What’s good leadership?

// Football leads the way

This weekend I went to a non-league football match - Wimborne Town vs Cribbs and it was a wonderful day out thanks to John Jocham’s company, Wire and Cable (they were the match ball sponsor and I was on their hospitality table).

The match was an eventful one - the result was 2-2 but the away side (Cribbs) had three players sent off.

The disparity between the two management styles of each team manager was so evident to me - one carried themselves with dignity, shielded his players from any criticism and spoke eloquently about the match despite the clear controversy in the game.

The other appeared to show very little contrition for his teams actions, stood back when the opposition fans caused havoc as they left the clubhouse and celebrated the draw as if he’d just won the World Cup.

There are ways to win a football match and aggression, cynicism and poor sportsmanship should not be the way.

If you look at the best football manager of today - Pep Guardiola, he carries himself with dignity and uses his words to galvanise and motivate his team - not disparage the other.

Leadership can be a really difficult thing to get right but if you can clearly identify the leadership traits that you shouldn’t be doing and avoid doing those things, you should be able to have a good stab at getting it right.

// Experience isn’t everything.

Being a leader isn’t about experiencing every situation and then use those challenges to form a level of competency - it’s far from that. It’s about making split second decisions based on your best judgement at the time and then either sticking to your choice or adjusting based on the outcome - willing to acknowledge that maybe the path you’re on isn’t the right one and maybe you need to adjust.

‘Experienced’ leaders are not those who have worked the longest, they are the ones who have been subjected to the most situations and made the most decisions - quite often, the two are not exclusively the same.

You can quite easily avoid making a decision when in a leadership position and defer (like the Cribbs manager this weekend when his fans were wreaking havoc) - that’s also a management style but I won’t get into that.

You don’t need to have experience, you don’t need to be older than those you lead and you don’t need to have been in a leadership position for a long time to be a good leader - you just need to make enough decisions.

// Visionary

Being a leader requires you to lead which means you need to know where you’re heading.

It’s difficult I know, especially if you don’t know where you’re actually going but this is the most important part of being a good leader in my opinion because without a clear path in your own head, you’re not able to give anyone else a sense of where you should be headed.

Knowing the end goal should be your first priority as a good leader and then you need to tell your team, if you’re all wandering around aimlessly or you flip flop from one idea to the next, your team are going to suffer.

For me, I like to set one specific monetary number and then push as hard as possible to get there - of course, financial targets are only one way of actually setting a goal but it could be that you want to exit the business or you want to finish off a specific product line. Whatever the goal is, you need to communicate this to your team in a concise and clear way.

// Communication

You don’t need to be made from the Steve Jobs/Tim Cook/Elon Musk type to communicate your ideas effectively because it comes down to how you speak to your team - Steve Jobs was notorious for being rude, arrogant and unforgiving when it came to communicating with his team and whilst that brought him great success, it also caused him to be ousted from his job at Apple one time before being re-hired and then (still) he was unforgiving. The success of the team forgave his faults.

Communication needs to happen on all levels - whether that’s communicating to the board of directors or the office junior - you need to keep everyone in the loop and make sure that your vision and your plan (even down to the smallest part of the business) is clear. Nothing derails a company faster than gossip because people assume a lot when they don’t know and when assumptions come into play, everything can go a little crazy.

Communication needs to be two way too - you can’t expect to deliver a vision without some form of criticism or disagreements because everyone will believe that they can do your job better or in a more effective way. Let’s go back to the football match this weekend as an example, of course I said that the opposition manager should have done something differently or he should have managed in a particular way because that’s how management works - he was probably doing the best he could with the tools available to him but he didn’t communicate his plan to me (or the home crowd, and why should he?) so we all thought he was wrong!

// Empathise and Care

Being in your teams heads and knowing what makes them tick is what I love to do - understanding what the drivers are and what the obstacles are is when your team feels valued, heard and understood.

If you’re a manager who tells people what they should be doing and doesn’t take the time to understand the nuances of his team then you’re missing out on the biggest multiplication factor available.

I know I’ll probably start to sound like some kind of Gary Vee video here but it’s true - when you care about your people and empathise with their struggles then they buy into you and they want to walk through fire for you. It’s not hard to listen to what your team are telling you and then for you to take action on those points.

A good leader understands and empathizes with the needs, concerns, and feelings of their team members which in turn fosters an environment where everyone feels valued and motivated to contribute their best. Not only does this work between leaders and their team members but between the entire team - everyone wants to talk and this openness breeds innovation. Ideas flow and solutions are found much easier - if you’re struggling as a leader to identify a solution to a business problem, I can almost certainly guarantee that the answer can be found from someone else in your team, you’re just not asking the right questions.

// Make a decision.

It’s easier for me to explain what makes a bad leader at this point because making decisions is the easy part. It’s how those decisions are made and more importantly, the impact those decisions have.

A bad leader will just make a decision - that’s it.

One of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned over the years (and I’m not blowing my own trumpet too hard here) is to assess the impact of every decision on the wider business.

How will it affect everybody if I do ‘x’?

What will ‘y’ say if I do this?

It can be tiring to think like this and it’s harder to do it in the quick decision making process but that’s why you need to be subjected to many decisions and just make them with your best judgement. You should be able to gather all the relevant information in a split second, weigh the pros and cons, and consider the impact on the entire team before making a well-informed decision.

That's in a perfect world - unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world and sometimes you’ll get it wrong but undoing those mistakes is often more important that making the mistake in the first place.

Another hack which can make this much easier is to give your team the ability to make autonomous decisions without you - allow them to move the chess pieces around the board to suit the game and send proposals, make decisions with clients, react in specific ways and help build your business with you - if you allow them to make decisions (and some will be good, some will be bad) then they will learn the way you want to operate far quicker too.

// Integrity

“Integrity is the quality of being honest, having strong moral principles, and adhering to ethical standards. It involves consistency in one's actions, values, and beliefs, even when faced with difficult situations or temptations.

Individuals with integrity are trustworthy, reliable, and demonstrate a commitment to doing what is right, regardless of external pressures or personal gain”

I had to google the word integrity because it’s very hard to picture and very hard to clearly articulate what it actually is - Integrity is the quality of being honest, having strong moral principles, and adhering to ethical standards. It’s what seperates mediocre leaders from good leaders and it’s the final building block in being a good leader.

Without it, you’re going to have a mutiny on board your ship - it’s as simple as that. You’ll have people resign from their jobs, you’ll lose respect and you’ll find yourself without a team to lead.

Standing up for your team, remaining calm in a storm and sticking by your principles are other ways to describe how I feel about integrity and once again, if you go back to the story at the start of the football match between Wimborne and Cribbs - the home manager (Tim Sills) managed with integrity.

He didn’t encourage his players to be more aggressive, he didn’t react when the red cards were flying and he remained laser focused on the game plan. The game plan which he knew he wanted to execute.

//Wrap Up

Being a good leader is hard. Believe it or not, it requires a huge personal sacrifice because you have to live your life with your team, in the trenches and you have to know every personal struggle, every strain and every success. You have to take every loss personally and you must take responsibility for them, you have to give your team the credit for every win - you can never personally take credit for any success it you want to move the team forwards.

You have to make decisions which are uncomfortable but you know that at the end of the day, the team will be better for them. You have to face every adversity head on and push through.

Some people would say that it’s an easy job being a leader - I say the opposite, it’s one of the hardest jobs in the world.