Leadership as a Verb
Being = Doing : Leadership as a Verb
When it comes to leadership, most of us tend to think positional, i.e. we define its part of speech as a noun. The harsh reality, however, is that true leadership is not related to the positions leaders hold, but to the actions they take and identify them as the leader. In other words, leadership as a verb.
Almost all leaders start positional. At some point in your career you are given a position of power in which you are allowed to tell a certain number of people what to do and how to do it. The problem with this is that you won’t get anything out of your subordinates other than exactly what you told them to do. In other words, your subordinates listen to you because they have to, not because they want to. It wasn’t that long ago that this was accepted as the reality of management. Employees needed to be ‘managed’, and so a whole army of middle and senior managers was employed to do just that.
Luckily more and more managers are realising that this system of command and control isn’t sufficient anymore. It might have worked for the organisations of the Industrial Age, but today’s ever-changing volatile work place calls out for true leaders, not managers. The initial shift from manager to leader isn’t that hard, it merely requires us to move from a positional level to a permission level of leadership. What this means is that whereas employees at the positional level do what they’re told because they have to, at a permission level they do it because they want to. Naturally, to get your employees to want to do what you want them to do, they have to like and trust you. This may seem daunting, but keep in mind that as humans we are social animals, building relationships is in our genes, and relationships are the foundation of true leadership. There are three essential relationship skills you’ll need to develop to become a relational leader.
The first, and most important, skill is that you listen well. Only when you know what’s going on in the minds of your subordinates, you will be able to get them to like and trust you. Unfortunately, most of us aren’t very good listeners, we tend to use the time we should be listening to think about what we want to say next. To appear to be a good listener isn’t that hard though. The trick is to let people finish saying what they want to say.
When I was a sergeant in the Netherlands Army, I had a reputation among my soldiers of being a good listener. This surprised me as I didn’t see myself like that at all. After asking around a bit, I learnt that the underlying reason for this was that I let them speak. Soldiers are required to do a lot of boring and seemingly useless tasks, and whenever they speak up to question the value of their work, their superiors simply tell them to shut up and get things done. The difference in my approach was that I would let them complain and when they’d spoken their mind I’d tell them that it was just the way things were and they should go and get the work done. The outcome was the same, the work got done, but the atmosphere in which it got done was completely different. Because I had allowed my soldiers to vent their frustrations, they would swiftly do their work without any further complaints. This in stark contrast to other groups who’d complain and procrastinate all along, forcing their sergeants to keep pushing them and creating a hostile atmosphere.
Besides being able to listen, a relational leader should observe. Unlike average positional managers, relational leaders won’t be hiding in an office, but are found among their subordinates, observing them. This does not mean surveilling, observing means that you should be constantly aware of where your subordinates are, what they are doing and what they need to keep going. Although hardly a leadership position, a clear example of this would be a bartender. There are those who are continuously pushing you for another drink, even though your glass is still half full, they are surveillants. Compare this to the bartender who, exactly at the moment you are thinking about having another drink, appears out of nowhere ready to take your order, that’s an observer.
The final skill the relational leader should master is a willingness to learn continuously. The world around us changes so fast these days that life-long learning isn’t optional anymore. To be able to lead, you should at least know the same as your subordinates and preferably a bit more. The good news is that knowledge is everywhere, it’s no longer necessary to take evening classes or sign up for a home correspondence course, with a bit of effort you can learn anything about everything online.
The shift from positional to relational leadership is just a first step, but an essential one. There are other steps, for example staff development, on the path to the ontological leadership that you should aspire to. However, we all have to learn to walk before we can run, so let’s take this step first. Become a relational leader, become aware of leadership as a verb and inspire your subordinates.
[T]here you are.
