It can feel lonely at the top.
As a leader, it can be difficult to influence others and get results when your team members do not report directly to you.
For example, a recent high-tech client wanted to expose and institutionalize a core group of leaders to key matrix leadership skills to both improve their personal development and to increase their ability to execute key strategic growth initiatives that were stalling.
When clients want to combine development with business outcomes, we follow four key best practice action learning and leadership development steps that anyone can use:
- Prepare: Define goals, business and career success metrics, and key performance levers with the executive sponsor. Focus on clarity, simplicity, and relevance.
- Co-Design: Co-create the approach, scope, timing, and detailed steps for the action learning process with the target audience to build ownership and accountability. Make sure that everything is linked to key success metrics and include plans to overcome key barriers to change.
- Execute: Align specific development projects with real-life work while providing just-in-time training, relevant tools, and 1x1 coaching for each leader. Meet collectively at least once-a-month, to share, brainstorm, and integrate lessons learned across teams.
- Learn and Scale: Measure the efficacy of the program as you go in terms of both learning and performance targets while making necessary adjustments to the design and execution based upon your results. Enroll participants as both owners and coaches and build internal case studies of lessons learned for future teams.
While formal power structures and hierarchies certainly still exist to provide ways for leaders to accomplish some of their tasks, more and more organizations are becoming matrix and process oriented to meet market and customer demands.
Succeeding in these environments requires a leader to work effectively in teams and to influence others without necessarily having the usual positional power structure for leverage. A leader’s ability to influence others is a critical leadership competency in this more fluid environment.
To be successful as a leader in an environment of cross-functional teams, leaner staffing and constant change, you will need to engage the hearts and minds of your team. Their perspectives, ideas and support are invaluable.
You will also need to garner the support of your peers and of those above you if you want to ensure your team’s ability to get the support and resources required to succeed.
Imagine that you no longer have a title or any “formal” authority at all.
- How many members of your team would follow you anyway?
- How many people in the organization would buy into your ideas?
If your answers are few, it is time to change your approach to leadership.
As a leader, your success is dependent upon the success of others. To succeed, you must develop the primary leadership skill of delegation.
- STEP ONE: Determine Whether to Delegate. First determine if the task is something you, given your role and responsibilities (and time constraints) should do yourself or give to someone else.
- STEP TWO: Pick a Person. Identify whom you want to take on the task.
- STEP THREE: Evaluate the Competence of the Person. Determine whether the person has both the capability to do the task (knowledge and skill) and the capacity to complete it (time and resources).
- STEP FOUR: Establish the Purpose. Identify both the rationale and value of completing the task to your business, your boss, yourself, and to the person doing the task.
- STEP FIVE: Communicate to the Team Member. Have a conversation handing off the task and discussing the rationale. If you have no direct authority over the individual, be sure to properly frame the request and value proposition. Consider the experience level of the team member as well as his/her style in order to provide the appropriate level of direction and boundaries for execution. Be clear on the goal (outcome, metric, due date) and answer any questions.
- STEP SIX: Follow-Up. Check in periodically to offer help and monitor progress, but don’t hover. Gather ongoing feedback about how they are doing and where they think they can improve. Once complete, evaluate the quality and determine whether the task was completed as outlined.
Effective leaders hold themselves and those around them accountable to a clear, consistent, and high standard.
If you want to be followed, make sure that you avoid these five ineffective leadership behaviors:
- Ignore It. Ineffective leaders either pretend not to know there is a major problem, or choose to deny it instead of facing challenges head on.
- Someone Else’s Problem. This age old excuse undermines confidence and can breed contempt. It also fails to acknowledge the systemic nature of leadership.
- Blame Others. This behavior is a corollary of “blaming others.” When leaders do not model a sense of personal responsibility for organizational success, they falter.
- Cover Your Backside. Another unproductive leadership approach is trying to protect your reputation instead of making things happen. Effective leaders acknowledge a problem and take the difficult steps necessary to solve it.
- Stall. While a wait and see attitude can be helpful when critical information is forthcoming, ineffective leaders often use a stalling tactic as an excuse for not taking responsibility and for not making the tough decisions.
