“Many people are convinced leadership is about authority. True leadership is more about influence. While people don’t want to be micromanaged, they do want to be led. An effective leader understands this and directs his/her people with intention, purpose and skill.” Derek Avera-Focus 3 Leadership Group
I was browsing Linkedin and I saw this quote from Derek Avera from Focus 3 Leadership Group. I connected with Derek during this pandemic to talk leadership and hear his insight on what it means to lead. This quote resonated with me because it is so simple, yet so powerful. This quote sums up the difference between positional power and personal power. Authority is simply relying on your title and hoping that drives outcomes. Personal power is built on relationships and inspiration that is created by a leader to move people to accomplish something great. People do want to be led, but people do not want to be victims of senseless power plays that are dependent on positional power.
This creates a leadership dilemma and requires a leader to walk a fine line between inspiring people with intention, purpose and skill but avoiding to micromanage staff. I have a broad experience of working with different leaders and I have experienced differences on this spectrum to both extremes. When I was in sales my company expected every interaction to be logged in a CRM, they could track our location by our cell phone and they have countless other measures to track activity. The idea was that you cannot manage what you cannot measure. This extreme level of measurement led to a culture of distrust and a fear that was unhealthy. I do not have quantitative data to support the idea, but I would imagine this had an impact on performance farther than killing the batteries of cell phones in record amounts of time.
I have also worked for leaders that would offer very little guidance and would explicitly state that they do not micromanage. The moment there was adversity this would create a great deal of conflict between the leader and myself. There would be questions around why I did something the way I did or how we got to this point. I would state that I made the decision based on the following criteria and provide justification for why I made the decision. I would leave the conversation frustrated because I was looking for guidance and was told that I would not be micromanaged, and the leader would leave the discussion frustrated because we had a different view of what should have been the outcome. Some simple preplanning and discussion could have avoided the frustration of both people when the waters got rough.
So where should you tread as a leader? I think Derek sums it up beautifully in the quote that people want to be led and that requires intention, purpose and skill. When adversity strikes the intention and purpose pieces should have already been executed and everyone should be on the same page when a decision needs to be made. The former CEO of General Electric, Jack Welch said as a leader say yes or no, never say maybe. So, when a decision is required the decision maker should already be prepared around what is the right decision for the mission and vision of the organization, so that leaves the skill piece around how to explain and communicate that decision. This is the challenge of leading others.
Everyone has their own leadership style, and it is impossible to summarize the exact characteristics of an effective leader. The key pieces to examine for yourself is how do you instill a sense of personal power over the alternative of positional power. That is where leaders must be intentional, purposeful and skillful in inspiring those within the organization. This is a powerful quote and one that I will be contemplating myself for a considerable amount of time. The more you get down to understanding what it means to lead others, the one constant is emotional intelligence. Understanding how people think, feel and react is essential to moving a group of people forward. I will look for ways to inspire others and would love to hear some feedback on the impact of emotional intelligence on your leadership journey.