Part 1 of “Understand what leaders do”, covered the following areas on which that leaders spent their time and resources.
- Bridging across diverse people and groups
- “Doing the vision thing”
In this blog post, we dive into other two areas critical for effective leadership:
- Engage and then lead
- Embody the change
Engage and then lead
When I had just started working, I was tasked with something very interesting. Nothing short of a leadership opportunity despite being a newly hired management trainee. I was working for a leading newspaper. The circulation department head asked me to implement a brilliant initiative. It was to get people who had newly migrated to the city to subscribe to the newspaper. We would add value to them by providing them all information needed to settle down in the city in lieu of the newspaper subscription. Excited as I was, I quickly got to work turning this idea into a best-in-class model with execution details. The model was highly appreciated by the department head and was signed off for execution. I was confident that the difficult part of envisioning and planning was over, executing it will be a walk in the park. I mailed it to all the people whom I thought would be able to take it forward and waited to hear roaring reviews on my fantastic work. To my dismay, all the hard work that was appreciated by the top management, failed to excite anyone in the department. The little work that got done was by me running around and trying to be a one-man army.
I had made a rookie mistake. Naïve leaders act if the idea itself is the ultimate selling point. Experienced leaders understand that process is just as important. To implement an initiative or to bring about a sustainable change, a leader must build bridges to those who don’t immediately agree with you. This bridge is built based on the leader’s credibility and the process he chooses to bring about the change.
| Success in leading change = The Idea + The Process + You |
If I had to go back and pick up the project again, my process would be as follows:
- I would first identify the stakeholders needed to make this project a success
- Do a one-on-one meeting to brief them about the idea and understand what they thought about this initiative.
- This would give me an indication of the champions and the nay-sayers in the group
- I would then try and address the concerns of those opposed to the idea and find a common ground to move ahead.
- Not only would it ensure that I have looked at all the factors needed to make the project a success, but this would involve all the stakeholders in the initiative. Involvement leads to ownership of the project.
- Then it would be time to execute
The above process would have involved everyone. This means the initiative would no longer be a top-down directive, but something that the entire team owned and would give their best to bring it to fruition.
| Key steps to leading change | Stylistic choices that influence the change process |
| Create Urgency | Where do I get my information? |
| Form a guide coalition | How much do I involve others? |
| Craft a vision | What people do I involve? |
| Communicate the vision | How many? |
| Empower others to act on it | How will I see my ideas? |
| Secure short – term wins | What should my role be? |
| Embed the change in the organisation’s systems and processes | How fast should we go? |
Embody the Change
This is all about “you” of the below formula
| Success in leading change = The Idea + The Process + You |
We follow people who inspire us, not people who are merely competent. Inspiration is not just about your management style. What people are gauging has to do with your passion, conviction, and coherence. In other words, your charisma. Charisma is less a quality of a person than a quality of a person’s relationships with others i.e. How and why a leader engages followers and what the leader found inspiring about who they were as people.
Your subordinates, peers and bosses will decide:
- Whether your process is fair
- Whether you have the best interests of the organisation in mind (as opposed to simply working to further your career)
- Whether you walk the talk.
Take Margert Thatcher for example. What distinguished her from all the other gifted politicians around her was how she used her personal experience to crystallize a powerful political message that she personally embodied. She told stories about herself to convey to people what really mattered and inspire them. About how she learnt to be thrifty and stick to budget. About how she was taught not to follow the crowd but stick to her guns. Her formative experiences profoundly shaped Thatcher’s beliefs as a politician. She used herself as a metaphor for what she felt was missing in the United Kingdom: a sense of self determination and redemption through hard work and delayed gratification. And she attracted a large following of people who believed what she believed.
Charismatic leaders have seen to have three things in common:
- Strong convictions based on their personal experience
- Good and frequent communication, mostly through personal stories
- A strong coherence between what they believe, what they actually do and who they are.
If you want to see all the four areas of focus in tandem, I would recommend reading “Hit Refresh” by Satya Nadella. In his book he takes us through the detailed process of how he created a vision for Microsoft, how he build critical and not always easy alliances within and outside the company, how he engaged with the top management to lead them through the change and finally how he embodied the change himself.
Deeply wishing that you get inspiration and insights to create something new and transformational wherever you are! Would love to hear from you on what resonated with you and stories about your breakthroughs….
Sources:
Act like a leader, think like a leader – Hermia Ibarra
The Leadership Journal – Kris Safarova
Bridge to leadership 
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