Leadership in a New Light

In my consulting remit, I feel that leaders, especially those who take their development seriously, put their trust in us. I consider this to be a certain privilege that should be managed with humility. I would say the trust placed in us happens to some degree in the management training room, since there is inevitably more limited self-disclosure when participants are surrounded by colleagues. Trust occurs to a greater degree in team coaching when the team is already relatively close-knit. The self-disclosure is more evident in our leadership assessments, where we debrief managers on their personality profiles, and help them to build upon their strengths and motivations, while helping them to manoeuvre the challenges of potential career “derailers”. Trust is at its optimum in my executive coaching relationships, in which managers truly share their challenges and concerns with frankness, fragility and introspection. I often remind them that the more they put into the coaching relationship, the more they will get out of it. All this trust would of course be compromised if I were to divulge specific cases in this article. So, my observations will always be of a more general nature. Since they are often repeated observations over years of practice, they are in my mind no less useful for leadership learning. The findings titles will be expressed in the imperative form, words of advice, to take or leave or course 😊. So here goes!

Finding N°1: Have Detached Involvement

All management theories espouse the need to reveal a sense of interpersonal sensitivity and empathy. Daniel Goleman was the first to coin the term “Emotional Intelligence” in his groundbreaking book published thirty years ago. Although a manager can never listen too much, the challenge is getting the right dose of empathy – too much and you get sidetracked or sucked in to the emotion, too little and you are seen as uncaring, or even a heartless brute! I call the healthy middle ground ‘detached involvement’, where one keeps sight of both the business and people perspectives. Marshal Rosenberg’s “Non-Violent Communication” approach is an ideal framework to help managers remain objective, pick up on their interlocutor’s needs and emotions and work together to find an optimum way forward. It works wonders in both mediation and one-to-one communication. Many of the managers I coach and assess grapple with the issue of responding to their teams’ need for support and encouragement while they are receiving pressure from above to deliver. I am always surprised at how few informal one-to-one meetings managers initiate, just to get a pulse of their team members motivation. Beyond formal engagement surveys, a healthy dose of active listening goes a long way.

Finding N°2: Be yourself

Many of my coaching sessions pertain in some shape or form to a certain fear of not speaking one’s own mind, suppressing one’s individuality as one gets tangled up in the matrix of corporate politics. I often encourage them with supportive, yet action-oriented words (“what’s the worst that can happen”), or advise them to read books to manage the inner critic (such as “Taming the gremlin”). At the extreme, I help them grapple with their lack of self-confidence, or their “impostor syndrome”. Very often it is simply an issue of being less concerned about how certain behaviours might come across in the workplace. Donald Winnicott, a British pediatrician and psychoanalyst, introduced the concepts of the “true self” and the “false self” as part of his psychoanalytic theory. Rather than wearing a social mask, teams much prefer working with managers in touch with their authentic and spontaneous core.  People like to see what a person really stands for, to have the guts to speak out.

For many managers it’s lonely at the top, all the more so when they haven’t found allies and sought feedback from trusted colleagues in their entourage. Very often managers need to understand their specific rapport with the notion of conflict. I have found the Thomas Kilmann Model to be a useful way to help managers clarify their attitudes to conflict (generally more “fight” or “flight”). This explains where they stand between assertiveness and cooperativeness (the extremes being competition and avoidance, the optimum being healthy collaboration). Equally the Hogan assessment personality traits can be divided into “derailers” that are linked to “moving away from”, “moving against”, or “moving towards” others. The Hogan assessment tool is particularly well constructed because it assesses a leader’s reputation, the way others perceive them, rather than how they see themselves. So, it’s about being yourself, while having the pulse on how others perceive you, and doing something about it if it’s hindering individual and team cohesion performance.

Finding N°3: Embrace the Dignity of Difference

As an Englishman having worked in France for most of my career, I am ever more sensitive to the notion of what today many companies put into a big bucket called “diversity and inclusion”. From a management behaviour perspective we could say that extra attention needs to be paid to embracing a diversity of skills and backgrounds. This creates a workplace that reaps the benefit of diverse viewpoints, which also reflects the diversity of a company’s customer base. Our team cohesion events do an excellent job at revealing the diversity of personalities and how that impacts decision-making, risk-taking and conflict management.

The imminent scarcity of talent in many sectors will make the diversity argument a “business no-brainer”.  Beyond personality, diversity can be interpreted in many other ways – one is interculturally, as “Fons Trompenaas” described 7 cultural dimensions in his book “Riding the Waves of Culture, published 25 years ago but as relevant as ever today. He described how managers need to be receptive to the different ways of “seeing things” (attitudes to time, individualism/collectivism, handling emotions, emphasis on achievement versus background, to name but a few).

Another way to interpret diversity is of course gender related. Women still hold a too small share of corporate leadership positions. The number of women in management continues to climb, but only slowly. They account for around 60% of new university graduates in the EU, yet are heavily under-represented in business decision-making, especially at the top. A S&P global analysis of more than 1,100 companies shows that women hold about one-quarter of senior management or leadership roles. That figure is up slightly from 24% in 2022 and 23% in 2021. Women navigate a landscape of broken rungs, glass ceilings. Women need not to be their own worst enemy, they hold back from networking the way men do.

There is also the need for managers to make the workplace more inclusive by integrating more employees with disabilities. Globally, one billion people live with a disability. To put that into perspective, that’s one person out of every seven. Nearly half (47%) of disabilities are invisible.  Research shows that 88% of employees with invisible disabilities choose not to disclose it at work to avoid stigma and discrimination. The Harvard Business Review in a recent article expressed that “there is a real opportunity for new and first-time leaders to drive change within organizations by increasing their awareness and practicing more vulnerable and empathetic leadership. Managers can create a space in which people feel safer disclosing and asking for what they need. They can encourage diversity and ensure that differences are valued — rather than feared — on their team. Managers need to be figuring out how to help each team member succeed in their role.

There is a growing body of evidence that “neurodiverse” employees bring unique strengths and add to team performance. Many hiring processes are not neuro inclusive and are “one-size-fits-all”.

Many seem to reassure themselves that they are “working” when in actual fact they are in back-to-back “Teams meetings”, confusing activity with productivity.

The problem arises when they rise up the ranks to people management responsibility. The remain “pally” with their team members, making it difficult to have potentially tough performance conversations. They also think that their teammates will judge them on the “know how”, on having the right answers. What their teammates really want is to be guided into making the “right” decisions. Managers tend to seek credibility from their teammates by getting their fingers dirty in the “day to day” when they should be rising beyond their former technicity, inspiring them with a sense of vision and purpose.

Many managers should be involved in organizational development initiatives. But rather than adapting to the change themselves, they are expected to be, in the words of “John Kotter”, leading the change. All too often I encounter managers overly skeptical of the changes going on around them, rather than voicing their concerns and potentially realigning the change initiative with their valuable input.

The coaching discussion for these managers gets into interesting self-reflection around what I would call “ways of being” rather than ways of doing. Words will never precisely define “soft skills” development plan objectives – they might involve developing a greater sense of “gravitas”, “assertiveness, “impact”, “influence” or “enthusiasm”. Manfred Kets De Vries, psychoanalyst and economist, also makes a sharp distinction between leaders and managers in his book The Leadership Mystique. His notion of leadership is more future oriented, more focused on the why than the how, more guided by intuition than logic. This is clearly demonstrated in Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman’s excellent book “Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow”, who differentiates between two modes of thought: “System 1” is fast, instinctive and emotional; “System 2” is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.

I am somewhat surprised when I come across managers who have never encountered the infamous “Situational Leadership” model by Ken Blanchard, developed in 1969 and still very alive and kicking! Ironically, in the context of our topic, I think the model relates more to management than leadership. But for all those overloaded managers out there, it is so simple and effective in helping managers get to grips with adapting their management style to the different team members’ levels of confidence, motivation, job related skills or transferable “soft skills”. In a nutshell, it helps managers flex their style according to the situation, aptly directing, coaching, supporting or delegating. They thus avoid being overly directive to staff who need them to back off (avoiding micromanagement). They thus also avoid being overly absent when they are most needed (to support, explain and coach). The worst posture is “seagull management”, that is feigning to delegate, but when the s**t hits the fan, having very autocratic management, swopping in and pooping on them! Situational Leadership encourages healthy conversations to calibrate the right level of feedback and joint goal setting, what in the “lingo” of the model is described as “partnering for performance”. To cap it all, there are times when the same employee requires different leadership styles, depending on the familiarity of the task at hand. That’s pretty much it! One paragraph that summarises a two-day training programme!  In short, I would say leadership is about learning to let go and empowering people at all levels of the organization.

Finding N° 5: Find your meaningful compass

People spend a large part of their lives in the workplace, so it surely makes sense to find a role that corresponds to who we are and what motivates us. When I begin a coaching programme, I ask my coachees to fill in a “discovery” questionnaire so to that I can get a better understanding of their values. This helps balance the coaching objectives between what they truly want for themselves and what the organization wants from them.

Staff want to make their mark, not be a cog in a large corporate wheel. In his seminal work, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Csíkszentmihályi outlined his theory that people are happiest when they are in a state of flow – Finding an optimal state of intrinsic motivation, where the person is fully immersed in what they are doing. Csikszentmihályi characterized nine component states of achieving flow. Amongst these are the notions of challenge/skill balance, clarity of goals, immediate and unambiguous feedback. I’m struck by just how much these can all be directly influenced by the quality of an employee’s direct manager.

So that’s it in a nutshell! No long-winded academic survey – some key management tips from my humble observations. In summary, today’s leaders need to 1) be close to their team, 2) be authentic, 3) be sensitive to diversity, 4) know when to manage or lead, 5) instill meaning.

It’s over to you now, or as they say here in France, “à vous de jouer”!

Feel free to mention in the comments any management essentials you would add :-)