A Thought on Leadership

There is a myth about being a great leader that has permeated what many people associate with leadership.  Through many different training sessions for supervisors that I have done, I find it is common that people believe you have to be famous or have some major accomplishments under your belt to be a great leader.  In reality all you really have to do is treat those that you lead with dignity and respect.  An integral part of the formula for good leadership, as well as getting effective results from your team can be as simple as that.  While it is true that there are great leaders who have accomplished something major, it is not a pre-requisite for being a great leader.  It is also unnecessary to have a wall of awards and trophies to serve as a leader who people adore and have come to identify as a leader who has made a difference.  It might come with the territory that an award is granted, but all too often those in positions of leadership pressure themselves to meet an imagined and arbitrary standard of being an awarded leader before they focus on how they treat those that they lead.

Let me walk you through a brief exercise I’ve done during a supervisor training session to illustrate what I’m talking about.  Try to name the past 5 Super Bowl MVP winners.  Try to name the past 3 Miss Universe winners. Try to name the last 4 Nobel Peace Prize Award winners.  Last but not least name the last 4 Oscar Winners for Best Director.

Now try to name 5 people who have been supportive of you.  Try to name 3 people who are great listeners.  Try to name 4 people whose honesty serves as a role model for you. Try to name 4 people who you’ve watched be kind to others regularly.

The first set of lists is remarkably more difficult.  Through that process we are listing people based on their awards, and while they have achieved some really amazing things, we do not remember them for their awards.  We do however remember people who have touched our lives in meaningful ways, and been there for us.  What’s more remarkable is that the traits they conveyed and are remembered for are traits that we generally associate with describing a good leader. 

The flipside is that as a good leader the respect from those you lead is commonly what resonates as more rewarding.  A recent example of this is listening to someone like Tom Brady who is a very accomplished quarterback in the NFL for the New England Patriots.  Recently he addressed college football players at the University of Michigan where he played as a quarterback.  He told these players that the accomplishment he was most proud of were not his Super Bowl rings, or a Super Bowl MVP award, but that his teammates voted him captain of the team in college.  He had earned the respect of his teammates and they looked up to him enough to select him to be their representative and leader.

This is exactly the crux of the matter.  Being a good leader is something that is earned from those that you lead.  Accomplishments while great and fantastic do not by default make someone a good leader.  Instead it is the way you treat those that you lead that make you a good leader.  Someone cannot be a leader without followers in any environment (work, sports team, volunteering, etc.).  The best way to be a memorable leader, as well as an effective one, is to be someone that people admire for the way that they treat their followers.  Just like in the exercise above, would you rather have someone struggle to remember you because of an award you won, or would you rather be someone who is easy to recall because you treated those you lead in a way that they appreciated?  It is in the latter where good leaders are created and how they earn the respect of those that they lead.

Coaching at Work

If I had a dollar for every time I heard “There is no I in team.” from a coach, I’d be almost as rich as someone who went pro.  I have very fond and vivid memories of the sports that I played throughout my youth.  I remember the coaches I had and the teammates I played with.  My love for soccer started in second grade when I played on my first organized team, and basketball started when I was in sixth grade.  I played both sports through high school and I genuinely loved being on the field or the court.  My experiences there and my love for all sports helped mold how I viewed leadership during those years and influences how I currently view it now.

The first time I started supervising people was late in undergrad when I ran an orientation team. I had been on the team, but I had never been in charge of the team.  Admittedly I was intimidated.  How do I manage a group of people when I’ve never done this before?  As I struggled to figure it out in the weeks before the first meeting, that’s when it hit me.  Just do what your coaches did to get people to work together.  It was then that I began to fuse my love of sports and leadership together. 

Before I knew it, I found myself coaching not on a court but coaching in the workplace.  The ghosts of coaches past and all the words of wisdom that they utilized to inspire us to play were now being rebranded by me as I supervised my team of employees.  (Minus a few locker room expletives which of course weren’t appropriate for a work environment.)  Throughout my time supervising, my leadership style has been refined.   I have been faced with challenging and easy teams to work with, but getting them to perform, and achieve greatness became my new ‘winning the game’. 

I have to admit, I’m always thinking of leadership and how it plays out, so I was touched by a shirt that I saw while walking in the mall one day.  It said “There is no ‘I’ in team, but there is a ‘me’.”  Instantaneously I had a dramatic revelation of how this would be my new mantra as a supervisor.  It would also become what I would instill in training those I supervised on how to supervise their own staff teams.

It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that you can’t be a leader without followers.  As a supervisor you have to be a good leader for your staff to buy into your vision and mission.  But you have to start with yourself.  You have to buy into your vision and mission and be a role model for them before you can get anyone else to buy in and follow what you expect of them.  Therefore like the t-shirt says, it starts with me. 

When the staff doesn’t perform, the blame typically falls on the leader and the whole team has a bad name.  Much like we see coaches in sports who have a losing team, more often than not, everyone holds that coach responsible for the team losing.  He/she gets dragged through the mud with the team’s name because they are a part of the team too.  The drive to be better should not only be an extrinsic force coming from the fans.  The drive to be better needs to be an intrinsic force as well coming from within.  That coach needs to look within and take a step to make the team better.
The mind blowing part is that this doesn’t only go for the supervisor/coach, but this goes for the staff/team members as well.  I remember sharing with a staff I supervised that “We as a team can only be as good as the weakest player”.  It was imperative for my staff to know that we are all in this together.  Think about any time you’ve worked on a team.  We have all been on a staff before where someone likes to take all the credit for when great things happen.   As soon as something bad happens they shirk the blame stating what they’ve done right, and like a weather vane in the wind, their finger starts pointing in all sorts of directions trying to distribute responsibility for the failure.  People who do this believe that the success is mine, but the failure is yours.  But as I stated before the team is only as good as the weakest player. 

So when you dissect the phrase on the t-shirt, it is saying that each employee and their supervisor need to look within and instead of saying “But I did…” they all need to take a look in the mirror saying “the success of this team starts with me.”  If everyone on the team approaches their work ethic in that way, people will begin taking responsibility for helping each other and the entire team where they see it necessary.  Instead of just complaining and letting things slide. , there will be more unity, ownership and empowerment in the workplace.  With this approach it becomes less of a bragging situation of look at what I did right, to one where people feel a sense of responsibility saying it is up to me to figure out how I can help my team be better.