jen briggs

One of the key ingredients for success in any company and community is leadership. We know this; it’s well documented, but not always well practiced and sometimes implemented poorly. Leadership takes many forms and learning how to be a self-disciplined leader with self-knowledge and high social-emotional intelligence is key.

Maya Angelo sums it up – “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”.

During magical phases of company culture and brand distinction – you will see leadership at its best in all levels of a company. You walk in and see people smiling, trusting, debating, respecting and contributing at levels in a way other companies are desperate to replicate. Consumers feel it. It’s what new employees inherit from their more tenured peers and make a promise to grow and perpetuate for their next generation. When people ask me about this related to New Belgium, my simple answer is the infectious openness, optimism, and drive of nearly every person. It is indeed a virtuous, but delectate cycle, and they key is the style, actions, and attitude of leadership.

Servant leadership from a practitioner’s perspective

I am a wholehearted believer in the power of servant leadership. I’ve also heard the naysayers:

• It’s too soft of an approach for certain industries
• It’s not the type of program that we want to plug in to our business
• I can’t just let people do what they want

They are all wrong.

• Servant leadership done well is highly disciplined and very humanized
• It is not a “program”. It is a mindset. There are specific management tactics that can be taught and programmatically added to a company through training and practice
• In a company that practices servant leadership – we all serve the best interest of the business and people are unified and aligned. People also become healthier through working in healthy teams, practicing self-leadership and improving their performance, social-emotional intelligence, and positive impact on others. It’s not a freedom to be your best self; it is an obligation and commitment.

My practitioner’s perspective – a servant leader helps people do their best work and create long and short-term value for the health and wealth of the company. When doing so, often people experience an improvement in self-worth, skill development and make more positive contributions to their team. Servant leaders create positive loops that create positive impact and increase value creation.

Where to start from an organizational perspective:

We know that finding and hiring great talent in companies is one of the catalysts to success. It is no different when you select your leaders:

• Gotta wanna. This is a saying I learned from sports over my years. People need to want to lead. This does require ego to feel that you deserve to oversee people. The question is – what is the ego in service of? Is the ego in service of self or in service of creating something better? Strong leaders have ego in service of something more and something better.
• Get over the leader vs. manager debate. Anyone who is in a position of managing people will need to lead people. There may be times where someone needs to manage a process or a system. Let them do that, but don’t assign them people if they aren’t a good leader. I think this debate is fun from an academic and philosophical perspective, but a waste of time from a practitioner’s perspective. Managers are leaders.
• The Peter Principal. Current performance is always important, but do not make the classic mistake that because someone is good at their technical job that they will be a good leader for others.

What to look for in your leaders

Behavioral interviewing and in-situation observation is key. Assessing real-life experiences where someone practiced leadership. Even if someone hasn’t been in a formal leadership position, they have likely had a chance to lead.

If you are hiring people internally for leader/manager positions and you have people with potential give them opportunities in meetings and projects to display their capabilities. In-situation observation is a gift and should be used as much as possible.

It is important that your leadership candidates have had a chance to practice and learn. Don’t give leadership opportunities easily or in haste.

Assess how your candidate manages the spectrum of participation at the individual and team level. Ask questions about how the person has uncovered and leveraged the wisdom of people on their teams to help solve problems.

Strong leaders are flexible and can easily shift between coaching, teaching, directing and motivating individuals and a team. They are great at diagnosing skill levels, ability, and engagement and then acting to instigate in the moment understanding and improvement. Strong leaders are teaching job skills, team engagement, and organizational citizenship so people can most effectively participate in problem-solving teams and see future organizational opportunities. They are often open book leaders and perpetual mentors.

Ask about:

What role does failure play in the workplace? Do they see failure as a spectrum where there are safe opportunities for praise-able failures that push people to a higher level of performance? Or do they enforce strict compliance?

Provide examples of team participation and decision making? Have they developed freedom with direction and drive? Do they care what people think? Are they clear about input, feedback, participation, influence and decision-making boundaries? Have they created a system to help people be productive, introduce innovative ideas and thinking yet not bog down quick, effective company movement?

Note: Situational Leadership is a great management training to help develop this skill in leadership.

Distributed leadership. When a leader is developing their team – ask them about how they distribute leadership throughout the team? Ask them about their beliefs about power and authority.

Strong leaders see leadership, power, and authority, not as actions done to people, but rather a system that draws on the wisdom of the team and is a construct that people participate in. Leadership activity is a social process of influence. Leaders who distribute leadership amongst their team distribute roles and activities appropriately to help grow value – it is a product of high impact interactions and shared power and authority. They see strengths and apply them to projects, tasks, and work that must get done well. Leaders know that people are an asset to the organization and want to maximize that asset to the benefit of the person and the company. Strong leaders have a keen sense of when to become a follower and to allow others to lead. Strong leaders can also be strong followers.

The abdication of leadership. Leadership never abdicates leadership. You can distribute power, authority and create systems of participation. A leader always is focusing on turning talent, skills, and abilities in to performance in service of the company vision and accomplishing goals. Leaders must rally their people, unifying them around the organization’s values and align the work and energy to accomplish plans. This is NOT limited to the C-suite. Every leader should do this at every level of the company. Leaders address the fears of the company and help lead people through them. They are clear and weed out organizational schizophrenia and disingenuous people and situations. Strong leaders are emotionally capable leaders with great social emotional intelligence and emotional control. Clarity of purpose is of utmost importance.

Ask about ethical dilemmas:

For example, as about an unhealthy cultural situation where heart and a stern stance were necessary. Has a person ever identified unhealthy bias and how did they deal with the situation? Did they need to make an unpopular decision – what was it and what did they do? Did they stand up for a value that was potentially being misrepresented? Are they able to treat people with respect while also having a critical, objective review of the matter and determining appropriate consequences?

More questions:

• How they have identified healthy team attributes and harnessed them for the good of a project?
• Have they been on an unhealthy team and what did they do to help be a remedy for the situation. What made the team unhealthy?
• What have they done to be a positive impact on improving the performance of another?
• What motivates this person to want to lead others? What do they hope this role will do for them in their career and life?
• How does this person handle stress? How do they handle disappointment? How do they handle being let down? Describe a stressful situation that had an impact on their team. What did they do? How did they handle it? You are looking for someone who does not take more power and control as a default instinct when things don’t go as planned, but leans on others and develops mechanisms to not let their stress negatively infect the team. You are also looking for appropriate stress shared with the team. Sheltering a team is not the answer and is an unhealthy parental attribute.

As you ask questions and make your observations – you will learn about a person’s approach and experiences. Learning from failure is a great teacher and hearing lessons of failure and improvement through correction are critical. Act like a scientist in a lab of human behavior. Be objective, note your observations and decide. Working with people with the right mindset and attitude, but little experience is exciting. I love it and one must be realistic and dedicate the time and money for training, mentoring and observational in-situational coaching. Hire and grow. Invest and perpetuate.

Many leaders can lead well in good times. Leadership is illuminated in tough situations. Never let a drive for results leave a trail of hurt behind. Will people feel success when the game is won? Will they feel stretched and challenged? Or, will they feel used and abused? Where will your new leader take stands? What will that be like? What will they do in the face of adversity? How will they act in the face of fear and failure?

Leadership sets the tone for your culture. What actions, behaviors, and attitudes are cultivated and condoned? This will set the tone for your brand – What your company stands for – What you are about.