What Makes a Truly Great Leader – From my Perspective
By Clark Neuhoff
People find themselves in positions of leadership several ways; hard work, get chosen, sometimes circumstance or luck. You prove yourself and finally get promoted to lead the division, or a company is acquired and you are selected to run it. Perhaps you inherit the family business, or it was time to leave corporate America and you buy or start your own company.
But landing in a leadership role does not always mean someone has what it takes to BE a great leader. Knowledge and skills are not always enough. We have all known people who had deep subject matter knowledge and breadth of experience, but were not the ones to cast the vision, or the people that everyone rallies behind. One critical element of all great leaders is wisdom. While most will agree that both leadership and wisdom are important, they can be equally hard to define. Recently a colleague of mine John Bell shared with me the first operational definition of wisdom that I had heard.
Wisdom is the ability to see and build relationships, not just with people but bringing all the parts together.
Sometimes we call this “connecting the dots”. It’s one thing to see what is going on, but quite another to understand why, and identify the implications.
NBA Hall-of-Famer Larry Byrd clearly possessed both talent and great wisdom of the game. While maybe not the physical abilities of a Magic Johnson or Michael Jordan, he was one of the smartest players to step on to the court. Right away he would mentally match up the players, identify strengths and weaknesses, then develop his strategy for winning. It was said that Larry Byrd played basketball chess, while others played basketball checkers.
Well this is great for those born with natural ability, but what about the rest of us? How can we develop this essential but sometimes elusive ingredient for success? Armed with this new definition of wisdom – the ability to see and build relationships – I would like to talk about 1) How we can develop more wisdom? and 2) What gets in the way?
How to Develop More Wisdom
As leaders we have the unique vantage point to see across people, functions, organizations and motivations. The first step is to stop for a moment (each day, or several times a day) and observe what is going on. Look at a given process or department within your company and ask:
- Who talks to whom?
- What information is needed, provided, shared, or withheld?
- How does work flow?
- Where are the bottlenecks?
- Where is the value created?
Then write down what you see, draw pictures with connecting lines if that helps you see the patters. Set it aside then come back to it. What else do you see?
These new insights are important but do not make you a great leader. They show you where and often what should be done. But the difference between leaders and everyone else is that leaders take action. Action requires confidence, decisions and the willingness (or desire) to accept a certain level of risk. A leader knows that not every attempt will result in exactly what you intend – but by not acting you’re dead where you sit. By taking action you learn either what works or what does not work, and either way you have now gained more wisdom. With more wisdom you become a stronger leader, your confidence builds as does the trust of your people. This simple flow diagram may help.
Wisdom → See Connections → Take Action → See Results → More Wisdom
What Gets in the Way of Wisdom
At each step in the process there are several things that can block us from gaining more wisdom. Here are several blockers that we have found:
Seeing Connections – Not taking the time to look, assuming we already know the answer, looking too deep at the details, missing the forest for the trees
Taking Action – Fear, lack of confidence in ourselves or our people, complacency
Results – Not taking the time to debrief or evaluate what happened
What often blocks all of this from translating into more wisdom are emotional factors. We already mentioned fear to act, but also the fear to admit we were wrong. It can be hard for leaders to admit to their people that they don’t have all the answers. In reality your people already know it, they are just waiting for you to figure it out. And once you do – and admit it to them – your credibility goes up and their willingness to jump in behind you now takes off. Closely related to this is our pride. It takes a certain amount of humility to ask for and accept help, but the only way an organization will grow is for each member to become fully engaged. It is tremendously motivating to ask your people for their ideas or opinions and then to act on them. Anger and frustration also get in the way of seeing what is really going on. Anger focuses our attention and our energy on the problem rather than looking past it to a solution.
Summary
Wisdom is an essential characteristic of successful leaders. It is demonstrated by the ability to see and build relationships, formulate and take action, then learn from the results, thereby building more wisdom. What often gets in the way of gaining wisdom is first not taking the time to stop and really look deeply at your business or situation. Then our pride, fears and anger block our ability learn from what just happened so we can apply it to the next situation.
Here are two things you can do to exercise your wisdom muscles:
- Practice observing your situation and look for the connections
- Check you pride and assumptions at the door, and be open to learn
Whether you are a leader in your organization today or aspire to a leadership role, this applies to all of us. At the very least we are all leaders of ideas and we strive to be market leaders. For those who carry the further responsibility of leading people, it is our obligation to bring all the wisdom we can muster.
