Effective Leadership Practices, Part 3

 Intermittently over the past several weeks, we have been looking at effective leadership practices as outlined by Kent M. Keith in The Case for Servant Leadership.  Key practices have been self-awareness and listening, changing the pyramid and developing your colleagues, and this week we’ll explore coaching (not controlling) and unleashing the energy and intelligence of others.

Servant leadership espoused a coaching approach to working with others long before it became popular.  The idea behind this tenet, as Keith (2008) notes, is that no one really controls anyone else.  As leaders we can motivate and inspire, we can remove barriers to self-direction, and on the negative side we can compel compliance by exerting threats or pleas, but ultimately people choose their own actions.  A leader who thinks she truly controls her team is delusional. If you’ve ever ridden a horse, you understand that the horse is much more powerful than the rider and the rider is only directing the horse because the horse chooses to be cooperative.  Leading a team is much the same. 

Displays of power and authority can get people to act, but they often produce the appearance of compliance and inspire large amounts of defiance instead.  Servant leaders coach.  They teach, they mentor, and they facilitate.  They understand that everything they do is done via relationships with those who are closer to the customer, the client, or the public that is served by the organization.  So, as Keith (2008, p. 48) states, “The issue for the servant-leader is not how to control others, but how to build strong, positive relationships with others.”  That is coaching, not controlling.

One of the ways they do that is the second effective leadership practice we will discuss today: unleashing the energy and intelligence of others.  Servant leaders remove the barriers to self-efficacy for others, allowing them to tap into their own internal motivation.  They also identify and grow the talents of their colleagues, they include their team members in decisions and major activities, like goal setting and evaluation, and they coach them along the way. 

This does not mean that they abdicate the responsibility to hold others accountable, or let a dysfunctional colleague dominate or alienate the team.  Servant leaders hold themselves responsible to the needs of their team colleagues, but they also work in service of the needs and goals of the organization.  When an individual hijacks that process through noncooperation or toxic behavior, the servant leader, like other types of leaders, takes remedial action to correct the situation, or terminates the employment if no other remedy works.  The servant leader does not allow one person’s dysfunctional choices to corrupt the development and work of others.

Through these methods – coaching and unleashing the energy and intelligence of others – the effective leader can leverage the talents and abilities of his team, fully engaging his colleagues to choose to do their best.

Cited:

Keith, K. M. (2008). The case for servant leadership. Westfield, IN:  The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership.

This Week’s Inspiration

This blog is written for the benefit of the graduate and professional students at the UGA Gwinnett Campus, and anyone else who’s interested in leadership topics.  We are located on a university campus, and it’s the time in our fall semester when inspiration, energy, and motivation are likely waning.  You’ve progressed through the multitude of duties, assignments, and tasks in the past few months and you have just a bit more to go before the academic part of your life can take a rest, if not the professional and personal. 

Leaders are called to inspire others, but they also must be inspired themselves.  So this week, I’d like to help you “fill your tank” with something positive that will help you push through this final part of the semester.  I’d like to share with you some Ted Talks that you may find will provide you with a little of that inspiration.  I recommend the talk by Steve Jobs on how to live before you die and the Shawn Anchor talk on the happy secret to better work.

Leadership Presence, Part 1: Light Up The Brain with Storytelling

Leadership presence is a critical factor for leaders and often can determine or significantly influence their success.  So what is leadership presence?  You may not know the formal definition yet but you undoubtedly have experienced it.  Presence, on its most basic level, is the ability to command attention, and leadership presence, as defined by Halpern and Lubar (2004, p. 8) as “the ability to connect authentically with the thoughts and feelings of others in order to motivate and inspire them to achieve a desired outcome.”

You’ve been in a room with someone who has presence and maybe you’ve seen them give a presentation.  Presence is that thing that makes you want to listen to them.  At this point, you might be thinking presence is a talent that you’re born with.  “How is one blog post going to make me into George Clooney or Angelina Jolie?” you ask.  It’s true that there are no magic wands here, but you can learn to develop your leadership presence skills. One of those skills is storytelling.

Imagine you are listening to two presentations.  The first presentation is about the invention of Scotch tape. And the presenter does a competent job of presenting facts, nicely summarized in bullets and arranged in beautiful PowerPoint slides.  The second presenter talks about a similar topic, the origin of the Post-It note.  This presenter also has bullets and slides but also tells you this:

It was 1968 and just past the Summer of Love, a scientist for 3M invented an adhesive that had some interesting qualities but wasn’t consistently sticky enough to work on tape. He played around with it for a while but just couldn’t make it work with any of his projects, so he shelved it.  In 1974, another 3M scientist named Art Fry had a problem at church.  He sang in the choir and his bookmarks tended to fall out of his hymnal, so when he had to sing the same songs at the church’s second service, he would fumble around because he’d lost the pages he’d previously marked.  A bookmark didn’t work but tape wouldn’t work either.  Mr. Fry needed something in between, something that would stay in place but wasn’t permanent.  He went back to the lab and applied a bit of this odd adhesive he’d heard about to little slips of paper.  He tried them out on a Sunday and…and voila!  No more lost places in the hymnal!  Hallelujah!

Which presentation would you rather listen to?  More importantly, which content would you remember? 

Our brains are hard-wired to respond to stories.  Neuroscience researchers have found that the sensory cortex of our brain lights up when we hear descriptive phrases like, “The singer had a velvet voice.”  Action descriptions – “Pablo kicked the ball” – and scent descriptions – “The delicious scent of coffee” – light up the parts of our brains associated with action and scent, respectively. 

Based on this and other studies, brain researchers now believe that our brains don’t make much of a distinction between experiencing something, like that velvet voice or that wonderful coffee, and hearing about it.  Hearing facts and figures ignites your neurons, sure, but hearing facts within a descriptive story engages many more parts of your brain, including your emotions, thus increasing the likelihood of engaging you and helping you remember what was said.

Leaders must do this every day.  Leaders have to have a vision but they must also engage others in that vision and inspire them to act.  Storytelling, then, is a critical communication skill for leaders.

Now that you know the “what” of leadership storytelling, next week we will get into the “hows” of specific tips for strengthening your storytelling ability. 

Cited:

Lubar, K. & Halpern, B.L. (2004). Presence:  What actors have that leaders need.  In Leadership Presence (p. 3).  New York: Gotham.