CareerZ Cast Guide to Leadership

=> CareerZ Cast audio version of this article

What is Leadership?

Leadership is the ability navigate the environment and effectively move a group of people towards achieving a common goal.

While there are certain roles (e.g. company executive, sports coach, army general, etc.) that are intrinsic leading roles within an organization, leadership is an attribute everyone should develop. Particularly in collaborative teams, every person should play a role coordinating and aligning with others in a common pursuit.

Not developing leadership limits one’s ability to work with others, restricting suitable roles that are limited in scope and responsibility. Leadership develops early in life. Don’t wait for a role that requires leadership to be available before you become proficient.

There are several styles of leadership and organizations, so there are multiple ways to lead people, but the top five actions of a leader are:

• Vision – A leader will consider the environmental constraints and the interest and values of the organization and define a clear inspiring vision of the future, with realistic goals and a definition of success.
• Communicate and Inspire – In order to bring the team along, the leader will communicate the vision clearly and inspire members of the team to embrace and work together towards it. The leader will also influence others outside the team to make coordinated decisions aligned with the organizational vision.
• Support and Motivate – The leader will provide the knowledge and tools needed to achieve the common goal, support the team day-to-day in its pursuit by defining metrics and intermediate milestones, and constantly monitor progress and take corrective action.
• Challenge and Innovate – Leaders will challenge the team to achieve more, experiment with new approaches, and encourage personal and professional growth.
• Make decisions – Leaders make timely and fair decisions, particularly in times of crisis where the right path to take is not clear.

Even if you are not in a position of leadership, use every opportunity to exercise it as part of teams. For example, let’s say two colleagues have different views about how to go about executing a task and are arguing about how to move forward. Rather than adding yet a different view, you can engage in the discussion by asking them to explain and compare their perspectives and facilitate the convergence. Serving a broker of consensus also give you an opportunity to add to and influence it. That is how leaders act every day.

It starts with Self-Leadership

Avie Tevanian (Apple CTO in 2000) once told me during a career advice conversation: “Before leading others, one must learn how to lead oneself.” When I wrote that down in my notebook, I was not prepared to fully understand that statement, but that was the inspiration for me to seek education on the concept of leadership. In retrospect, I realize that self-leadership is not only a pre-requisite , but also a precursor to organizational leadership – a good self-leader usually also become a good organizational leader.

So, my recommendation to early-career professionals is to start with self-leadership. Develop and nurture good habits and active learning that will eventually prepare you to understand other’s abilities and motivations.

Consider the definition of Leadership above and transpose it to self. A self-leadership program would go like this:

• Envision and achieve your next career steps – When it comes to life and career, set goals and milestones that are meaningful to you and develop your personal approach to achieve them. Learning how to focus and prioritize, visualize a set of steps to be executed that leads to the goals. Learn how to overcome procrastination, lack of motivation or focus, paralysis by developing productive habits and rituals.
• Tell and live your story – Understand yourself and your attributes by telling the story of how you got here and how do you operate today (this is what is often referred to as your “personal brand”). Practice telling that story when you introduce yourself to others so it becomes second-nature to you. Inspire yourself to move forward by extending that story into the future and finding who you want to become.
• Shift into a growth mindset – Constantly take the opportunity to learn (from books, from direct advice, from observing others) and grow. Understand the skills your a missing and go after them. Understand what people you admire do and imitate them. Dreaming big takes the same effort as dreaming small.
• Challenge yourself – Don’t let constraints stop you. It is true that luck and opportunity is unfairly distributed, but you need to do your part. When people say they don’t have opportunity, I often find that people are not paying attention to the present opportunities. Success in life and work result from the interaction of your actions with the environment you live in.
• Be deliberate and decisive – We are constantly presented with broad selection of choices in life. Be self-aware and make choices that take you closer to your vision. It is ok to discover a dead-end and have to backtrack and explore other alternatives. It is ok to take a detour and and a longer path to a specific destination. It is not ok to be stuck for too long because you cannot decide whether to go right or left.

Basic skills and resources

Leadership is a broad concept and there are multiple styles and perspectives that can be different and right at the same time. This is a very personal list of basic skills I recommend developing early in your life and career to prepare you for formal organizational leadership in the future. Traditional school is not very good at offering these skills, so you need to be an active learner.

• Storytelling – Influencing, convincing, educating, inspiring, converging, motivating… All these verbs are much easier to achieve through a compelling narrative or story. The human brain evolved to produce and consume stories. Study and practice storytelling. Every major religion have a book of stories. Every great leader share stories. That is no coincidence. Storytelling can be learned and practiced since childhood and is one of the most important skills for leadership. A good book to read and understand the components of a good story is “Storyworthy” by Matthew Dicks.
• Psychology – Understand how people react to incentives, how people behave when not thinking objectively, what moves people. Understanding how humans operate is a core skill for leadership. Behavioral Economics is a discipline that combines some economics and psychology and focus on practical experiments over theoretical models and it is what I selected for me as a basic toolkit for leadership. There are plenty of book titles in this space that are more up to date than the titles I read 25-15 years ago.
• Project Management – I find it surprising that people I interact with, seasoned professionals, lack the ability to break a large project into a set of smaller tasks. Cooking is a great analogy… You can envision a finalized dish, you can break that into sup-projects (the main component, the sauce, the seasonings, etc.), then map to the ingredients you have to purchase prepare. You can synchronize the different branches of execution so that tasks complete in the right sequence. Project Management is a basic life skill, that is also critical for executing professional projects. Here is a web list of resources on Project Management.

Follow-up Action

Leadership is not a narrow skillset. It is the result of experience working with others, but it requires you to be aware of what it takes, learn models and frameworks to make the process repetitive, and requires you to develop a good personal brand and empathy with others.

Don’t skip steps and focus on the basics early. Storytelling, psychology, project management are practical and useful by themselves. Learn how to enjoy progress on those basic skills so you can become effective and later develop formal leadership capabilities.

Take the time to share this post with a mentor and have a discussion on leadership Also take the time to share with a friends who might be also developing leadership skills.

About the author

Marcio is a technology veteran both in large corporate and startups. He has built a 35-year career in Technology product development and led a handful of people in a startup environment, dozens of people in traditional companies, and hundreds of people in large Tech. Marcio provides career coaching, including preparation for successful onboarding and development in organizational leadership roles.