Leadership Takes a Village

You don’t need to be the hero when it comes to leading. At least according to David Pendleton, who is the author of Leadership: All You Need to Know. Pendleton is the Chairman of Edgecumbe consulting group and leadership expert at the University of Oxford’s Said Business School within their Advanced Management and High Performance Leadership programs.

I recently met with David to talk about the theories and practical applications of effective leadership. Here are the top three takeaways for leaders:

1. Complementary leadership increases success

We often think of diversity as a ‘have to’, a quota about race, gender, sexual orientation and color. Yet David opened my eyes to a new definition of diversity in leadership, which he calls complementary leadership.

His argument is that complete leadership must cover strategy, operations and the interpersonal. Often, but not necessarily always, the CEO usually holds the strategy role, looking up and out via a big leap; in Myers-Briggs (MBTI) terms, this person is usually an ‘N,’ meaning ‘Intuition’. The COO usually holds the operations role, driving down with a narrow focus on results through incremental steps. In Myers-Briggs terms, this person is usually a ‘S’ meaning ‘Sensing’. The interpersonal role is usually held by the CHRO, focusing on the organizational values and building sustainable relationships; this person’s MBTI is usually a ‘F’ meaning ‘Feeling’.

Yet no one leader can manage all three areas well. David’s thinking is that you need to play to people’s leadership strengths irrespective of their official title. In fact, some of the most interesting leadership challenges start with a CEO who is poor with strategy! The vital point is that the best leaders are not well rounded; the best teams are. Usually a leader may be good in one area, adequate in two areas yet struggle to manage all three areas. So the organization needs diversity of skills and psyche to lead well.

Pendleton urges leaders to look around and ask, “Who do I need around me? Why?” Answering these questions honestly will force a leadership team to look outside the usual scope and find people who round out the team with complementary skills and mindsets to increase organizational success. This includes winning both the head and the heart of your employees, which takes both the MBTI ‘F’ and the MBTI ‘S and N’. Without this candid assessment, the organization will just reproduce the same mistakes in the past due to groupthink.

2. Leadership Strengths: Natural, Potential and Fragile

According to Dr. Pendleton, leaders have three types of strengths:

Natural strength includes the cards that someone is dealt with at birth. Their natural abilities and skills are easily and naturally honed because the person enjoys that trait. In my case, I’m naturally good at, and enjoy, building relationships and networking, remembering people’s names and introducing them to other people they want to meet.

Potential strength includes the cards that someone is born with but not naturally honed. These are latent strengths that could be improved through discipline and practice. For me, that means creativity. Creative word play comes to me fairly naturally; many people tell me that I have natural capacity to be much better and could produce more if I just made the time to slow down and be creative more regularly.

Fragile strength includes the strengths that someone had to learn. As it was not a natural skill for this person, this strength can tarnish if not regularly used. My fragile strength includes marketing; I’ve owned two companies and always needed a marketing pro to help me strategize and delegate the marketing plan.

His point is that leaders need to respond to all three strengths differently. It is important to hone your natural strengths, to be all you can be. Yet you also have to realize that you will always have to work on your fragile strengths because they can easily deteriorate. While doing this, why not work on the potential strengths as well, where you have much of what it takes but have not yet learned how to use it?  Discipline and awareness are the keys to doing this.

3. Increase employee engagement by creating on/off ramps

Since Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In was released, many people are asking how to get more women at the top. Data shows that companies with at least three women on the board have an average 46% higher ROI than those with none. Women are needed at the top but obstacles still stand in the way.

Sean Coleman of Webster University, who invited me to speak with Dr. Pendleton, suggested creating on/off ramps for both men and women. He argued that these ramps would allow valued employees to manage unexpected family illness, aging parents, child issues and more, without penalty when they return to work. This is akin to the idea of an academic sabbatical. Besides being a nice perk, as I’ve blogged about earlier, it also helps create trust between the employer and employee.

Businesses have started to create some financial on/off ramps for employees. These come in the form of 401K’s, IRA’s and other types of investments that extend a person’s ability to build a retirement nest egg not dependent on the success of their employer 30 years down the road. However, as a society we haven’t found successful ways to build on and off ramps for employees to use here and now. What are other ways to engage employees? How could organizations start to create and implement them in incremental steps?

Leadership involves a team of people who are willing to learn from each other, take initiative and humbly listen. We often associate leadership with one person; while one person may dedicate her time to strategizing on a grander scale, plans go nowhere without two-way communication and the capacity to execute.

If your team is eager to innovate, strong leadership is necessary. A first step would be for your team to begin to identify what their natural, potential and fragile strengths are and then build out ways to communicate, plan and execute on them successfully.

I’d like to hear from you. What are your strengths? How can your team help you? How can you help your team? Leave me a comment, email or tweet.