Observations on leadership - part 5

Leadership is about encouragement, not management

We had another planning session in Noosa. This was years ago when the mighty corporations cared about people and spent money on them. That’s another quality of a good leader it seems to me – you need to care about people. And interestingly it’s an organisational cultural attribute as well as a personal one. Maybe organisations don’t have cultures, maybe they have values. But whatever your philosophical standpoint, valuing people is really important. We’re often much quicker to tell someone he cocked it up and not quick enough to tell him that he did a good job. Validating people’s contribution is important: it doesn’t need money or a lot of time. Get a senior person to send an e-mail to a more junior person complimenting them on their performance. It takes you no time and it works every time.

But, anyway, back to Noosa. Simon Ensleigh had been in the Army and he had been chief of staff to some Minister or other in the early years of the Howard government. Realising that being chief of staff to a Minister rather limited the concept of work-life balance he opted to join us as a client executive. We had some free time at Noosa and Simon, two others I cannot recall and I decided to hire a motor scooter each and blast off into Noosa the town. Off we went. Riding these scooters was non-trivial and the trip was further than I thought. We kept having to stop and start. When we arrived at Noosa I realised that, as we had stopped and started and come to terms with our machines, the three of us had each been determined to arrive before the others. Simon on the other hand had been concerned that – as a group – we all got to Noosa OK. His Army leadership training was quite clear – success is about bring the team across the line and safely home.

Life is not a race. Running a business is not a race. What we do usually depends upon others’ efforts and we need everyone across the line to succeed. Two things strike me about this. The first is that teamwork is important but also that a good leader must facilitate that by delegating and then encouraging and supporting, never ever by micro-managing. The best delegators may know that they could do the job better but never let on – or they recognise that they certainly could not do it and leave well alone. The second leadership attribute is the ability to value each member of the team, to understand their strengths and weaknesses and work with them.