Early in my career, I wanted to be a good leader. It was an important priority for me, which sounds like a good thing. But I also wanted to be known as a good leader and manager, and that was the problem.
I was intentional in how I cared for my employees, and I did good things for them. I took an interest in them, their families, and their careers. I sacrificed for them often, putting their needs above my own. I championed them and encouraged them to become more than they thought they could become. And I celebrated them.
But deep, deep down inside I measured my success and worth as a leader by what I believed my people thought of me. Though I didn’t understand or admit it at the time, being a good leader wasn’t really as much about them as it was about my own identity and self-worth.
Some might be tempted to accuse me of being overly scrupulous in my self-analysis. They might say, “What is the harm in this, as long as the people you were leading were getting what they needed?” I contend that the harm was subtle, but very dangerous; it threatened my own peace of mind, as well as the sustainability of any goodness my employees were receiving from me.
See, when things went well, I felt a sense of satisfaction. But it never lasted long. I was always thinking about what else I needed to accomplish, and how I could continue to prove my prowess as a leader and a professional. At the end of the day, I would find myself feeling a little empty.
When things went poorly, I found myself disproportionately upset. Why? Was it because my employees were impacted by something gone wrong? As much as I wanted to think so, looking back, I know it was because my world was not right. My identity was at risk.
It was only as I grew older, and started to understand the true definition of humility, that I understood how to improve. Until I separated my identity as a professional from my definition as a person, I could not be a truly good leader. So I began to go deeper in my faith in God, then in my roles as a husband and a father and a son and a friend. It wasn’t that I was indifferent to these things before. In fact, I was extremely involved in my home life. It was my identity that I struggled with and that I needed to get right.
I wish I could say that all this happened in my early thirties and that I’ve been living this way for the past 20 years, but it wasn’t until my mid-forties that I fully made this critical realization. I can tell you that the people who have worked with me both before and after I made this realization saw a big change in me. I’m far from perfect now. Still learning lessons. But I’m definitely less stressed. Less invested in work. More thoughtful. More measured. And much more effective as a mentor, strategist, and manager.
My message to those who are reading this book in order to become better leaders is simple. Be a whole person first. Get your priorities in order. Know that neither your job nor your leadership defines you. Ask yourself if it might be better to set this book down to invest in your faith, your marriage, or your parenting. If you do, you’ll come back better able to digest and apply the principles of leadership for the right reasons, and with better prospects for long-term success.
Reflection Questions
What do you consider the qualities of a good leader to be?
How do you evaluate yourself as a leader? How much do you rely on the opinions of others in making this judgment?
How much is your personal sense of identity linked to your perception of yourself as a leader? What other roles do you have that provide you with a sense of identity? How hard is it to separate your identity from your roles?
6
Scaling Your Impact as a Leader
Taavo Godtfredsen
Taavo Godtfredsen is an executive coach, speaker, and is currently an advisor to the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches organization.
Taavo has spent more than 20 years in the leadership development field as a successful business leader and practitioner. He has traveled the world interviewing and collaborating with hundreds of the most recognized CEOs, best-selling business authors, and top business school faculty. With both a breadth of experience and depth of knowledge in the leadership development field, Taavo has remained on the cutting edge continuously working with executives as they adapt to a changing business environment. As a pragmatist, Taavo’s methodology zeroes in on the most innovative and time efficient leadership actions that yield the greatest impact.
Taavo was the originator of Five@5:00™ and co-created the Leadership Development Channel™. Taavo began his career at Linkage Inc., and held various senior roles leading both functions and business units. He later helped to grow Targeted Learning Corporation, a private company sold to Skillsoft Corporation. Taavo is the chair and founder of the CEO Advisory Group, a private equity only CEO group; a certified and experienced executive coach; and holds an MBA from Babson College.
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There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one’s self.
—Benjamin Franklin
What I have come to learn from working with hundreds of executives is that your success as a leader is not based on your intentions, as most leaders want the very best for their people and organization. Rather, your success is based on your impact. When there is a misalignment between your intentions and your actions, you can be operating at a fraction of your capability as a leader. This is the single greatest leadership challenge I see today – the lack of awareness in leaders of the gap between how they intend to lead and how they actually lead.
Let me put a face to this astounding leadership challenge. The example below involves a coaching client from a Fortune 100 company.
I will never forget coaching Adam. He was an incredibly successful senior leader working for a major global industrial organization who was viewed by senior leadership as hitting it [the numbers] out of the park. Adam was leading a high-growth business and his executive team brought me in to help him accelerate the revenue of the business. In parallel, they wanted me to support his advancement to the executive level and work with him on how to avoid burnout. They saw a looming cliff on the horizon if Adam didn’t change course. He was going too hard and too fast and his people couldn’t keep up.
In getting to know Adam, it appeared he simply didn’t have an off button. He was your classic drive-for-results type of leader. He was bright, competent, and dedicated. Early in the coaching process, I asked him a question (which I will be coming back to later): “How do you want your people feeling as a result of your leadership?” I thought he would stew on this for a bit, but without any hesitation and with a voice of conviction two words popped out: “passionate and energized.” Right then I knew Adam had a long road ahead because I had already interviewed his direct reports, manager, members of the senior team, and close colleagues. As one of his direct reports shared with me, “He sees himself one way and the reality is different. He is not being perceived as the person he thinks he is.”
In fact, people who worked for Adam felt the exact opposite of how he wanted them to feel: “exhausted,” “underappreciated,” and even “used.” Fighting back tears, one of Adam’s direct reports told me, “He has taken years off my life.” I don’t know about you, but there isn’t a leader I have met who would want to be having this type of impact on his people.
The leadership practices Adam had been employing simply did not align with his intentions for leading a high-growth business. Just imagine the impact Adam could have on the organization and his team’s performance if his leadership had been in the same ballpark as his intellect and intent. He was already highly successful despite the chasm between how he intended to lead and how he actually led.
What do you think are the primary reasons we, especially senior leaders, can be out of step with our intentions?
There are a few primary reasons. One of them (and this was true of Adam) is that we don’t create a safe space for people to provide us with feedback on how we show up as leaders.
A second reason, and I am going to quote my friend Dr. Peter Fuda,1 is that “We judge ourselves by our
intentions and everyone else by their actions.” You see, we have high standards for everyone around us, but we don’t always hold ourselves to the same high standards. Meanwhile, because you are a leader, everyone is judging you by your behavior – watching your every move – and they will look to see if you hold yourself to the same standards to which you hold everyone else. It isn’t just what you say or how you say it that affects people; it is also your body language and what you do. There is a massive echo effect in the organization based on how others perceive you.
A third reason can be attributed to the power we hold in an organization. The research has found that the more power you have – the weight your title carries – the more likely you are to be blind to your shortcomings as a leader. In fact, studies show that people in positions of authority in organizations are three times more likely to interrupt coworkers and to raise their voices. Most of us have seen examples of this type of behavior from senior leaders. A classic example of this power effect is when the most senior person in a meeting is looking at his or her phone and checking email or text while others are speaking. This individual would be appalled if others were doing it when he or she was speaking but think nothing of doing it him- or herself. To combat this, leaders must learn to control their mindset. One quick tip on how to limit this power effect when you are meeting with your team or others is to imagine that you are on the same level with everyone else in the room, that you are peers or colleagues. In other words, think and behave as if you are equals.
A fourth cause of our intent being out of step with our impact is our own perception of ourselves. Self-perception can be just that – perception and not reality. Studies show that too many of us, especially those of us from Western cultures, believe that we are better at things than we really are. It is why 88% of US drivers and 77% of Swedish drivers put themselves in the top 50% driving ability for safety. My personal favorite is that 95% of the faculty at a major US university considered themselves above average in teaching ability and 68% placed their teaching abilities in the top 25%.
Tasha Eurich, an organizational psychologist and author,2 conducted a three-year study on self-awareness and found that 95% of people think they’re self-aware, but in reality only 10% to 15% really are. She identifies seven different categories of self-knowledge that we must develop if we want to increase our self-awareness. These include: values, passions, aspirations, fit (situation/setting that is most enriching to us), personality, strengths and weaknesses, and the impact we have on others around us. All of these elements are critical for leaders to understand deeply about themselves, particularly in regard to the impact they can have on others.
Let’s go back to the feeling question I asked Adam. Is the way a leader makes others feel really that important? Irwin Federman, a venture capitalist and the former president of Monolithic Memories, certainly believes so. As he put it to Jim Kouzes, author of The Leadership Challenge,3 “Conventional wisdom has it that management is not a popularity contest…. I contend, however, that all things being equal, we will work harder and more effectively for people we like. And we will like them in direct proportion to how they make us feel.”4
Just think back to managers you have had in the past: How much discretionary effort did you give to the one you admired the most? The least? Liz Wiseman,5 a top authority on effective leadership, calls these types of bosses (respectively) either multipliers or diminishers. As she found in her research, diminishers get approximately 48% of the capability out of their people while multipliers get 95%. Close to a 50% difference! What percentage of capability do you think Adam was getting from his people? Just imagine him increasing the capability of his people by even 10% or 20% and what could be accomplished. And this is what he did.
Adam did not go over the cliff and was able to grow the business while avoiding burnout. The turning point to his success was his proactive and courageous step of asking for and acting on the feedback from his team, manager, and colleagues. The feedback was not easy to digest. It was so tough, in fact, that he contemplated walking out of the building because he was so shocked at the gap between how he saw himself and how others experienced him. He finally had a lens into how poorly he treated others. He learned that he needed to empower and recognize his team members in a fundamentally different way if he was to continue to successfully scale the business. Eventually, Adam received the promotion he hoped for and his division had a record sales year. His people slowly began to feel differently as they started to believe and trust in the changes he was making. They felt appreciated and could bring more of themselves to their work. They didn’t view Adam’s changes as superficial or inauthentic. Quite the opposite. They saw who Adam really was.
Action Steps
My goal for you, as it was for Adam, is to create a bridge to help you reach your deepest leadership aspirations. So, let me shift now to the how of scaling your impact as a leader. I am going to provide you with two very simple techniques that you can complete over the next 30 days. The first and most important is an action you will implement on your own to assess the size of the gap (if any) between your intentions and actions. Ultimately, your goal is to get yourself into alignment.
The second action is a fantastic team exercise you will lead to learn if everyone is clear on the most critical goal(s), top priorities, and metrics for success. This exercise will provide you with additional feedback on whether or not you have been communicating what you think you have been communicating. Teams that are not on the same page can experience a debilitating level of frustration, conflict, and wasted effort. The objective here is to understand whether your team is in alignment and make sure you get them there if they are not. Too many leaders believe that they have adequately communicated their goals and priorities and therefore assume that all their people are working under the same assumptions and that there is no confusion. This is rarely the case, from my experience.
As you will discover, the two actions outlined below will take relatively little time, are scalable, and connect to two critical areas of leadership success – continuous improvement and clarity of goals. As for the scalable part, the actions you take will have a compounding effect because you will be modeling what you expect your team members to do with their teams, allowing the high-impact leadership practices you employ to be magnified throughout the organization.
Your First Action
In order to improve and/or adapt, you have to know how you are doing. You need the data. I am going to teach you how to get it by conducting your own assessment, which can reveal how aligned your intentions are with your actions.
Send an e-mail letting your direct reports, selected colleagues, and manager know that you will be asking them to evaluate you as a leader and offering suggestions on what you can do moving forward to improve.
Follow up directly with all those from whom you have requested feedback, and do what I have learned from Marshall Goldsmith, the world’s #1 executive coach: Make them feel comfortable about providing you with honest and concrete suggestions.
Only say “Thank you” to their suggestions—do not try to evaluate or comment on any of their ideas.
If you are already clear on a couple of areas you will focus on, ask them for their ideas on how you can improve in those areas. Encourage them to make suggestions that are observable and actionable.
Follow up with them every four to six weeks to see how you are improving in those areas. Continue to ask for their ideas.
At this point, as many do, you may be feeling quite hesitant. This can be an awkward and uncomfortable exercise for all involved. It can be hard to both ask for and give feedback, but the benefits can be numerous and profound.
Your Second Action
One of the most important roles of a leader is to make sure everyone is clear on both your key goals and priorities. When teams are not clear (aligned), it can create a tremendous amount of wasted effort and conflict. I am going to teach you a simple team exercise I call “Testing Team Clari
ty.”
In either a face-to-face team meeting (using note cards) or virtually (via e-mail), ask your team members to write their responses anonymously to the questions below:
What is our most important goal (this year)?
What do you believe are our top three priorities?
What are the top two or three metrics that matter most to measure our progress/success?
Once completed, pass the note cards to a volunteer who will read out the responses to the group. If done virtually, the volunteer can e-mail the aggregate responses. Ask the team (and yourself!) the following:
What is your reaction to what you heard from your fellow team members? Did anything surprise you?
Do we have the right goals and priorities? If not, what should they be?
Is there something we aren’t measuring that we should be?
Summary
The two actions I outlined above are a small subset of the more comprehensive program in leadership development that I employ. While simple, these are a great place to start in targeting two critical leadership challenges we face: (1) fostering and modeling continuous improvement, and (2) providing clarity of goals, priorities, and metrics for success. Addressing these two challenges will provide important enlightenment and will begin to close the gap between your leadership intent and your actual impact.
Typically, after a leader has worked through these two exercises, he or she has learned more than enough to begin making the important changes necessary to achieve greater impact and success – as an individual leader, for their team, and for their organization as a whole. These changes aren’t always easy. Some may be as simple as improving your communication by providing your team with more regular updates. Others could involve a much more difficult change in behavior or way of thinking, such as controlling your anger. You may even breathe a sigh of relief as one leader did when she learned that only 2 out of her 10 direct reports was in alignment with her in identifying critical goals and top priorities through the Testing Team Clarity exercise. The truth enabled her to adapt quickly to get each team member pointed in the right direction. Whatever the outcome of the exercises above, you are modeling the way forward for your team, and as a result, scaling your impact as a leader.
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