Stepping up your game as a leader
“To truly lead people, you must understand them.”
The journey of becoming a transformational leader is about deeply understanding people. At this point in your journey, you understand yourself and business well enough to be highly effective at creating value. Now you get to step into aligning and helping others create value. To help them tap into a deep sense of intrinsic motivation within themselves that surpasses the barriers of your business and inspires them to truly innovate, create and overcome. That transition will be the fuel for your next season of growth.
To coach is to not play the game.
To learn to coach is not about learning how to play, it’s about practicing not playing. You are not there to play the game. Yes, you can make decisions and can call plays but your goal is to build a team that can make good decisions in the moment, without you. That you can build a bench of skills on your team so strong that nobody can tell who the leader actually is.
This type of leadership is paradoxical in that constantly adding people into the room who are smarter than you makes you one of the smartest people in the room. This level of leadership comes with not living in what you are good at, but rather coming to terms and living with what you are not good at. Your job is to take people who are better than you at the game and give them everything they need to play as best as they can. To do this requires a deep sense of perspective and competency but your competency is not showing value in how well you play, it’s showing value in how well you can build value in others. To step into this level is to leave what made you the best player behind. It’s to acknowledge that the players you need in the game are what matters and what they need isn’t someone to teach them how to be technically or operationally competent, they are past that. They need someone to inspire them to bring their best behavior and best skill forward. Too many leaders try to compete with their staff. Too many leaders try to “show the team how it’s done”. Too few leaders care deeply enough and build a vision strong enough to where deeply competent players feel inspired to play. You aren’t there to only align the player with the game, but the player with themselves.
When we say things like “culture eats strategy for breakfast”, we are saying that people, and their ability to bring their skills together in deep alignment will solve threats. This is the heart of truly adaptable businesses. To be a transformative leader,
it means the goal is no longer you, it’s them. The graphic below is an example of a modified version of Maslows. It includes a suggestion of transcendence between self oriented action to others oriented action as part of our motivation.
Employees who are predominantly towards the top of Maslow's Hierarchy are typically in a state to be more effective at work and more collaborative with each other. To facilitate this journey, intention is needed in giving employees the space to step into each next level. For instance, to facilitate the building of self-esteem in an employee, a sense of ownership and accomplishment is helpful to doing that. To give ownership and recognition means that the game becomes less about how much you as an owner contribute and how much you give away to that employee so they can practice what you used to practice. Even if they fail as you give them space, they can be guided to either overcoming the problem or learning where their boundaries/capabilities actually are. Failure that results in growth can still result in development of self-esteem. To be good at letting people fail but connecting it with growth is a fundamental skill of a higher level-leader.
People naturally want to move up this ladder, this is the key to intrinsic motivation. We want them to be motivated by our business or what we are producing but in all
reality, deep motivation comes when people can find these needs being fulfilled within the work they are doing. When a person’s individual “mission” of how they create value through self-actualization is in alignment with the company's “mission”, you will find optimal performance. If a person’s individual mission is not in alignment with the company mission, their work should at least be valuable in discovering and putting action towards their mission. This journey of alignment between self and company is the work that a high-level leader does. They find individual value in the people they manage and align their work to either the company mission or help them connect with how their work will help them grow to stepping into their mission. If there is no alignment on those levels, it’s about coaching them “up and out” of the organization.
Become a mirror
To be a coach is to be willing to challenge someone for their benefit. You cannot grow resiliency without tension and requiring tension in your team is the core trait of a coach. The goal is to connect the tension with the result. This is where the skill of teaching is effective in coaching. You are not teaching them propositional knowledge, that is their job. You are teaching them how their tension relates to their desired result. It’s about lending perspective that will help connect the hard work and pain with where they want to intrinsically go themselves. Ideally, you would not relieve their pain but relieve their anxiety about not seeing sufficient results from their pain.
Propositional knowledge applied to action turns to procedural knowledge (knowledge only gained by training yourself through doing). Procedural knowledge built up over time turns to perspectival knowledge and perspectival knowledge acted upon by someone who built skill through procedural knowledge creates transformation (participatory knowledge). Because you have been through propositional and procedural education, you have enough perspective and know how to adjust yourself to help others navigate through propositional and their own procedural knowledge. Simply put, there are only some things learned by doing and you, because you have already done, are guiding them through learning through doing. It’s not something that comes from talking to them. It’s something that comes through putting barriers in front of them so they learn how to overcome them. Their largest barriers are themselves so the act of teaching them to be better requires you to put challenges in front of them and be patient as they face themselves and learn how to gain perspective and know how to adjust themselves to become overcomers.
Becoming the mirror is about becoming a reflection of their action to themselves and inspiring them to face their impact on the external world. Just like you have.
Ideally, as they gain skill and competency, the result of their development is so profound that they don’t just have the skill to do a job well, but the world would invite them into that job because they can inspire others to invite the work. This is often the deeper part of procedural work. Learning a skill and being able to execute that skill is much easier than aligning others and navigating that work through complex group interactions. Just because they can do the work in an ideal environment does not mean they are good at the work. To take their skill and constantly adjust it for complex social dynamics and normal business stressors while still maintaining momentum and buy-in is the true mark of high competency. This is only something that can be learned by practice within a group. To develop this in others requires you letting them take their work and face it against their peers to improve these skills. You will know the work is valuable when the group aligns and is inspired to buy-in to their work. As a high-level leader, you are there to give them the opportunity to do this work and to help them as they hit walls with others.
Marrying self-actualization with communal-actualization
To understand what it means to “create”. To become an artist and then a designer to finally become a creator. To be a creator means full integration of the internal world with the external value. Let’s look at it this way:
● To be an artist means learning how to express yourself in what you are doing
● To be a designer means building tools for others' ability to express themselves.
● To be a creator means knowing how to express yourself in a way that creates
maximum value for the people you’re creating for.
The role of creator is not about the creator, it’s about the created. It’s about the end result of the work being both an expression of the unique value of the artist while simultaneously creating the intended value and well-being improvements in the sentient beings that interact with the created. It takes a deep knowledge of self and others to achieve true creator output. This level of understanding is only achieved after a proper amount of understanding is gained of both yourself and others. This is broken into two primary reflections:
● Self Awareness - This is rooted in a deep understanding of yourself and also how the value you create sits in the external world. This is done with sufficient analysis of one’s deep truths and how one’s behaviors influence others to supply these truths with validation. To have a truth that you are aware of is one part, to know you can sufficiently practice that truth is another part and to know that the world wants that truth is the last part.
● Others Awareness - This is rooted not only in a deep understanding of how your internal world creates value in the external world but also understanding
how the external world works. To be a leader without understanding how people work is to be an imposter.
So to create is a dance between self awareness and others awareness. It’s about knowing you have a value, that others want that value, that you know how to express that value and that others agree that the value you express is the value that they want. To be a creator is to have procedural knowledge of this dance. As you develop your team, it can’t be about how effectively they get others to do what they want, it’s about deeply understanding what others want, what you want and finding alignment in the work. To lead someone to be a creator is to help them build the tools for empathy, listening, curiosity, humility, and self-sacrifice while also understanding who they are and what they are good at and seeing if there is alignment within the group they are in to do the work that is valued.
As a high-level leader, for you, It’s not about self expression, it’s about helping others learn how to practice self-actualization. It’s about surrounding yourself with people who know more than you in different areas and learning to help them build the tools to align together more effectively.
Resetting assumptions
Poor leaders assume their staff are motivated by poor intentions. Great leaders follow positive assumptions. Maslows assumptions are a great example of positive assumptions that create deep growth. Often, as high-level leaders, we are predisposed to assume the worst. Our biological motivators are tuned to find threats and remove them. That causes us to build for the worst case scenario. For instance, when building policy or process, the common root assumptions are that “people will try to take advantage of us, people don't want to work, people just want to skate by, etc”. Most business systems are built to mitigate against these worst assumptions. Transformational leaders build systems around positive assumptions.
Those assumptions are:
● Everyone is to be trusted.
● Everyone is to be informed as completely as possible of as many facts and
truths as possible; i.e., everything relevant to the situation.
● Assume in all your people the impulse to achieve; assume that they are for
good workmanship, are against wasting time and inefficiency, and want to
do a good job, etc.
● Everyone will have the same ultimate managerial objectives and will identify
with them no matter where they are in the organization or in the hierarchy.
● Good will exists among all the members of the organization rather than rivalry or jealousy.
(6a) Synergy (the resolution of the dichotomy between selfishness & unselfishness, or between selfishness & altruism) is also assumed.
● The individuals involved are mentally healthy.
● The ability to be objective and detached is present regarding one’s own and
other people’s capacities & skills. Assume there is no hostility to basic virtues.
● The people in the organization are not fixated at the safety-need level.
● There is an active trend to self-actualization.
● Everyone can enjoy good teamwork, friendship, good group spirit, good group
homonymy, good belongingness, and group love.
● Assume hostility to be primarily reactive rather than character-based (this
comes close to being just simply “honesty”).
● People can “take it,” they are tougher than most people give them credit for.
● People are improvable (but not PERFECTABLE).
● Everyone prefers to feel important, needed, useful, successful, proud,
respected, rather than unimportant, interchangeable, anonymous, wasted,
unused, expendable, disrespected.
● Everyone prefers to love his boss (rather than to hate him), & that everyone
prefers to respect his boss (rather than to disrespect him).
● Everyone dislikes fearing anyone (more than he likes fearing anyone), but
that he prefers fearing the boss to despising the boss.
● Everyone prefers to be a prime mover than a passive helper (but these people
need to be selected out of the pack).
● Assume a tendency to improve things, to straighten the crooked picture on
the wall, to clean up the dirty mess, to put things right, make things better, to
do things better.
● Growth occurs through delight (first, the novelty of finding new things) and
then through boredom (later, looks for “other” new things).
● Assume preference for being a whole person and not just a part, not a thing
or an implement, or tool, or “hand”.
● Assume the preference for working than for being idle.
● All human beings prefer meaningful work to meaningless work.
● Assume the preference for personhood, uniqueness as a person, identity (in
contrast to being anonymous or interchangeable).
● The person is courageous enough for enlightened processes.
● Assume the person has a conscience.
● Assume the wisdom and the efficacy of self-choice (people find out what they
like to do and then they go choose to do it).
● Everyone likes to be justly and fairly appreciated, preferably in public.
● Assume that every time we talk about a good trend in human nature, a
counter-trend exists. The question is which is the strongest in the particular
person at the particular time under the particular circumstances.
● Everyone (especially the more developed persons) prefers responsibility to
dependency and passivity most of the time.
● People will get more pleasure out of loving than they will out of hating or
disruption (although the pleasures of hating are real & should not be
overlooked).
● Fairly well developed people would rather create than destroy.
● Fairly well developed people would rather be interested than be bored.
● Assume a preference or a tendency to identify more and more with the world,
in contrast with increasing alienation from the world.
● Assumption for the yearning of the virtues of life (the “B-values” which are the
motivating forces in the self-actualizing person – no hostility to truth, beauty, goodness, justice, law, order, etc.).
There will be people in an organization that will want to destroy it, but to prevent that destruction, we fail to empower the people who want to build the organization. Builders far outweigh destroyers. Often, in environments where builders are empowered, destroyers are found quickly and dealt with by the group.