OPINION: What do we look for in a leader?
Leadership styles vary from business-to-business so, as internal communicators, we have to be ready to adapt and make the most of what we have to help leaders achieve an ideal approach.
As demonstrated with the recent UK riots and the global economy in freefall, the cries for leadership and direction have never been louder. It’s no different in the corporate world. Several years of cut backs, corporate re-sizing, product diversification and integrations later and the pressures on organizations’ leaders are stretching to breaking point.
In these times of making the most of every asset, expectations of leaders are higher than ever. Leadership in this age is a heady cocktail of visionary thinking, magnetic personality, rolling up your sleeves and delivering – and that’s just the start. On top of that, there’s the people development role – managing the career aspirations and day-to-day performance of team members as well as spotting and nurturing talent.
So how to achieve the "Holy Grail"? What is the perfect leadership style and how do we, as internal communication professionals, go about helping our leaders to achieve it? Well, we can support our leaders to be effective by giving them the internal communication vehicles to be successful. We can facilitate leadership visibility – creating roadshows, walk-the-floor exercises and presentations, which tackle employee concerns. We can flood the regular communication channels with a leadership "voice" and bring their take on things to the workforce at large. We can coach our leaders, helping them to articulate their thinking and become better communicators at every level. All of these actions are a critical part of our role and have a tangible impact on levels of engagement in our organizations and the degree to which our leaders are successful. But, it’s not the whole answer.
Leadership DNA can’t be bottled and resold. Leaders are distinct personalities within an organization who can’t be replicated and rolled out. Their qualities – some good and some bad – make them what they are. In our attempt to present them in their best light, we sometimes try to gloss over their less attractive traits. We connect strategy and initiatives, which can’t always be connected in the desire to present a "clear line of sight". Our day-to-day battle, on behalf of employees, for transparency sometimes stops short of the Boardroom door.
Leaders are fallible and perhaps that is one of their greatest untapped qualities. We all know the adage about learning more from our mistakes than our successes, but this seems to stop at the highest level of middle manager and from then on all decisions have to be justifiably right even when they are not! One of the most powerful things a leader can do is be honest about when they have got it wrong, especially in this climate. This admission can be incredibly empowering to those around them. It tells a story of risk-taking, trying something out even if you don’t have all the answers yet.
One of the most powerful things a leader can do is be honest about when they have got it wrong, especially in this climate.
In a recent piece of work for a client, we uncovered 84 initiatives going on in the organization, some of which were connected and some of which weren’t, and in direct opposition to each other. The challenge – to try and make sense of the puzzle, to connect the dots or to expose it as it was? Encouraging the senior team to expose this initiative overload, not to explain it away, had an immediate effect resulting in initiative amnesty. In a desire to create a clear way forward, part of the roll-out of the new strategy was a process of acknowledging and clearing up the debris of previous mistakes.
So, in an economic climate like this, one of the most empowering roles a leader can have is to turn the volume down a little – although definitely not off. The rallying cry becomes more subtle. It’s about creating more space to listen than it is to speak. It’s about creating thinking space – time for people throughout the organization to step off the carousel, to reflect, observe, come up with thoughts, suggestions and ideas. To empower people to find solutions and not be the solution point in itself. Again it comes down to fallibility – not being afraid to say "I don’t have all the answers". As communicators, our challenge is to help to make this happen.
Have your say
Do you think your leader could benefit from establishing a reflective workplace culture? Does a leader have to promote an infallible image, or should they be able to hold their hands up and admit when they don't have the answers? Share your stories below...
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