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Growth Management Personal Development

Two Powerful Acts of Leadership

Learning and Leadership

I have studied, practiced, taught, and coached leadership for over two decades.  The best leaders I have worked with have this in common:  they are intentional about learning, growing, and expanding their capabilities.  Consider the world we live in.  Radical disruption from the COVID-19 crisis with entire industries being impacted.  An ever-changing workforce with multiple generations. Ongoing changes in technology, and the rise of social media.  Because of this relentless change, leaders must evolve more quickly to keep pace.  President John F. Kennedy said it well.  “Leadership and learning are indispensable to one another.”  While all this may be a blinding flash of the obvious, what may not be obvious is how we can accelerate the expansion of our own leadership capabilities?

Two acts of leadership

Consider these two acts of leadership as a starting point for expanding your leadership capacity:  Courage and wisdom.  Not as concepts or principles, but as actions.

Courage is the first act of leadership

The practice of leadership requires many acts of courage.  Having the tough conversations.  Challenging the status quo.  Making the hard decisions.  Taking calculated risks.  Leading change.  Speaking truth to power.  All of these acts build our leadership muscles.  However, the first act of courage that enables all others is the act of taking a cold, hard look at ourselves as leaders.  Consider these questions as a starting point.  Many are framed in the context of the changing world we live in.

  1. What strengths do I have that serve me well in this changing world?
  2. How can I build on these strengths?
  3. What strengths do I lean on that may not be relevant today?
  4. How do identify them and learn to play new music?
  5. What weaknesses do I have that will handicap me going forward?
  6. How do I strengthen them? Can I mitigate them through the strengths of others?
  7. What blind spots do I have, particularly as it relates to the new business realities we face?
  8. What bad behaviors do I have that limit my effectiveness?
  9. Who do I trust to give me candid, constructive feedback to gain a clearer picture of myself as a leader?

Winston Churchill once said, “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality that guarantees all the others.”  While courage is a human quality, this quality comes from acting with courage.  The first act is coming face-to-face with ourselves.  It is courageous because it is hard.  It is also what separates us from the pack.

Wisdom is the second act of leadership

Making the decision to get support is an act of wisdom.  There is too much at stake to go it alone in our leadership journey.  High performers in many professions surround themselves with a support system.  Following are three ways to build a support system to expand your capabilities.

  1. A mentor or mentors.  Mentors can come from within the organization you work for, or outside the organization.  There are benefits to both.  One understands the organization and its dynamics, while the other brings a fresh, outside perspective.  Mentors can be great sounding boards to challenge or validate our thinking.
  2. A leadership or executive coach. Coaches are professionally trained and skilled in holding a mirror up to see ourselves more clearly.  They are experts at asking the right questions to expand our thinking.  They can hold us accountable for doing the work necessary in achieving the goals we set for ourselves.  I have been on both sides of mentoring and coaching and have experienced the value of both.
  3. A master-mind group. These are groups of like-minded professionals that meet on a regular basis to support each other’s growth.  They are a great source of diverse thinking that expands our own thinking.  They can become a network for lifelong professional relationships that are beneficial to all.  I am a member of a mastermind group within The C-Suite Network.  C-Suite is a network of like-minded executives, consultants, coaches, and entrepreneurs that are masterful at leveraging each other’s knowledge and strengths.  Being a member of this network has allowed me to share my knowledge and experiences with other members while expanding my own from the experiences of these same colleagues.  This network has accelerated my own development as I have transitioned from a 30-year corporate career to being a business owner.  Having a professional facilitator is essential to a successful mastermind group.

To your growth!

Mark Hinderliter, PhD, CPC is a Veteran-Owned business owner that works with client companies in creating great workplaces that impact performance.  His insights come from three decades in the corporate arena, most recently as a Senior Vice-President for a billion-dollar global company.

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Growth Leadership Personal Development

Servant Leadership is Good Business

Serving others is essentially setting people up for success.

My experience is that there are two kinds of leaders.  Those that get it that our job as leaders is to SERVE our people, teams, and customers.  The second kind of leader is one that serves themselves.  You can see it in their behaviors.  They are focused on their own success, their own career path, their own compensation, their own advancement, or only the bottom line.  Both kinds of leaders are easy to spot.  Most of us have worked with both, so we KNOW the difference.

Earlier in my career, I worked as a Senior Vice President for a global business.   Our CEO, Phil, as everyone called him, really got it.  Our workforce was made up of several thousand skilled technicians that worked in our customers’  facilities.  Phil gave regular lunch-time talks to technicians who were in the headquarters for technical training.  His talks always included some version of this conversation.  “You (technicians) are the most important people in the company.  You take care of our customers and to them, you are the face of the company.  You are at the top of the company pyramid.  I am at the bottom because my job is to support you and help you be great.”  The inverted pyramid above would be a representation of Phil’s perspective.

Similarly, when Phil addressed our leadership meetings, he often said, “Our jobs as leaders is to help people be great at their jobs.”  Under Phil’s leadership, the company averaged about 10% year-over- year growth over a 15 year period and had over 50 consecutive profitable quarters in a very competitive industry.  Because of my first hand experience with Phil’s leadership, along with seeing contrasting styles, it became clear to me that a servant leadership model is good business and can be practiced at all levels.  In Gallup’s 2019 Engagement Survey of 25,000 people across 20 industries, they reported the #1 factor that predicts performance is the level of support provided by managers.

Further support of this approach is the United States Marine Corps, who has a saying, “Officers eat last.”  Literally, enlisted men and women are at the front of the chow line, and the officers are at the back.  It is a symbolic way of showing that officers’ primary function was to serve the needs of their people – first.  Simon Sinek’s best-selling book, “Leaders Eat Last” was inspired by a conversation with a Marine Corps General, dispelling the old myth that servant leadership is soft.  Think about servant leadership as a two-sided coin.  One side is supporting people.  The other side is holding them accountable for performance.  Practicing both sides of the coin sets people up for success.  To be clear, mature leaders have a few styles of leadership they use in the right situation.  Phil, like the Marine Corps, could be very directive in the right situation.  There is a time and place for a leader to say, “This is what we are doing (and why) and I expect everyone to get on board.” Times of crisis, when safety is at risk, and urgent matters can be such times when a directive approach is needed.

In your role as a leader at any level, if you buy into the concept that our jobs are to help people be great, then its a good bet your teams perform at a high-level.  In my leadership workshops, I ask participants “What are the essential things you must do to set your people and teams up for success?”  Then I ask them (and now you) to create a list of ten of those essentials and then grade themselves on how well they are performing each of them.  Most lists include providing the right tools for the job, training and coaching, reviewing the company’s purpose and core values, and communicating clear expectations. It’s a great starting point to increase your leadership impact. Serving others goes a long way to building trust.  As discussed in a previous article called Building Trust-The Key to Agility ( https://c-suitenetwork.com/advisors/building-trust-the-key-to-organizational-agility/), high-trust cultures outperform low-trust cultures all day long.  I have experienced this truth first-hand.

Let’s think about leadership in the context of today.   Research shows that today’s workforce wants four things from their jobs – a fulfilling job, better bosses, teams they like being a part of,  a company they believe in.  The servant-leader will thrive with today’s workforce.  The self-serving leader will struggle with attracting and retaining talent and achieving engagement and sustained performance.  If we take the conversation up to the organization level, self-serving, command and control leadership cultures have a distinct disadvantage during these challenging times.

Know this, your leadership matters. Keep learning, growing and developing your leaders!

 

Dr. Mark Hinderliter works with clients to develop a people strategy that aligns with their current business strategy.  His experience as a Senior Vice President for a billion-dollar global enterprise along with a PhD in Organization and Management are a unique fusion of real-world experience and academic credentials.

Mark is a Veteran-owned Business Owner and the host of the bi-weekly LinkedIn Live event called, “The Great Retention.”

You can follow Mark on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/markhinderliter/