12 Hard Leadership Truths That Every Leader Needs To Hear

Welcome to the No Bullshit Leadership podcast. In a world where knowledge has become a commodity, this podcast is designed to give you something more. Access to the experience of a successful CEO who has already walked the path. So join your host, Martin Moore, who will unlock and bring to life your own leadership experiences and accelerate your journey to leadership excellence. Hey there and welcome to episode 311 of the No Bullshit Leadership podcast. This week's episode, 12 hard leadership truths bringing success closer. I try as much as possible to make sure that every episode of No Bullshit Leadership is a valuable reference source for leaders at every level. Some episodes are super practical. They home in on a specific facet of leadership that might be difficult and they provide tools and strategies for how to deal with it. Other episodes are a little more philosophical. So in the past I've covered super practical topics like episode 275. When should you let someone go? And on the other extreme topics like episode 229. Confidence, arrogance and self-doubt. Hopefully you're finding a really good blend of detailed practical tools and the higher level principles that help you guide your mental, emotional and psychological responses to the hard work of leadership. This one clearly belongs in the second category. I cover 12 things that you'll instinctively resist on your leadership journey. Of course not all of you will resist all of them obviously. But I suspect I'll be at least a few of these principles that you'll instinctively try to avoid or ignore. There's no doubt in my mind that these principles are rock solid. They're like gravity. They operate the same way on all of us, whether we believe in them or not. And they'll ultimately have a huge bearing on how successful you are as a leader. This episode's pretty simple. I outline each of the 12 hard leadership truths one by one. I've also created a free PDF downloadable so that you can keep a cheat sheet handy. You can pick this up at yourCEOmental.com/episode311. So let's get into it. Truth number one. Activity is irrelevant. Creating value is all that matters. We get ourselves so caught up in activity. We love to busy ourselves with the things that we've mastered, regardless of whether or not they actually deliver the highest value outcomes. The people who work for you find comfort and security in being able to fill their days. And we're going to gravitate towards the things that are most comfortable for us. Leadership work, I'm talking about real leadership work, is tough. So there are always other things that we can busy ourselves with. As a leader, value comes from leveraging the talent of the people in your team, from giving them clarity and focusing them on the right work, and then holding them to account for delivering it. But it's easy to let people follow the path of least resistance because, to do otherwise, might very well land you in a conflict situation. The quest for value has to be a lifelong passion that you pursue with single-minded focus. Otherwise, you'll have really good people working super-productively on all the wrong things. Challenge number two, not everyone's going to like you. You have an inbuilt safety mechanism that's trying to work to protect you from conflict. We are programmed through evolution to seek affiliation and acceptance. Almost everything you do as a leader has the potential for conflict, and if you're leading well, conflict just comes with the territory. Whether you're trying to stretch a team member's performance, or whether you're disagreeing with your boss, or negotiating a supplier agreement, your leadership career will be so much happier and so much more fulfilling if you learn to handle conflict confidently and comfortably. But it takes conscious, consistent, disciplined effort to become comfortable in conflict. So the best advice I can give you is, get over it and get on with it. Quest number three, prioritizing speed over accuracy improves every single decision. Your decisions don't have to take a long time. Slow decisions can be boiled down to three fundamental reasons. Number one, fear of getting it wrong. Number two, seeking the comfort of consensus. And number three, a lack of diligence between decision-making steps. You need robust process to make sure your decisions are good. Understanding the risk associated with any decision is going to help you to work out how much is enough, how much data is enough, how much consultation is enough, how much analysis is enough. You need to be really clear on the value trade-offs between making a decision now and delaying it. In general, we tend to really overestimate the risk of moving forward, and we underestimate the risk that comes from staying where we are. Truth number four, the higher up you go, the less likely it is that your decisions are going to receive unanimous agreement. So while we're talking about decision-making, this is a really big one. It incorporates the importance of getting over the need to be liked and the need for speed principle. Consensus is harder and harder to achieve at higher levels. So the process takes longer, and you're more likely to reach an impasse. Strong single-point accountability is critical if you want your decision-making process to operate effectively. Otherwise, it just drives you to the lowest common denominator. And you end up with a decision that everyone can kind of live with, but no one is happy with. And you'll really struggle to find anyone who thinks that it's the best decision that could have been made. Consensus number five, feedback is a gift. Give and receive that gift liberally. There seems to be growing hesitation about giving feedback. Performance management systems are out of vogue, and there's a growing school of thought that people are happier and more productive when they're given only positive feedback. And of course, even that happens really in the field of play. I could not disagree more with this principle. To me, feedback is an essential part of good leadership. Letting people know whether or not they're meeting your expectations and the standard you're trying to set for them is all important. Killing people with kindness makes them weak and ineffective. Everyone knows instinctively whether or not they are performing. So telling them something they know deep down isn't true only serves to damage the trust relationship you have with them. People always know. So whether or not your organization embraces performance management systems is sort of irrelevant. Your objective, if you want to be a good leader, should be to give people constant microfeedback. The sort of feedback that helps them to calibrate where they truly are, that gives them clarity around your expectations and makes them feel secure in knowing where they are. If you do this, performance management isn't daunting. There are no surprises because you've already had all the individual conversations you need to about your people's performance. Truth number six, the quality and capability of your team is the greatest predictor of your personal success. The sooner you learn to leverage the talent in your team, the faster you're going to reach the point where your performance reaches your potential. Too many leaders rely on their own individual brilliance and they eventually hit a ceiling. They can't do everything and they get burned out. Learning early to build capability in your team, to stretch every individual to whatever peak performance lies within them and focusing them on the right things is going to speed your ability to grow and move up. The better you get a building team capability, the sooner you're going to be promoted to a bigger role. Truth number seven, high-performing teams are tough to build and even tougher to run. Lots of people I know kid themselves that they have a high-performing team. If this is you, I just want you to ask yourself, by what measure? Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls in the 1990s was a high-performing team. Six NBA championships in an eight-year span. The New England Patriots from 2001 to 2018 was a high-performing team. And Super Bowl appearances and six titles in an 18-year span. Steve Ward's Australian cricket team was a high-performing team. A record 15 consecutive test match wins and the 1999 World Cup. Of course, not every team has to reach these heights to be considered a high-performing team. The point I'm making though is, where are you setting the bar for your team? What's your yardstick? Teams that have little or no conflict are rarely high-performing. High-performing teams have strong, capable, driven individuals who are fanatical about achieving high performance. I had the privilege of leading one of these during my executive career. Maybe two at a pinch. And that was no walk in the park. Managing the conflict so that it remained constructive and focused on shared excellence rather than individual point scoring can be really difficult. It takes a really strong leader to manage a high-performing team. Truth number eight, empathy isn't optional. And leaders can always use more of it. Empathy is not sympathy though. Empathy is about understanding. It's your ability to see the world through someone else's eyes, to walk a mile in their shoes. I firmly believe that the more empathy you have, the better you will be as a leader. Sympathy, on the other hand, is disastrous. If you feel sympathy for someone, you're likely to make concessions for them. You'll allow them to behave or perform in a substandard fashion. And this is bad for everyone, including the individual involved. Make sure you know the difference between empathy and sympathy. And balance your empathy with strong leadership. This means that you understand and connect with people in a very compassionate and human way. But you don't allow to cloud your judgment. Truth number nine, perfectionism will freeze your team and destroy value. Excellence over perfection every single time. In truth number three, I spoke about the principle that perfection is driven by fear. People freeze because they're afraid to get something wrong. And because of that, everything grinds to a halt. In the quest to take something beyond the Pareto principle sweet spot where 80% of the value comes from 20% of the effort, time and energy are wasted and value is destroyed. You reach the point of diminishing returns way faster than you expect. Excellence, on the other hand, creates momentum. You can't fail fast. You can't be agile. You can't mimic any other business cliche if you're a perfectionist. Your decisions don't have to be perfect. They have to be roughly right. Now think about how the very best performers see perfection. In the world of major league baseball, it's hard for a batter to hit the ball when it's coming at them at 98 miles an hour. Every batter knows when he steps to the plate that the odds are stacked against him making it to first base. In fact, as a professional baseball player, if you could manage to get to first base once in every three attempts at bat, it would put you in the top 30 players of all time. Getting on base two times out of seven is excellence. Getting on base one in three times is freakish. Truth number 10, accountability is everything. One head to pat, one ass to kick and they both belong to the same person. Shared accountability is no accountability. It invariably creates gaps and overlaps. Nothing. I mean this. Nothing will do more to improve your team's execution capability than implementing strong single point accountability. Everyone knows who's cooking the chalk. Decision rights are crystal clear. Issues all flow to the right point and you've got none of the old, oh Marty, I'm sorry, I thought someone else was doing that. It creates a completely different energy and a different cadence for your people. If you can be strong enough to assign those accountabilities, give your people autonomy and empowerment and then hold them to account for their performance, the results your team produces will be night and day different. Truth number 11, if you maintain grace under pressure, your team will be calmer. Being relaxed and composed in the face of extreme pressure is the hallmark of great leaders and it's contagious. Your team will become calmer as well. When you see a leader who genuinely has this nailed, they have what I call grace under pressure. The calmness on the outside reflects what's going on on the inside. They have faith in their people and the ability of their team to handle whatever comes their way. They're confident and they're diligent but they're also unflappable. This gives the team permission to not panic. They don't buy into the drama. They take their lead from you. It lets everyone work with a sense of urgency without the drama and thrashing about that you often see when teams fall into a crisis. And finally truth number 12, business is serious but you shouldn't take yourself too seriously. An old mentor of mine once said to me, "Marty, we're only in business for two reasons. To make money and to have fun." We sometimes forget about the fun part of business. Now let's face it, winning is fun. I don't care who you are. But you also need the ability to laugh at yourself. If you become overly infatuated with your own self-importance, you run the risk of believing your own bullshit. So keep it light and keep it fun. And then go and smack the ball out of the park. These 12 truths are sometimes difficult to sign up to. Some come with additional work. Some come with personal risk. Some come with the need to grow your self-awareness. Some come with the uncomfortable reality of having to challenge your long-held worldview. But I can promise you that if you manage to adopt these principles, your leadership performance will skyrocket. And that is why you listen to this podcast in the first place, right? Alright so that brings us to the end of episode 311. Thanks so much for joining us and remember at your CEO mentor, our purpose is to improve the quality of leaders globally. So please make sure you share this episode. I don't know anyone who wouldn't benefit from this one. I look forward to next week's episode where I swing back to the practical tool side of my repertoire with the five hardest conversations. Until then, I know you'll take every opportunity you can to be a no bullshit leader. (upbeat music)