Guest Post by Bill Treasurer
Leadership: It’s amazing how complicated leadership “experts” have made the topic. I know because I am one of them. I am a senior ranking officer in what can only be called the Legion of Leadership Complexifiers (the LLC).
We members of the LLC make our livelihood plumbing, parsing, and peddling leadership concepts. We use fancy words and nitpick the life out of the subject.
Sure, most of us are well-intentioned, but by complicating leadership, we have created an unrealistic and largely unattainable standard for people to live up to.
We set impossible expectations when we tell leaders they need to be:
Bold and calculated
Passionate and reasonable
Rational and emotional
Confident and humble
Driven and patient
Strategic and tactical
Competitive and cooperative
Principled and flexible
Faced with such a laundry list of expectations, how on earth could anyone fulfill all these roles? Why would they want to be a leader?
Keep it simple! The truth is, leadership doesn’t have to be complex.
It’s time to lighten the leadership load and bring leadership back to what’s most essential. Here are six tips that simplify leadership and re-focus on what’s essential.
1. Focus on a Positive Future: Always keep the best days of the people you’re leading in front of them. Focus on looming achievements on the horizon, not the glory days of the past.
2 Stop Stoking Fear: Here’s the most overused phrase in the history of business: What keeps me awake at night… Phrases like that only serve to make people anxious. Followers would rather know what gets you up in the morning.
3. Motivate with Opportunity: People will move mountains, if in exchange for doing so, they grow and develop. Benjamin Disraeli was right, “Opportunity is more powerful even than conquerors and prophets.”
4. Know Them Until You Care: Get to know the career desires, goals, and aspirations of each of your people. When you know them, you’ll care about them. And when you care about them, their trust and loyalty increases.
5. Stretch into Discomfort: People grow and develop in a zone of discomfort, not comfort. Task people with stretch assignments that cause them to grow and make them a tad uncomfortable.
6. Be Grateful: Your job is to help your people be eminently successful. When they are, you will be deemed an effective leader…because of their work. Be grateful, and say, “Thank you!”
Leadership may not be easy, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. When you cut through the clutter, leadership is about advancing the growth and development of those you lead.
Think of a leader you admire – someone who actually led you. What do you admire about him or her?
- Did she provide you with an opportunity where you could grow your skills?
- Did he give you candid feedback that caused you to see yourself in a more honest way?
- Did she value your perspective, input, and ideas?
- Did he create opportunities for you to stretch, grow, and excel?
Leaders open doors. They create opportunities for those they lead. It’s as simple as that! And when you stay focused on this, everything else falls into place.
Bill Treasurer is the Chief Encouragement Officer of Giant Leap Consulting. His latest book Leaders Open Doors focuses on how leaders create growth through opportunity. Bill is also the author of the bestseller Courage Goes to Work and Courageous Leadership: A Program for Using Courage to Transform the Workplace, an off-the-shelf training toolkit that organizations use to build workplace courage. Bill has led courage-building workshops for a huge range of companies such as NASA, Accenture, CNN, PNC Bank, SPANX, Hugo Boss, Saks Fifth Avenue, and the US Department of Veterans Affairs. You can contact Bill at btreasurer@giantleapconsulting.com, and follow him on Twitter at @btreasurer.
Bill:
Thanks for your work in helping to demystify leadership. We need more messengers to help simplify leadership and encourage leaders to lower their guards and get to know those they lead. We have plenty of thinkers- we need more examples of the courageous who lead with their heart. Thank you for carrying the flag!
Thanks for your kind comments Joe. I’ve spent too much of my consulting career as a member of the Legion of Leadership Complexifiers (LLC!). It took my 5-year old son to help clarify what’s most important about leadership: creating opportunities for those you lead!
Bill
First time in a longtime I have read something honest on leadership. It is not complicated nor is it about extreme view points and styles. It is about being human and working to develop and get the best out of those you are leading, by doing that you shine far greater than you could by what you do persoanlly.
Thanks Robert! You’re right…leadership doesn’t have to be complicated with fancy-pants words and holier-than-thou admonishments from “experts” like me. People would be more drawn to leadership roles if we lightened the leadership load and stayed focused on the simple ideas. Like leaving people better off than you found them.
Thank you for sharing Jesse !
This is a simple yet remarkable article / post
It got me thinking at each line… we do tend to add to the complexity
We live busy lives at home and at the office, why add to the mix?
Our societies value success and performance, however more sometimes means less.
As a manager and executive, I find that when I remain in a co-creation zone full of vulnerability and laughter everything else falls through in an easy sequence.
Life experiences thought me to let go, not resist, and when I did it just either inflated my ego or made for many more bumps in the road
Thanks for engaging us on a very timely and important topic
Shalom,
Johann
Thank you Johann. I’m with you. I enjoy leading so much more, and am more effective, when I move my ego out of the way. Leading is about serving those being led, not ego-feeding!
Bill Treasurer is just that: a treasure. Wisdom- simplified. And– look what he does with the results– spreads it around to others. I am ordering the book today!
Eileen! Thank you, as always, for radiating all of your positive energy. Thanks too for supporting the book!
Great post Bill!
This one really got me thinking this morning. For the past few days I’ve been feeling a case of info overload when it comes to SM and the need to take a step back and be able to grab some white space away from it all to calm the senses on a regular basis.
Then I read your post this morning, and it sort of reminded me of the same thing. We are INUNDATED with the ‘how-to’s of leadership on a regular basis. Everywhere we look, the market is saturated with it. Books, posts, tweets.
On the one hand, it is helpful to be able to learn and grow by sharing knowledge together. I, personally, can’t imagine my life without a good book to read! : ) However, we can also overdose on it to the point where we cram our heads full of all this knowledge that we fail to practice even the basics at times.
High on theory in our heads. Low on practical experience and application. : )
I believe what we need more of in order to ‘learn’ is more MODELING of what is taught in our real life/work relationships. I certainly don’t mean to create a carbon copy of the teacher or to crank out more parrots, yet what is not translated very well via book, blog posts, or PP presentation are the intangibles of leadership that can really only be adequately conveyed while IN relationship.
And we translate our learning into practice as new challenges are faced and problems are solved on a moment to moment, day in and day out basis.
Loved the ideas in your list. Thanks for sharing Bill.
~Samantha
Thanks for your thoughtful post Samantha. Like you, I love a good leadership book. Some of them leave me exhausted though. Even my previous book, Courage Goes to Work, was too dense with ideas. It weighs the book, and the reader, down.
In writing Leaders Open Doors, I wanted to lighten the leadership load a little. Sometimes focusing on the simple lessons is more effective. Simple stuff, like: leave people and the organization better than you found it. Or, keep the best days of everyone in front of them. Or, talk about opportunities, not problems. Why get all bogged down with quadrant models, fancy-pants words, and esoteric examples.
Simple as in not complex, not simple as in easy. Leadership is still hard, but we don’t have to make it more complex than it needs to be to grasp it!
🙂
Bill,
We need a whole lot of simplification for poor managers drowning in complexity. We say there job is to get results through people and then we end up surrounding them with a hairball of processes,forms, models and trendy terms that get in the way of doing that. Hats off to you for cutting away the complexity and getting down to the essentials. I’m going to get the book and send some to my beleaguered friends in management.
Jeannie
Amen Jeannie! Funny how those processes are always designed to “make people’s lives easier” and then mostly don’t. Thanks for your comment. Thanks too for getting the book for your beleaguered management friends!
Enjoyed a variety of the points you presented here specifically around these: stop stoking fear, motivate with opportunity, and being grateful. These relationship building techniques help create a positive attitude in the workplace, contribute to a positive morale, and positively impact productivity. Your points demonstrate commitment to a person.
Thanks for your comment David. Much of the book is about what the leader can do to strengthen relationships with those she is leading. Much is also about the actions leaders can take to express and open up people – to more imaginative ways of thinking and to new possibilities. The last chapter, though, is really about the importance of the leader being open and vulnerable herself. When the leader herself opens up to her people, it goes a long, long way toward strengthening relationships. Thanks!
Excellent post Bill.
I like your “Legion of Leadership Complexifiers, LLC.” If you don’t mind, I’m going to use the concept when I need to convince others of the need to simplify. As a leader, if we were to focus a clearly articulated message to an engaged team and be there when that team needs to be inspired, we would all be better leaders. We do sometimes make life far too complicated for our teams and in turn for ourselves.
I will use your points from this post to help focus my leadership.
Thank you.
Tim Krupa
Hi Tim! I’d be honored if you would use the term! I was an official member for a long time. I spent too much time “proving” and not enough time communicating in easy-to-understand ways.
Glad that the post resonated with you. Glad to read your comment too. BT