Five tips to be a wiser leader
I have been teaching and researching leadership for more than 20 years and I believe leadership is a skill that can be learnt with reflective practice. Here, I give my top tips to become a better leader.
1. The ‘going beyond’ principle
A good leader needs to go beyond the immediate; they need to go beyond one’s narrow self-interest and consider the longer term implications.
If they can do that they will generate trust among their staff and stakeholders – the type of trust needed to exist and function as a leader.
Going beyond enables leaders not to be bound by the immediate concerns of various stakeholders and see the long term implications.
Probably the finest example of this is Nelson Mandela’s framing of post-apartheid South Africa. After decades of imprisonment and brutality, he went beyond his self-interest and that of his community and understood that he needed to balance the needs of the many different communities if South Africa was to move forward.
He thus gained the trust of all sides and we felt the commanding presence of a leader. He looked beyond the immediate satisfaction of his own narcissistic ego and instead looked at the long term future of South Africa.
2. Hear the voices you don’t want to hear
Leaders are under pressure to get results, but they must make sure they are hearing all of the competing voices, that none are being marginalised because what they are saying is difficult.
It might make things difficult and awkward, but they must hear the arguments from all stakeholders, especially as the dominant voices have to justify themselves, rather than risk missing important pieces of information.
An example when voices were ignored was the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. The NASA leadership needed to maintain political capital and so concerns from the engineers of an important contractor were marginalised.
Engineers argued against the launch, but marginalising them enabled NASA management to make the decision to launch.
One can never know if one has the full picture, but a leader must get as much of it as possible by including several stakeholders who might be marginalised, by having relationship-enhancing conversations rather than relationship-cancelling conversations and including the voices leaders don’t want to hear.
3. Sensing the common good
A leader must think about the wider impact of any decision or action. They have to think of the ‘common good’. That is not just for the good of the department or company, but the good of stakeholders outside the organisation.
Indirectly the organisation exists for a social good, it provides a product or service that is socially needed, but a leader has to see the wider implications of its role in society and include the many stakeholders.
A great example of this was how healthcare multinational Johnson & Johnson dealt with the Tylenol scare in 1982. Seven people died taking Johnson & Johnson’s Tylenol, which had been deliberately laced with cyanide.
Johnson & Johnson’s management decided to swallow $100 million in costs and withdraw all 31 million bottles from the shelves, the first major recall in American history.
Despite the huge cost it is now seen as a great public relations decision as it re-gained its pre-crisis market share in a year and introduced the first tamper-proof bottles.
4. Process wisdom
Leaders need to be in tune with the process and temporality of events and meetings that generate outcomes, as the quality of the process can affect the outcome.
They need to be sensitive to how even a conversation unfolds, because one needs to be attuned to the process, so that it unfolds in a more meaningful way to avoid a biased answer.
For example, the new CEO of a US company was told to grow the company fast, so she decided to outsource production to the Far East.
This met with a lot of resistance, with fears over redundancies and a loss of quality, so when the CEO presented her case, by paying attention to how people reacted and how they expressed their feelings, she was able to structure her presentation and responses accordingly to win the argument.
5. Same same but different
Remember that every situation has its own unique context, no matter how familiar it may look. That is when open-mindedness is needed to be aware that this familiar situation is actually different.
When Admiral Thad Allen confronted the Deepwater Horizon oil spill he had done many clean-up operations in the sea, but when he was asked if he had a template to deal with the situation he said: “Yes, and no.”
He drew on past experiences, but for this particular spill, the expectations of society and the US Government were well beyond what was even allowed by law.
He realised that to do his job properly, he should not merely rely on his experience, but go further and see the uniqueness of this oil spill, of the context, and so he decided to go beyond the letter of the law.
This article was originally written by Hari Tsoukas and originally published on the Warwick Business School website, whose London location at The Shard offers an ideal base for executive learning including an Executive MBA and a range of executive diplomas.