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8 SIGNS YOU'RE GOING TO FAIL AS A LEADER
Are you aware of the things you do that turn your people off? Do you know how and when you’re demotivating them? For that matter, do you know what most motivates members of your team, and is most likely to encourage them to go the extra mile? How your employees answer these questions will determine whether you succeed or fail as a leader.
For some time now, I’ve been searching for the secret sauce that enables people to be better leaders. And I believe I have the answer.
I’ve interviewed more than a hundred CEOs, polled more than 3000 managers, and conducted research among 6000 employees to try to find the management skills and behaviours that truly make a difference.
Why? Because I believe that your leadership skills really do matter. In today’s hugely competitive market, you have to achieve extraordinary results to shine.
Extraordinary results come from extraordinarily motivated people and highly engaged teams.
Where you find an extraordinary team, you find an inspiring leader.
Inspiring leadership can make a huge difference to the performance of a team or a company. This is why some company valuations can vary by up to 35% based on perceptions of the quality of management. That’s a huge intangible asset of enormous worth – and great leaders are the ultimate advantage for any organisation.
I’ve been off-line for months now, preparing for the launch of my new book, “People with Purpose“, which has just been published by Kogan Page. It is already at number 12 on the business charts at WH Smith stores in stations and airports all over the world, and is available at all online bookstores.
This book is about how great leaders use purpose to power super performance. It is not only about purpose, or the importance of purpose, it is also about the wider concept of what it takes to give people a sense of purpose.
It shows how leaders create value when they align purpose with culture and stretching goals, and it explains why a sense of purpose is derived from the combination of values, purpose and goals.
If you have to lead, then the research in this book is for you. It is for leaders of large businesses, divisions of those businesses, and small teams in those businesses. It is for people who aspire to be leaders in any organization, big or small. It is for entrepreneurs who are setting out in business, for people leading teams in the public sector, and leaders in the world of charity.
People with Purpose brings together a wide range of compelling research into how having a clearly defined purpose as part of business strategy is a vital element in business success, longevity and inspired teams. More than 30 case studies are explored from exclusive interviews with leaders from a range of organizations, including Odeon and UCI Cinemas, Healthcare at Home, Yodel, Monarch Airlines, Moss Bros and Virgin Atlantic.
These are CEOs who have used purpose to transform performance, motivate their people, develop organizational resilience and deliver results – often from the very edge of disaster.
People with Purpose also looks at the work of neuroscientists, brings together the evidence from around the world that proves purpose powers performance, and shows why purpose matters more in a digitally connected and transparent world.
At the heart of the book is new research by global online polling company YouGov, which identifies the most important management behaviours that enable high-performance.
(High performance comes from people and teams who are not only engaged in their work, but who are willing to go the extra mile. They are so inspired that they regularly and willingly give the discretionary effort that delivers extraordinary results.)
This is what YouGov was searching for when they polled 1880 managers and 2200 employees in research I especially commissioned for the book – the most important things that managers do that encourage extra commitment and engagement from staff.
From their research, these are the top eight things you might be doing to discourage and demotivate your staff.
1.You fail to bring the outside in.
Employees want to know how what they do makes a difference to the people they serve. The best leaders are either regularly bringing customers in to talk with their people, or they are constantly communicating about customer experiences and expectations.
2.You don’t show that you understand employee perspectives.
Many managers fail to acknowledge how people are feeling, because they feel that if they do so, they validate those feelings and will be compelled to reverse decisions that may not be liked. Empathising does not mean agreeing, and empathy is everything. It is amazing how people feel better when you say you understand them, even if you don’t agree or have reasons for making decisions that might not be popular.
3.You show little commitment to the organisation’s purpose.
Employees want to feel that they are working to a purpose that is more than just simply about making a profit. They want to feel they are making a difference in the world. Managers who don’t reinforce this, disconnect them from a purpose that otherwise might be hugely inspiring.
4.You fail to define and review goals that align with the organisation’s purpose.
One of the most important things a manager can do is show employees how what they are doing contributes to the organisation’s purpose. Setting goals that clearly align with the corporate goals is vital for employees to feel connected and part of something that makes them proud. (By the way, the more often those goals are reviewed, the higher the performance.)
5.You never listen. (Or people think you don’t.)
Managers who are good listeners are often the most inspiring leaders. People feel much more respected and valued when they are given a damn good listening to. When leaders are good listeners they pick up great ideas from their staff and respond to those ideas, they welcome bad news in order to take corrective action, and they will guide and steer opinions because they are better informed about how people are feeling.
6.You fail to live the values of the organisation consistently.
Your culture is one of your most important assets. The values that define how you behave are crucial to create a sense of belonging, predictability, and freedom for your staff. People who know the values of the organisation and who know the purpose or able to make decisions without the boss being there, but leaders who are inconsistent about the values sew confusion and doubt and inefficiency into the fabric of their teams.
7.You seem to be dishonest and insincere to your staff.
Of course you are honest, and of course you are sincere. In fact, 94% of the managers we surveyed said they were. The only problem is that any two thirds of staff believe their managers are honest, with a third actively disagreeing. Doing what you say you will do, living the values, doing what you expect others to do – these all go to how employees perceive you and you may unwittingly be failing in some or all of these areas.
8.You don’t make your employees feel important and appreciated.
How you make people feel will determine your success. All the neuroscience shows that people who are made to feel worthy, who are respected, cared for and nurtured, are far more likely to be super performers, to go the extra mile and to be loyal and committed employees. Managers who inadvertently disrespect their staff, or who deliberately or accidentally make them feel threatened or unworthy, quickly demotivate their staff and lose the performance edge so crucial to success. In the YouGov research, 93% of managers said that they cared about the people they lead. Only 50% of employees agreed. A lot of bosses are failing in this regard. Are you one of them?
https://www.amazon.co.uk/People-Purpose-Leaders-Thriving-Organizations/dp/0749476958/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1489484395&sr=8-1&keywords=people+with+purpose
https://theleadershipcommunication.com/
https://www.koganpage.com/author/kevin-murray
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Five things inspirational leaders do
At leadership conferences, I often see the output of brainstorming sessions where attendees have been asked to name leaders they find the most inspiring. They are asked to put up photographs of these leaders. As I walk around the room, I see the faces of former Presidents John F Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, as well as other many other prominent political and religious leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa.
Who would you put up? The same people?
THE WRONG MODELS
These leaders were more than inspiring. They were awe-inspiring. Most commanded a world stage and were commanding orators. But if this is the concept we have in our minds when we think of being inspiring leaders ourselves, it is entirely the wrong concept on which to model our own leadership style.
If I asked you who was most inspiring boss in your career, you’d probably say it was a person who believed in you, who stretched you, who coached you and who helped you achieve more than you thought you could. They made you feel inspired.
There is a huge difference between being seen as inspiring and making others feel inspired.
Inspiring leadership communication is not about great oratory or great charisma: rather, it is about getting others to believe in your cause. It is about getting your employees to achieve more than they thought was possible.
It’s all about them, not you.
The simple truth is this: how well you perform as a leader will depend on how well you communicate. You can have the best plan, the best resources and best people, but if you don’t communicate well, you won’t persuade anyone to your cause, and you will fail.
Yet any leader at any level in an organisation can easily derive competitive advantage by learning how to be more inspiring. It is much easier than you might think.
Having interviewed dozens of the UK’s top leaders on what it means to be inspiring, and backed it up with research on 4,000 workers. I believe there are five things the most inspiring leaders do.
1. CONVEY YOUR PASSION
Inspirational leaders are transparently passionate, and possess a visible moral compass. Authenticity is crucial. Followers will not commit if they do not trust you or believe that you have integrity. So, even if you see a highly introverted individual, it’s vital that you learn to speak with more passion – talk about your values, stand up more often and outline your beliefs. The ability to consistently display passion and commitment is the single most important behaviour of effective leaders.
2. CREATE A SHARED VISION AND VALUES
Too often, leaders use financial goals to motivate people, but employees say they don’t get out of bed in the morning to achieve financial objectives. Numbers don’t drive people, but people drive the numbers. They want to be inspired by a sense of doing something important, something that makes a difference to society and the world. They want a purpose that makes them proud. On top of that, the best executives focus on creating shared values. When leaders speak about a purpose that creates shared value, it is far more motivating than money, especially when coupled with a set of values that your employees know to be true. In this world of radical transparency, vales have assumed a far greater importance. They define how people in an organisation behave in pursuit of their objectives, and these actions define a business to the outside world.
3. NEVER STOP MOVING FORWARD
The best leaders I spoke to were addicted to progress, with a crystal clear intent. They knew precisely where they wanted to be in a given timescale, even if they did not know exactly how to get there. They were never satisfied with the status quo, and their restlessness was a tangible force. Every question they asked had to do with how people were progressing to their goals, and they kept those goals under constant review, painting a vivid picture of success. They made sure everyone knew how they were doing and what was expected of them, regularly.
4. STAY CUSTOMER – FOCUSED
Leaders have to live outside of their organisations, constantly bringing in stories of success and failure to keep everyone fixed on what need to improve. Successful leaders know that relationships are the engines of success. They set up ‘quivering antennae.’ As one executive described it to me – a radar system that keeps you in touch with the outside world.
One effective strategy is to bring customers into the building to talk to people within the organisation. Leaders tell me that such sessions were often far more inspiring than talks by the managers.
5. ENGAGE WITH EMPLOYEES
Increasing numbers of organisations are now measuring level of employee engagement, and using this as a strategic tool to find ways to keep people motivated and committed to the cause. Companies with high levels of engagement outperform their competitors by some margin,
Engagement is achieved through conversations – structured, potent conversations that allow employees to fully understand the big objectives, and work out with their leaders what they have to do to achieve them. Too often, these discussions are neglected, and middle managers are neither trained for nor measured on their ability to hold these critical conversations.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/five-things-inspirational-leaders-do-kevin-murray?trk=mp-reader-card
What followers want from leaders
In the past few weeks I have been privileged to talk with large groups of leaders about my research on how to be inspiring. It seems, no matter where I go, that there is always huge interest in the subject of leadership – and what it takes to be engage and motivate employees.
Questions I received from members of the audience during and after my session had to do with what followers need and want from their leaders.
Leadership – wherever it is – does not happen in a vacuum. Leaders operate in an ecosystem of interdependent people in an environment that they all inhabit together, and depend on. Leaders have followers. They have advisers. They have peers. They have competitors. They have customers. They have shareholders. They have regulators. Depending on where they are in the organisation chart, they might even have bosses. And leaders have to communicate with all of these audiences.
For any leader, though, the most important audience is followers. Nothing gets done without inspired and motivated followers. Customers won’t be satisfied, regulators will be alarmed, competitors will be gleeful and advisers will have a field day, if followers don’t perform.
This was a key message from the 120 interviews I did with the Chairmen and CEO’s of a wide variety of organisations. If you are a leader, your most important asset is motivated people.
So, if followers are the most important audience, then what do followers want from their leaders?
All my research, and my experience of working in companies for three decades, tells me that, above all, what followers want in a leader is someone they can believe in.
Followers respond best to leaders who have a strong strategic focus, with a clear vision of where the business should be going, who speaks plainly and truthfully and, when necessary, courageously and with principles. They especially like leaders who stand up for them and defend them to the hilt.
For my next book, I recently commissioned research from YouGov, the online research agency, among 4,000 managers and employees in the UK. I wanted to find out which management behaviours were deemed to be most important, by both managers and employees.
The YOUGOV survey highlighted that the single most important attribute in a manager was making employees feel important and appreciated.
66% of managers and 65% of employees regarded this as the top attribute, by some way ahead of all other attributes.
If that is the most important attribute, how do leaders perform on the criteria of respecting employees?
how do leaders perform against on respecting employees? In our survey, 73% of managers felt they made their employees feel respected at work. (A curious four percent admitted they did little to respect their employees.) However, only 40% of employees said their bosses regularly made them feel respected.
Ouch. That’s 60% of employees feeling undervalued and under-appreciated, a lot of the time.
What effect would greater feelings of respect have on employee willingness to give discretionary effort? The YOUGOV research shows that if managers could move their performance here from poor to good (not outstanding, just, just good) the payback would be a 36% jump in discretionary effort.
The research is very revealing on the subject of which management behaviours get the best results from employees, and I will reveal more fully these results in my new book, due out at the end of this year.
In the meantime, here is the list of the top 8 management attributes, in ranking order.
1.Making employees feel important and appreciated.
2.Being honest and sincere.
3.Demonstrating consistent principles.
4.Listening carefully.
5.Defining goals and reviewing them regularly.
6.Being committed to a purpose wider than profit.
7.Understanding employee perspectives.
8.Communicating customer expectations/experiences.
So, leaders with a strong set of values built on honesty and openness and respect for other people are the most inspirational of all. They are predictable, and they are human.
Followers want leaders to be accessible, with genuine humility and even, occasionally, vulnerability.
They want someone who listens to them and respects their views, someone who gives them energy and makes them feel involved and even electrified; they want someone whose passion and drive make it fun to work with them; they want to be trusted and in turn, to trust their leader.
They want to be appreciated and to have their successes celebrated; and they want to feel valued, as much as they need to value their colleagues and the company for which they work. They want to have fun, and enjoy what they do, and they want to believe that what they do makes a difference.
Followers want leaders to make them feel inspired.
And that’s the bottom line.
Great leaders know that they must inject emotion into their communications or else they will be unable to make followers feel anything. The language of business is numbers, but for many that can be very boring. Action and commitment follow only when people feel uplifted and enabled and clear about what they are supposed to achieve.
All too often I have seen leaders insist on staying in the world of rational argument, rooting their calls to action in the need to deliver the numbers.
To be a great leader, you have to learn to communicate with passion, because passion begets action.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-followers-want-from-leaders-kevin-murray?trk=prof-post
