If only there were a perfect list of the most effective leadership characteristics to judge talent. Senior learning executives could use this all-encompassing, quite magical list as a guide for what type of learning to provide to develop that talent. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, not a magical one, and such a list does not exist. However, there is something new on the leadership landscape for senior learning executives to hold onto. According to the authors of Why Should Anyone Be Led By You? professors Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, if you are your very best self, your chances of becoming a great leader increase.
The book began as an article in the Harvard Business Review and ended with the phrase, “If you want to become a more effective leader, be yourself more with skill.” “That phrase seemed to be memorable for some people, but of course, inside organizations, many people don’t want you to be yourself. They want you to be someone else. They want you to fit against a competence model or they want you to be more like Jack Welch or Lee Iacocca or some other famous leader,” said Gareth Jones, professor and fellow at the Center for Management Development, London Business School. “The issue of authenticity seemed to be so relevant to our times.”
Jones said that there are several reasons why authenticity is critically important. One, employees in today’s organizations are increasingly skeptical. There is a growing awareness and a kind of guard built against being worked or manipulated by leaders. Second, the idea that consistency in role performances and authenticity are opposites is false because leaders do have to play roles. Third, to achieve authenticity one must be comfortable with origins, which means understanding what makes you who you are. And leaders must be comfortable with destinations, which means understanding where you are now. “This is especially true of societies like the United States with relatively high rates of social mobility,” Jones said. “When Rob and I talk to chief executives in organizations and say, ‘What’s your biggest problem?’ They almost universally say, ‘There’s not enough leadership around here.’ We look inside their organizations, and we find structures and cultures that are designed to inhibit the growth of leadership.”
Truly authentic leaders will selectively show their weaknesses. No one is perfect, so the old way of looking at leadership development, to point out good traits yet focus on those that need improving, can make someone forget about traits that make him or her special and encourage frustration as the leader in training chases after perfection, which doesn’t exist. “We all have weaknesses,” Jones explained. “And by weaknesses we don’t mean things that are central to your role performance. We mean that all of us have individual foibles, which in some organizations we’ve been encouraged to hide. Selective revelation of weakness or foible has a humanizing effect, and followers want to be led by a human being. We want people to be able to selectively and skillfully reveal weaknesses, which are real, perceived relevant to context, and which convince followers that they’re being led by a person.”
However, being a leader who is unafraid to show weakness does not mean that you should aspire to be just like your employees. Then they might question why you’re the leader because if you’re on equal footing, conceivably they could do your job. Your power to incite exceptional performance is weakened. Most people will only follow people who are different, so build on whatever makes you you, and make it work for you.
“Good leaders use their differences, whatever they are, as skillfully as they can,” said Rob Goffee, professor of organizational behavior and faculty director of executive education, London Business School. “Obviously, the best ones are those that are appropriate to the context and build relationships because leadership is a relationship. You can’t be a leader without followers. That rests upon a degree of self-knowledge and a degree of self-disclosure, and that doesn’t necessarily equate to full blown emotional intelligence, which has become pretty fashionable these days. Of course emotional intelligence is very helpful, but skillful leaders know and show enough. They’re not necessarily completely emotionally intelligent.”
The new leadership requirements mean that leaders should manage with tough empathy, and that means sincerely caring about the people who you lead and the tasks that they have been hired to carry out. A leader should be prepared to discipline if necessary to encourage great, potentially hidden, performance. “It’s a kind of tough caring,” Jones said. “Of course, when you really care you make yourself vulnerable. We think that notion of investing yourself in your role is intrinsic to really effective leadership. There are some social skills that fall out from the notion of tough empathy. One of them is practicing social distance. I’m happy to get close to you so that we can be good colleagues, but I’m also aware that on occasion I’m going to be distant from you when we talk about performance issues. Tough empathy, that practice of social distance, falls out of the notion of tough empathy. It’s a skill. You can learn it.”
“Some people tend to have default modes,” Goffee said. “They’re always stuck with closeness, so they find it difficult to distance themselves or take a bigger picture or confront poor performance. Then there are others who are stuck in a slightly wooden performance at a distance and find it very, very difficult to get close. Really good leaders make these movements between closeness and distance at just the right time. All of that rests upon really excellent situation sensing. Good leaders know when to get close and when to keep their distance. It’s built around well developed antennae both at the interpersonal and the organizational level.”
