment. The feedback comments reflected how I was popular in driving my own agenda, rather than resolving my team issues.

In a few years down the line, I managed a much smaller team of 5, where I also worked as a contributor. At this point, a realization came to me, about my failures as a leader with my past team.

A team consists of individuals with different personalities. Some are full of patience and can get truly into details, while others want to move fast. The same goes for managers as well!

What is “True Leadership”?

In short, it is a potent and balanced mix of “IQ” and “EQ”. The level of which one to use when…, is something that comes of experience dealing with people and myriad forms of situations.

The most important quality of ‘True Leadership’ is the ability to –

Understand thyself first and regulate our emotions to effectively deal with others.

If you can do “self-reflection”, you can easily correlate the above with the ability to…

• Empathize: Understand people issues / problems and resolve these to a ‘certain degree’.
• Connect Emotionally and Map Work Types: Identify the strengths of your team and utilize these for the ‘right-fit’ work.
• Be a Task-Master: Be disciplined and assertive to complete project tasks efficiently and within the given boundaries daily. 
• Be a Visionary: Always strive to achieve the final project goal in mind.
• Stay Away from Micro-management: Give freedom and trust the team to do their jobs (in their own ways).
• Strive for Perfection but Do-Not Go Crazy Over It: Understand that perfection should not be pursued as the final goal, but efforts should be made to achieve perfection. 
• Drive for Change: Be ready to learn, adapt and manage change with evolving situations. 

Additionally, resolving people issues is never 100% (done-done) and hence, there are certain issues which should be left for time to heal/resolve. On perfection, different individuals have different ways to do the same job for achieving the same goal. It is also important to keep our minds ‘open’ for different ideas and allow the ‘ideas to flow’. This is the only way for you to allow your team to ‘test their approaches’ and fail / pass.

Failures teach and help teams to finally create a common intent.

Why there is a ‘dearth of true leaders’?

Considering the important quality of ‘True Leadership’, fewer individuals can ‘balance’ the need to Understand Thyself, People Management and Managing Project Goals. The biggest culprit here is Our Own Ego, which when boosted with ‘power’, blinds us to the reality on the ground.

This becomes more apparent, when the leader shifts his / her management style to – my way or the highway… approach during extreme situations. This becomes highly detrimental in the long-run for both the leader and the team (apart from the organization).

How to develop ‘True Leadership Qualities’?

The world of knowledge is full of training material on management and leadership.

Specifically, for “true leadership”, apart from knowledge, below key points are worth striving for…

• Develop the Important Quality of True Leadership: Develop an ability of self-introspection and changing tact / approach towards work daily. It is also important to balance this aspect with the understanding of your team members personality and subtle cues from your team members behavior.  
• Be Hands-On: Do hands-on work with your team daily or every few days. This gives a leader true insight for the extent of on-the-ground issues of your team members.
• Be Ready-To-Share: Share at-least 50% of your managerial work and ask for suggestions from your team. Even though, they may have less knowledge in certain managerial tasks, this provides them the importance and acknowledgement of “why” their leader may take certain decisions. This establishes an amazing level of connect with your team.
• Prepare the Next Rung of Leadership: Identify and train specific selected individuals having a ‘good-balance’ of IQ and EQ. It is also important, that they have an interest to take up leadership roles. An effective leader spends time to train theses specific individuals using the “experience of their failures”. A good leader should be wary of his / her own perceptions to do a selection of individuals here.

- Written by Anand Nanavati (SupraDigit Solutions)