The 5 Levels of Leadership: Proven Steps to Maximize Your Potential (16 page)

Baha’i: “And if thine eyes be turned towards justice, choose thou for thy neighbour that which thou choosest for thyself.”
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Jainism: “A man should wander about treating all creatures as he himself would be treated.”
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Yoruba Proverb (Nigeria):“One going to take a pointed stick to pinch a baby bird should first try it on himself to feel how it hurts.”
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It is clear that the golden rule cuts across cultural and religious boundaries and is embraced by people from nearly every part of the world. And what does practicing the golden rule in leadership do? It enables everyone to feel respected. That changes the entire environment of a department or an organization. When leaders change from driving people in a positional environment to respecting people
in a permissional environment, their people go from feeling like a stake to feeling like a stakeholder.

For many years I have enjoyed the friendship of the Cathy family, the leaders of Chick-fil-A. One day when I was having dinner with Truett Cathy, the company’s founder, he said, “Do you know how I identify someone who needs encouragement? If the person is breathing they need a pat on the back!”

I have yet to meet a person who doesn’t enjoy and benefit from encouragement. No one is too successful, old, experienced, or educated to appreciate positive praise and encouragement from another person. A great example of this can be found in the lives of two talented authors and teachers: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. The friends, both professors at Oxford, often met to share with each other the fiction they were writing. When Tolkien was writing
The Lord of the Rings
, he became discouraged. Lewis continually encouraged his friend to keep writing. “Tollers, where’s the next chapter? You can’t give up now,” Lewis would chide. In later years, Tolkien acknowledged how much of a difference Lewis’s positive input had made: “The unspeakable debt I owe him cannot be fathomed,” wrote Tolkien. “For long, he was my only audience.”

As a leader, you have great power to lift people up. Mother Teresa said, “Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are endless.” I’m sure Lewis’s encouraging words echoed in Tolkien’s ears as he labored to write his fantasy masterpiece. As a leader, you can have a similarly positive impact on others. People enjoy affirmation from a peer. But they really value it from their leader. The
words “I’m glad you work with me; you add incredible value to the team” mean a lot coming from someone who has the best interest of the team, department, or organization at heart.

If you want people to be positive and to always be glad when they see you coming, encourage them. If you become the chief encourager of the people on your team, they will work hard and strive to meet your positive expectations.

Many people get the wrong idea about the concept of permissional leadership when they become acquainted with it. Some think that succeeding on the Permission level of leadership means treating the people on their team like family. That is almost always a mistake. People don’t deal realistically with their family. I don’t. I have a commitment level with them that is deeper than with others. Regardless of what they do, I am committed to giving them unconditional love. They have privileges that I extend to no other people. And compromise is a constant. (Anyone who says they don’t believe in compromise has never been married—or stayed married.) What makes a family great isn’t what makes a team great. Families value community over contribution. Businesses value contribution over community. The best teams strike a balance.

Others think being a permissional leader means giving team members permission to do whatever they want. That idea is also wrong. Just because you care about people doesn’t mean you let them work without responsibility or accountability. If you care about people, treat them with respect, and build positive relationships with them, you actually have more numerous opportunities to speak candidly and have hard conversations with them that will help them to grow and perform better.

Every person has problems and makes mistakes in the workplace.
Every person needs to improve and needs someone to come alongside them to help them improve. As a leader, it is your responsibility and your privilege to be the person who helps them get better. That often begins with a candid conversation. But before you have it, it helps to ask yourself what the nature of the problem might be. My friend Sam Chand says that when he is having difficulty with a person he asks himself one simple question, “Is this person a
can’t
or a
won’t
?
Can’t
is about abilities. We can help these kinds of people in most cases—not in all cases, but in most. But
won’t
is about attitude. If the issue is attitude, the time to let that person know there is a problem is now, because here is the deal: we hire people for what they know and fire them for who they are.”

I believe that people can change their attitudes and can improve their abilities. And because I do, I talk to them about where they’re coming up short. If you’re a leader and you want to help people, you need to be willing to have those tough conversations. So how does a leader handle being relational while still trying to move people forward? By balancing care and candor. Care without candor creates dysfunctional relationships. Candor without care creates distant relationships. But care balanced with candor creates developing relationships.

Allow me to help you understand how care and candor work together to help a leader succeed on Level 2:

To lead successfully on Levels 2 and higher, it is important for you to value people. That is foundational to solid relationships. Caring for others demonstrates that you value them. However, if you want to help them get better, you have to be honest about where they need to
improve. That shows that you value the person’s potential. That requires candor.

One of the secrets of being candid is to think, speak, and act in terms of who the person has the potential to become and to think about how you can help them to reach it. Proverbs says,

If you’re candid with others but with their benefit in mind, it doesn’t have to be harmful. It can be similar to the work of a surgeon. It may hurt, but it is meant to help and it shouldn’t harm. As a leader, you must be willing and able to do that. If not, you won’t be able to help your people grow and change.

The things that usually help to establish a relationship are common ground and care. But those things usually aren’t enough to make a relationship grow. To expand a relationship, candor and open communication are required.

Most leaders I talk to have a difficult conversation that they know they need to have but are avoiding. Usually they are reluctant for one of two reasons: either they don’t like confrontation, or they fear that they will hurt the person they need to talk to. But if a leader can balance care and candor, it will actually deepen and strengthen the relationship.

Let me give you an example. Sheryl came to work for me because she was a real go-getter with a lot of potential. For six months, I watched her work, and what I discovered was that she was great at the hard side of leadership. She was energetic. She was organized. She was a good planner. And she always got things done. But she totally
neglected the soft side of leadership—the relational part. She wasn’t winning over anyone she was leading. As a result, she wasn’t gaining influence, which meant that her leadership was going to be very limited.

I scheduled a meeting with her so that we could have a candid conversation about her leadership style. I let her know how much I respected her ability and how much I cared about her as a person. But I also let her know where she was falling short and how that would limit her in her ability to lead people. I also offered to coach her on the relational side. To her credit, she accepted my criticism and took my help.

For the next couple of years, I met with her regularly, critiqued her interaction with others, gave her reading assignments, and asked her to do things that would stretch her. She blossomed as a leader and began to win people on Level 2. And that freed her to keep growing. It wasn’t long before she worked her way up to Level 4 with many people in the organization.

Not everyone responds well to candid conversations. Let’s face it: honesty can hurt. Some people shut down when you criticize them. Others leave and work somewhere else. However, if you have candid conversations with someone and that person hangs in there and grows, she will make herself a candidate for the climb up to Level 3 and beyond, just as Sheryl did.

Solid relationships are defined by how people care about one another. But just because people care about one another doesn’t mean that they are going anywhere together. Getting the team moving together to accomplish a goal is the responsibility of the leader, and that often requires candor. My friend, Colin Sewell, owner of several auto dealerships, said to me, “Leaders have to make the best decisions
for the largest group of people. Therefore, leaders give up the right to cater to an individual if it hurts the team or the organization.”

Getting results always matters, and good leaders never lose track of that. One night at a basketball banquet the president of a junior college was congratulating the coach and the team profusely. The beaming coach asked the president, “Would you still like me as much if we didn’t win?”

“I’d like you as much,” the president replied. “I’d just miss having you around.”

Retired army general and former secretary of state Colin Powell noted, “Good leadership involves responsibility to the welfare of the group, which means that some people will get angry at your actions and decisions. It’s inevitable—if you’re honorable.” If you want to lead people well, you need to be willing to direct them candidly.

The bottom line, which has already become very clear, is that good leaders must embrace both care and candor. You can’t ignore either. So to help you keep the balance between the two, I’ve created a caring candor checklist for working with people. Before having a candid conversation, make sure that you can answer yes to the following questions:

• Have I invested enough in the relationship to be candid with them?
  
• Do I truly value them as people?
  
• Am I sure this is their issue and not mine?
  
• Am I sure I’m not speaking up because I feel threatened?
  
• Is the issue more important than the relationship?
  
• Does this conversation clearly serve their interests and not just mine?
  
• Am I willing to invest time and energy to help them change?
  
• Am I willing to show them how to do something, not just say what’s wrong?
  
• Am I willing and able to set clear, specific expectations?
  

If you can answer yes to all of these questions, then your motives are probably right and you have a good chance of being able to communicate effectively.

As a young leader, I found it very difficult to have candid conversations with people. I often postponed those difficult talks, hoping that an issue would go away. Seldom did that happen. Maybe you relate to that. If so, you’ll be glad to hear that you’re normal. However, you need to know that candid conversations are a leader’s responsibility and must be done—but in the right way with the right attitude. When an employee is hired to get a certain job done and doesn’t, that hurts the team and the organization. And then it’s time for the leader to take action. That can be very hard; but in the long term, it’s best not only for the organization but also for the person who needs to hear what’s not going right.

The next time you find yourself in a place where you need to have a candid conversation, just remember this:

• Do it quickly—shovel the pile while it’s small.
  
• Do it calmly, never in anger—use the caring candor checklist.
  
• Do it privately—you want to help the person, not embarrass him or her.
  
• Do it thoughtfully, in a way that minimizes embarrassment or intimidation.
  

If your goal is to help the individual, improve the team, and fulfill the vision of the organization, then this is the path you should follow as a leader.

As you work with people and have candid conversations, allow me to remind you of one more thing: candidness is a two-way street. If you want to be an effective leader and earn your way onto Level 2, you must allow the people you work with to be candid with you. You must solicit feedback. And you must be mature and secure enough to take in people’s criticism without defensiveness and learn from it. Leadership expert Warren Bennis observed, “Effective leaders reward dissent, as well as encourage it. They understand that whatever momentary discomfort they experience as a result of being told from time to time that they are wrong is more than offset by the fact that ‘reflective back talk’ increases a leader’s ability to make good decisions.”
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Caring for people, making good decisions for everyone involved, and building solid relationships is what Level 2 is all about. This is Permission at its best.