level – supervisor, manager, general manager, president, or CEO – leadership is challenging.
Five Fundamental Goals of Highly Effective Leaders
Let's examine those five goals:
1. Bring people together to work as a team. You guide your team, department, or group, and it's not easy leading a group of diverse people. The workplace today is more diverse than at any time in history: Greatest Generation, baby boomers, Gen X, and Gen Y. Each group has its ideas, values, and thoughts regarding what should be done and how to do it. Effective leaders work hard to build strong teams that accomplish great things. People who work together cohesively offer a competitive advantage.
2. Motivate people to perform. You can't lead without inspiring people to do great things. They must be willing to take that next step, the one that allows them to reach beyond their perceived capabilities and step out of the proverbial box. Each employee has distinct values and needs, wants and desires. Effective leaders spend time coaching people one-on-one to find out what makes them tick, which challenges confront them, and which types of motivation will spur them to perform at a higher level.
People are motivated in two ways: intrinsically and extrinsically. Extrinsic motivation involves outside factors: money, power, or position. Intrinsic motivation comes from within: the desire for pride, a passion for one's work, and the desire to do a great job.
3. Take responsibility for bottom-line results. Regardless of your organization's size or type (public or private), much of your behavior is driven by the bottom line. If you are in a leadership role, you've got to work with people to produce and achieve the results necessary to be profitable. Leaders are measured by their results, as are the people who work for them. Every organization has financial goals. If they're unmet, the consequences may be severe.
4. Make difficult decisions. It's your responsibility to hire the right people, terminate the wrong people, and call people on the carpet to take corrective measures. It's also within your purview to change the direction of your department, team, or organization as the landscape changes in your business environment.
You may also have to decide whether friends or former colleagues are doing their job. You may find yourself in the unenviable position of having to reprimand, issue warnings, and occasionally terminate staff. The people who report to you must be in the right job for their abilities. You may have the right people, but the positions they're in may not be the correct fit, so you'll need to make the necessary changes.
5. Create positive energy. Team and company success depend on having highly motivated individuals who are excited about their work. Of course, no workforce operates in a vacuum. Employees need a strong leader with a positive attitude and enthusiasm. Employees work for people (leaders), not for companies. Conversely, employees don't leave companies – they leave ineffective leaders. An employee's relationship with a manager/supervisor largely determines the length of an employee's stay. The main reason people quit is the manager's behavior. A quality leader is the key factor in attracting and retaining top talent.
There is no shortage of good employees today; however, there is a shortage of inspirational leaders and inspiring places to work. Leaders are seldom energy neutral. They either energize their employees, or they act as energy vampires, sapping workers' motivation and enthusiasm and contributing to low morale.
What's Wrong with Being Right?
Ego can serve as a powerful tool in regulating your personal and professional behavior. In Freud's psychological schematic, the ego maintains balance between our primitive emotions (the id) and our conscience (the superego). “The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions,” Freud explained in The Ego and the Id. The ego's job as referee may therefore prove difficult, as the id (think of it as your brain's inner toddler) strives for pleasure and instant gratification. Meanwhile, the superego (your brain's parent) may simultaneously demand perfectionism. These diametrical and concomitant objectives can get you into a heap of trouble if your ego fails to step in and play mediator.
At first glance, the superego's drive for perfection may sound like a positive leadership trait, but the opposite holds true. Let your bossy superego rule the roost, and you'll always find yourself frustrated. That's because perfection is unquestionably impossible to attain. Let me be clear: Any pride that you take in achieving what you perceive to be perfection is misplaced, in essence, a fantasy or delusion.
How, then, do you measure success? Instead of seeking perfection, aim for excellence. It's completely attainable with hard work, but be prepared to make your share of mistakes across a long career. While leadership requires you to be at the top of your game, you also must allow yourself the luxury of making a mistake from time to time. And to survive these career speed bumps, you must build and continually fortify the emotional resilience required to change directions and correct your course.
Zoe Learns an Important Lesson from Her Boss, Stan
At 27, Zoe was a hotshot art director for a large, multistate HMO. She had previously worked as a senior graphic designer for a well-known national advertising agency. Zoe decided to change jobs after a five-year stint at the agency so she would have the opportunity to earn more money and embark on a management career. Moving from a highly creative and informal workplace to a more rigid corporate setting was her first challenge, but she found herself settling in nicely.
She enjoyed supervising and mentoring two junior graphic artists, even though she had never received any formal management training. Thanks to her personality and excellent people skills, Zoe formed meaningful bonds with her staff and colleagues. She likened her new job to changing TV channels and graduating from Mad Men to House.
About three months into her tenure, Jack, one of Zoe's direct reports, failed to spell-check a document that Stan, the HMO's director of communications, had given him before placing the text into a brochure layout. Zoe caught the typos, pointed them out to Jack, and counseled him on how he could avoid the problem in the future.
This kind of interaction came easily to Zoe, who was known for being patient. But what her staff didn't know was that Zoe couldn't tolerate any personal mistakes, and she held herself to a higher, and unrealistic, standard. As a child, she had grown up with two college-professor parents, and scoring an A on a test was often greeted with the question, “Why didn't you get an A+?” The experience had a long-lasting effect, which continued well into Zoe's adulthood and work life.
Similarly, Zoe's prior stint at the ad agency exposed her to three partners who viewed any error as a potential loss of revenue. Mistakes amounted to the equivalent of criminal felonies that damaged the agency's credibility, and every copywriter and designer operated in a state of high alert and hypervigilance. Employees knew that presenting edgier, more eye-catching designs had the potential to offend certain clients, even though the agency's partners knew that stodgy clients required image upgrades to succeed.
In her new job, Zoe had to learn a new vocabulary and complex industry. It was easy to confuse terminology and often difficult to discern the nuances of the health care system. With perseverance, she was mastering her responsibilities and enthusiastically embracing the challenges each day presented.
When Zoe submitted her second brochure layout to Stan, she learned that one of her graphic designers had horizontally flipped a photo, and she hadn't caught it. Stan told her the doctor in the picture was reversed, which meant his lab coat and stethoscope appeared backward. Even though Stan spoke to her without a hint of anger, Zoe had turned beet red and was mortified.
After the conversation with Stan, Zoe tossed and turned in bed.
