Eight Rules of Leadership

Leadership: it's one of those qualities you know when you see it but it's tough to define exactly what makes it. The dictionaries define leadership in terms of leading and leaders: "The position or function of a leader"; "the ability to lead"; and so on. In order to parse these definitions we must look back at the leaders and leading we've experienced in our own lives. Those experiences differ from person to person and so the word "leadership" really has different meaning to different people.

It's no surprise that different authors cite different things as components of leadership. At a recent Toastmasters club meeting, a friend Dick T. presented eight of these components, which he gathered from four different books. These Rules of Leadership come from: Loeb, Marshall, and Kindel, "Leadership for Dummies"; Phillips, "Lincoln on Leadership"; Toastmasters International, "Competent Leadership"; and Toastmasters International, "High Performance Leadership". The comments below each rule, are my own.

1. EMBRACE RESPONSIBILITY

U.S. President Truman popularized the phrase, "the buck stops here". It means that a leader doesn't pass blame off to someone else. A leader wears the blame for her subordinates actions.
If someone under your command messes up, and you put all the blame on them, then you are giving away your power over the situation. By saying it's your underling's fault, you are implicitly saying that you have no power over the situation. If you want real power, don't do this. Take the blame yourself and you send a strong message that the power is your own.

This can even serve as a road toward leadership when you yourself are the subordinate. If you and a colleague share blame for a mishap, consider claiming the full responsibility all for yourself-- and then offering to fix it. Suddenly you glow with an aura of leadership.

2. ARTICULATE A VISION AND CONTINUOUSLY REAFFIRM IT

Successful people are the people who can really visualize what they want. Visualizing a goal means more than just imagining yourself holding a million dollar check. It means visualizing all the side effects, and visualizing the road that gets you there. The same goes for your team. It's not enough just to visualize your team curing cancer, visualize everything around that goal. How will your day-to-day life change? How will you react to the press-- or the paparazzi? What'll happen to your team, will it move on to a new challenge or will it disband? Will you become estranged from any of your less successful friends? Once you've solidified such a vision, you'll enjoy True Action: a curtain drawn back, and the path of leadership suddenly laid out before your eyes.

A practical problem in leadership, is that your workers become attached to their jobs, rather than to your goals. The typical police officer wouldn't want to work toward a crime-free world, that'd put him out of his job. A great police chief would be one who could get his officers to share a vision of reduced crime (including the strategy and aftermath), rather than just concentrating on individual routines.

(It's not enough to just make a lame "vision statement". See the "pitfalls" section below.)

3. BUILD A TEAM


When you're in charge of a team, you should constantly be building it up. Pimp it like a sweet ride. That means sometimes wandering off the path of short term gains. Anyone is capable of just doing what gets the most results in the short term. A true leader will make long term investments in the team. That might mean, letting ineffective team members go to make room for better ones. The new team members will need training and such, and you might have to make several tries before you get the right person. The long term investment lays down and oils the machinery which will get the team over the finish line.

4. PURSUADE, DELEGATE, AND SUPPORT TEAM MEMBERS

Remember when you had a boss, teacher, or friend who got you do something by explaining to you how it was the best course of action. This creates a relationship between leader and follower, a channel that lets the leader share the goal and vision he's created in rule 2. In this way, the follower isn't just some hired hand, but a partner and an ally. And when your follower is a partner/ally, looking toward the same goals as yourself, then you can elevate them and share the cup of power with them. This is what it means to delegate. By persuading your subordinates toward your own goals and vision, you can let them take over some of your responsibilities. This shifts you away from micromanagement, the stressful and ultimately impossible act of trying to control everything. Toward macromanagement, where you can see the process and the beauty of the process from a bird's eye view. Don't forget to support the people to whom you've delegated power-- which leads back to Rule 1. Once you've delegated power to a man under you, his words carry the same authority as your own, which means you'll support him and take responsibility if he screws up.

5. SET GOALS, MAKE PLANS, REQUIRE ACCOUNTABILITY

By Rule 2, you already have a long term vision and long term plans laid out. Rule 5 refers to shorter term goals and plans. While everyone shares the long term vision, your job as a great leader is to make sure everyone's timeline agrees. Even if two men are working toward your goal, it'll do you little good if they're working by themselves with different deadlines. Use short term goals and plans with concrete benchmarks and deadlines to get your team in sync with eachother.

Part of making goals and plans is checking up on them. Enter accountability. Have the people working under you, report to you often and keep you up to date. If you follow Rule 4, you should have no fear of people deliberately slacking off (if they are, you didn't persuade them well enough with Rule 4, or you need to free them and replace them by rule 3). The point of accountability isn't to prevent people slacking off. Rather, it's to reinforce the established synchrony of goals and plans. It's possible you yourself will err and make a short term goal too ambitious. Accountability alerts you to this and lets you make corrections and keep the team working together.

6. LISTEN, OBSERVE, AND QUESTION

Rule 6 kind of goes along with Rule 5. You've established a vision (Rule 2), built up a good team (Rule 3), and gotten the team to share your vision (Rule 4). The power of the team is that it works together, and that's what rules 5 and 6 are all about. Once all the machinery is set, your job as leader is to keep it running smoothly. That's done with short term goals (Rule 5), and also of course by simply being vigilant and aware of the process. If things should start to degenerate, the leader should be the first to see it. Then the leader can act and correct whatever went wrong.

In the U.S. Air Force, there's an open-door policy: an airman can, in principle, go as far up as the U.S. President (it seldom really goes that high because the airman has to go up the chain one step at a time, but I did meet an airman who took a complaint up to the Secretary of the Air Force, who is just 2 steps below the President). The reason is because everyone at every level of a team has a unique perspective, and the people in charge don't want anything in their "blind spot" to go unnoticed. The open door policy transforms every set of eyes in the service into a vast radar to keep the leadership informed. You can adopt an open-door policy of your own regardless of the size of your team, and let your underlings be your eyes and ears.


7. SETTLE DISPUTES

Rule 7 supports Rules 5 and 6 because when accountability or vigilance alert you to a problem, your task as a leader is to solve it. The biggest problem in any team is an inter-team dispute. You want your team to be synchronized like an orchestra, and a fight is as far from synchrony as you can get. A leader is also a referee, an umpire, and sometimes a hostage negotiator.

Settling disputes could be the subject of an entire post of its own. Without delving into over-long details, let me point out that, if Rules 3 and 4 have been followed, so that the bickering team members really share the same goal and vision, then the fight must boil down to a difference of opinion about how that goal can be met. In the heat of passion in a dispute, it's easy for team members to forget that they're really after the same goal. One general technique for settling disputes is to lead the parties involved toward realizing they are, indeed, going for the same goal. For example, if one manager wants to cut jobs and the other wants to create more, lift their focus above those particular details by asking them questions about WHY they want to do those things. In this example, the managers both ultimately want to improve the company. Once their aims are aligned, the dispute is half settled and they might just resolve it on their own.


8. PLACE THE INTERESTS OF OTHERS AHEAD OF YOUR OWN

Historically, the greatest leaders, the leaders of legend, were often selfless. This is no mere coincidence. By the single act of placing others first, you simultaneously set all the previous Rules in motion. A selfless leader never hesitates to take the responsibility when the shit hits the fan (Rule 1). He more easily pursuades (Rule 4), because his very voice resonates with sincerity when he truly is acting in his team's best interest. This naturally lets his vision catch on among the whole team (Rule 2). When the team's best interests come first, the integrity of the team comes first, so the selfless leader will always be team-building (Rule 3) and team-guiding (Rule 5). With selflessness automatically comes sincere interest in the affairs and goings on of the team (Rule 6). And the sincerity of putting the competing parties interests first, lends a lot of power and rapport when it becomes necessary to resolve disputes (Rule 7).


SOME PITFALLS

Vision Statements: A lot of companies or teams have "vision statements", neat short statements which supposedly outline the team's vision. By themselves, these don't fulfill Rule 2. Vision statements are often written in committee, and they often come across as very artificial. They also tend to be vague and open-ended. Here's the thing: your vision should be something you're really sincere about. If you lie awake thinking about the team, your thoughts should effortlessly be in sync with the vision you created. It's the difference between intellectual knowing and emotional knowing. Your vision should be known at an emotional level: it's not just "yeah yeah our vision is to excel in the market of widgets" (intellectual knowing), it should be a deep core belief (emotional knowing). And when you share this vision with your team, it should be with sincerity, which is impossible with a neatly typed up vision statement. I wonder how many upper level managers can even recite their teams' "vision statements"?

Yes-men: When sharing your vision with team members, try to really share it. You don't want to have people pretending to follow your vision just to gain brownie points with you. Certainly don't reward that behavior, since doing so would encourage it and also build resentment lower down in the team. You might even test for yes men, by putting forth bogus proposals which noone should agree with, and seeing who laps them up. (But don't make them too obvious of course)

Perfectionism: A good leader knows when to be flexible. Your vision should be sincere, but you don't want it to weigh you down. Be willing to change plans when you need, and keep the team in sync.

Work for your Team, not your Ego: In an official leadership position, it can be tempting to go out of your way to try and present a sort of wise leader mask to the world. Be wary of making decisions based on how good a leader they make you look. It's much better to actually be a good leader, than to come off looking like one. Abe Lincoln told a general: "If you succeed, all the glory is yours. If you fail, all the blame is mine."


Here are some other great things I've written.
The Mirror Model of Social Interaction
How the Mind Learns
Voice: The Male Version of Tits