By Dr. Ray Benedetto, DM, LFACHE, Colonel, USAF, MSC (Ret), Co-founder of GuideStar, Inc. and Co-author of It’s My Company Too! How Entangled Companies Move Beyond Employee Engagement for Remarkable Results
The last two articles focused on aligning human capital to achieve financial capital, but before you can hire top talent, you need to look within yourself to decide if you have the character traits for leading your company. What? I own this enterprise. Doesn’t that qualify me to lead it as well?
Many small to mid-size business owners believe private ownership entitles them to make decisions about the company without consulting their business partners, specifically the employees who “make it happen” each day. In today’s environment, “old” ways of leadership such as command and control, “do it my way,” or “we’ve always done it this way” simply do not work for several reasons. Peter Drucker predicted the Age of the Knowledge Worker well before it arrived, but it is here to stay. Today’s workers are much more tech savvy, independent, and knowledgeable in many ways. Building trust with those around us takes work and leadership, based on core values of trust and care, as noted in a previous article.
Building trust also requires replacing transactional leadership styles with transformational leadership. Transformational leadership teaches that the character of a leader is essential to success. Effective leadership requires the exercise of key traits such as will, intellect, courage, presence, and energy, but it requires more because the character of the leader underpins all these traits. Character is defined by the values one chooses to put into action, which is the essence of leadership, regardless of the situation.
Character trumps everything, including training. The five traits above have separated winners from losers, time and again. We study leaders to understand their decision-making, but we should scrutinize those decisions through the lens of character. Effective leaders must have strong character traits to face adversity, but we need to understand how character shows through in our actions, which either give confidence to those around us or cause distress or consternation that can lead to less than effective performance or worse, disengagement and resignations.
During leadership courses I teach, I use a clip of the movie Gettysburg (Scene 28) where the 20th Maine Volunteers, under the command of militia Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, are faced with a life-and-death situation at Little Round Top on July 2, 1863. We may not face such dire circumstances in our world, but the sustainability of your business can be threatened easily in today’s VUCA world. Jeff Daniels’ portrayal of Chamberlain shows emotionally intelligent leadership in action when the 20th Maine, having repulsed numerous Confederate attempts to take Little Round Top, were now out of ammunition and retreat was not an option. The movie shows Chamberlain using emotionally intelligent rather than coercive leadership to engage his leaders in this critical defining moment, coaching their understanding of the situation, and getting their full commitment to execute a bayonet charge down the hill, a courageous and dangerous action that literally ensured a Union victory. Wouldn’t you like similar results when facing daunting challenges?
Your people expect you to lead without being a micromanager. If you hired the right people whose personal character traits align with those of your company AND they have the technical competence to do their jobs, then your job is to coach and guide them to do the right things and to develop their capabilities to do more. Hiring the right partners to help you internally, i.e., your team members, also means you need to continue their development and never assume they have all the knowledge required to face all situations. Today’s world is too unpredictable and uncertain for that; however, if you have the right people of character on board, and they are in the right seats where they can contribute their KASH (Knowledge, Abilities, Skills, and Habits) to solving your toughest challenges each day, then you have the foundation for transformational leadership, which can have positive effects throughout your company and raise the confidence of everyone to do their best work.
Questions for the Week: In the last two weeks, when did a situation arise that caused frustration, for either me or my staff? How did I respond? What character traits did I display that I would like others to emulate? What example did I set? How did others perceive my actions? What will I do differently in the future if faced with a similar situation?