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by
Frances Frei
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December 20 - December 23, 2020
Our starting point is that leadership, at its core, isn’t about you. Instead, it’s about how effective you are at empowering other people and unleashing their full potential.
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The practice of leadership almost always asks you to risk something, but it only sometimes requires a midnight ride or a clutch, buzzer-beating jump shot. And there’s rarely a crowd that goes wild when you get it right.
leadership, at its core, isn’t about you. It’s about how effective you are at unleashing other people. Full stop. That’s it. That’s the secret.
leadership is about empowering other people as a result of your presence—and making sure that impact continues into your absence.
Your job as a leader is to create the conditions for the people around you to become increasingly effective, to help them fully realize their own capacity and power. And not only when you’re in the trenches with them, but also when you’re not around, and even (this is the cleanest test) after you’ve permanently moved on from the team.
As Brown-Philpot describes it, she shifted her focus going forward from what she needed to be successful as a leader to what she needed to do to help others succeed.
Leadership requires you to be present to the needs, abilities, and potential of other people—and to respond quickly and strategically to those signals.
When you’re in an effective leadership state, the strengths and potential of the people around you become your greatest assets.
“As a leader, you have to constantly shut off your own reel and watch all the movies playing around you.”
If your objective is to lead, then unleashing other people—helping them become as effective as they can possibly be—is your fundamental mandate.
If you seek to lead at the scale of an organization, then you need to spend a whole lot of time getting strategy and culture right.
“You’re going to have a manager. Your manager’s important. But they’re not with you all day long. What you’re doing with your time is your choice, and the impact you have is driven by your decisions.”
Dempsey articulated a vision for leadership focused somewhat radically on the performance of subordinates, on creating conditions for other people to increasingly call the shots. In this new framework, leaders would teach their trainees not what to think, but how to think and make decisions in the murky world of modern warfare, where context and conditions are constantly shifting.
It’s electrifying to be seen not only as we are, rare enough in its own right, but also as the people we might become.
The relevant question wasn’t “What do these people think of me?”; it was “What can I do to help make these people better?” That’s the shift that empowerment leadership demands.
Only when you can imagine a better version of someone can you play a role in helping to unleash them.
If you don’t have confidence in someone’s growth potential, then you can do many things with that person, but leading isn’t one of them.
other people’s awesomeness (OPA).c It works like this: choose someone in whom you see some kind of talent, however big or small, and find a genuine way to let them know that you’ve noticed. You see what they’re capable of today and—this is for leadership bonus points—you see where that gift might take them tomorrow if they decide to share it more often. Start with a person close to you and work outward from there.
Leadership that’s not about you gives people license to engage more fully with the organizations around them.
What will be the focus of your own leadership story? Will it be about the power you stockpiled and protected? Or about how much more you achieved by using that power to unleash the people around you?
Empowerment begins, we believe, with trust.
people tend to trust you when they think they are interacting with the real you (authenticity), when they have faith in your judgment and competence (logic), and when they believe that you care about them (empathy).
“agony of the super smart” (or ASS).
change your objective from getting what you need in the meeting to making sure everyone else gets what they need.
“never forget that investing in people has the possibility of infinite returns.”
Paulo Freire, said, “What the educator does is make it possible for students to become themselves.”
There is no higher human need than to realize our full potential, and no greater act of empathy than to enable that evolution in others.
Other people’s insights are among the most valuable—and overlooked—resources in the workplace, but accessing them requires a willingness to reveal you don’t have all the answers, something leaders often resist.
valuable—and overlooked—resources in the workplace, but accessing them requires a willingness to reveal you don’t have all the answers, something leaders often resist.
Reveal your full humanity to the world, regardless of what your critics say. And while you’re at it, take exquisite care of people who are different from you with confidence that their difference is the very thing that could unleash you.
Justice is neither blindly devoted to someone else, nor so relentless in its quest for power that leaders lose their humanity. Justice neither imposes its authority at the cost of duty, nor is it dutiful at the cost of authority.
When a leader’s expectations are high and clear, we tend to stretch to reach them. And we are far more likely to get there when we know that leader truly has our back.
Your leadership past does not define your future, and therein lies the possibility.
ValMax urges his readers to look closely at the lives of the leaders they admire. Many had undistinguished starts in life, if not downright grim ones. But they persevered and turned challenges into gifts, pulling glory from the crucible of adversity.9
It’s positive reinforcement that gets the job done, the most powerful accelerant we’ve observed for helping human beings scramble up a learning curve.
Your job as a leader is to make others better. If the feedback you’re giving has a neutral to negative impact, then you’re not doing your job.
We’ve learned the hard way that big organizational change almost always happens quickly, so our advice is to start now and slay all the dragons you can find.
“Be a positive influence on the lives of people around me. Encourage them, challenge them, help them to fulfill their potential.”
customers, competitors, and suppliers—the external stakeholders whose decisions can make or break you.
Your first job as a strategist is to be better than your competitors at the things that matter most to your customers.
one of your central duties as an absent leader is to empower your employees to deploy resources they control without you staring over their shoulders.
When you step up to the leadership challenge, whether you like it or not, there’s no option to turn off the broadcast feature on your actions. Is it who you are or just for show? The answer is always both.
If you seek to lead in your absence, then get your strategy right, tell everyone about it, and revisit it early and often. And if you’re swinging for maximum absentee impact, pull that other, all-powerful organizational lever: culture. Get your culture working for you rather than against you.
to get people to reliably behave the way you want—even in your absence—you have to get them to reliably think the way you want.
