Consultancy Matters

What are the defining attributes of great leaders? That's the age-old question thought leaders and scholars galore have been attempting to answer in mountains of books and literature. 

While great leadership, to an extent, can be personal and subjective to the follower, there are universal principles you can't argue with (but you can try). Speaking of those thought leaders and scholars, here are six traits that keep surfacing over and over again in the leadership literature and best-sellers.

1. They challenge their own assumptions.

Great leaders may be smart and know a lot, but they are humble enough to recognize there are smarter people in the room that they can learn from. They don't restrict themselves from opinions and input outside of their own. They surround themselves with diverse perspectives to help them answer questions like, "How do I know my decision is the right one?" or "Is there a better course of action here?"

Most companies have articulated their purpose — the reason they exist. But very few have made that purpose a reality for their organizations.

Consider Nokia. Before the iPhone was introduced, in 2007, Nokia was the dominant mobile phone maker with a clearly stated purpose — “Connecting people” — and an aggressive strategy for sustaining market dominance. Seeking to extend its technological edge (particularly in miniaturization), it acquired more than 100 startup companies while pursuing a vast portfolio of research and product development projects. In 2006 alone, Nokia introduced 39 new mobile-device models. Few imagined that this juggernaut, brandishing vast resources with such steely determination, could be quickly brought down.

In retrospect, it seems inevitable. Nokia was so immersed in executing its strategy that it lost sight of its purpose. When Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone as “a leapfrog product that is way smarter than any mobile device has ever been, and super-easy to use,” Apple started “connecting people” at astounding new levels. Nokia’s purpose had been co-opted, making its myriad strengths irrelevant. The once-dominant Nokia soon lost much of its market cap and was eventually acquired by Microsoft.

Companies want to be profitable and maximize their performance and impact both in the world and within their industry.

With that said, accomplishing those feats starts with cultivating a culture to allow those things to happen which starts with a priority on employee well-being.

Culture is important -- it affects engagement, mindset, reputation, recruitment of talent, and well being. When looking to cultivate a healthy and high performing culture, start by emphasizing these six points:

Defined hierarchy. Commanding leadership. These corporate ligaments secure firms in the face of threats and unify them against competition. Few beliefs are more widely held in business.

The intuition, though, is wrong. “When you look at real organizations, having a clear hierarchy within your firm actually makes people turn on each other when they face an outside threat,” says Lindred Greer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Effective teamwork against threats requires not hierarchy, but egalitarianism; not centralized power, but a culture in which all voices count.

Along with Lisanne van Bunderen of the University of Amsterdam and Daan Van Knippenberg of Drexel University, the research team teased out this finding through two complementary studies. In the first study, an experiment, teams of three students developed and pitched a consultancy project to a prospective client. Some of these teams were non-hierarchical, while members of other teams arbitrarily received titles: senior consultant, consultant, junior consultant. Likewise, some teams faced no rivals, while others were told they were competing with a rival firm for clients. The researchers found that the subset of hierarchical teams facing competition with rival firms struggled with infighting while the egalitarian teams cooperated on their work.

Is it possible to be a high-standards, results-driven leader while at the same time building an engaged, fun-to-work-with team? Many people would contend that doing either of these things well makes it almost impossible to succeed at the other. And yet our examination of 360-degree assessment data from more than 60,000 leaders showed us that leaders who were rated in the top quartile of both skills ranked in the 91st percentile of all leaders. It seems that not only is it possible to do both things well, but the best leaders are the very ones who manage to do both.

But there aren’t very many of them — specifically, we isolated leaders who ranked in the top quartile on both driving for results and people skills.

Running a business is an inherently emotional experience. Even the most stoic leaders are bound to find themselves becoming invested not only in outcomes, but in people and processes as well.

While emotional leadership is often regarded as a liability, lack of personal investment can also bring about negative outcomes.

I’ve learned that the best leaders are those who can recognize emotionally-charged situations, rise above the passions of the movement, and maintain a level head. Good leaders are quick to listen and slow to anger.

We call ourselves “human beings,” but I think that title is aspirational: one we are meant to earn. Being human should mean we are capable of higher-level thought and can choose rationally how we respond to external events as well as to internal thoughts and emotions. Now, I don’t know about you, but all I need is to be cut off in traffic or have my husband use the wrong tone of voice to witness my own inability to do this well.

Perhaps the most surprising element in business today is that we often behave in ways that are extremely ineffective and quite beneath us. Even those among us who are highly educated senior-level professionals fall into these traps. 

Whether you're managing an intern or running an entire business, your employees' success (and your own skin) depends on your leadership.

Thankfully, the solution for motivating your team and squashing any issues is right at the tip of your tongue. It all starts with communication -- the skill experts point to as the make-or-break factor for successful leadership.

Here are eight things that exceptional bosses tell their employees daily. Start using these daily (or begin looking for a boss who does), and watch your success skyrocket:

To make a good decision, you need to have a sense of two things: how different choices change the likelihood of different outcomes and how desirable each of those outcomes is. In other words, as Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb have written, decision making requires both prediction and judgment.

But how do you get better at either? We’ve published volumes on this subject —here are a few of my favorites — but there are three rules that stand out. Following them will improve your ability to predict the effects of your choices and assess their desirability.

Rule #1: Be less certain.

Nobel-prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman has said that overconfidence is the bias he’d eliminate first if he had a magic wand. It’s ubiquitous, particularly among men, the wealthy, and even experts. Overconfidence is not a universal phenomenon — it depends on factors including culture and personality — but the chances are good that you’re more confident about each step of the decision-making process than you ought to be.

So, the first rule of decision making is to just be less certain — about everything. Think choice A will lead to outcome B? It’s probably a bit less likely than you believe. Think outcome B is preferable to outcome C? You’re probably too confident about that as well.

Once you accept that you’re overconfident, you can revisit the logic of your decision. What else would you think about if you were less sure that A would cause B, or that B is preferable to C? Have you prepared for a dramatically different outcome than your expected one?

You can also practice aligning your level of your confidence to the chance that you’re correct. Try out quizzes like this one or this one. You’ll realize that while it’s not possible to always be right, it’s totally possible to become less overconfident.

Most companies have articulated their purpose — the reason they exist. But very few have made that purpose a reality for their organizations.

Consider Nokia. Before the iPhone was introduced, in 2007, Nokia was the dominant mobile phone maker with a clearly stated purpose — “Connecting people” — and an aggressive strategy for sustaining market dominance. Seeking to extend its technological edge (particularly in miniaturization), it acquired more than 100 startup companies while pursuing a vast portfolio of research and product development projects. In 2006 alone, Nokia introduced 39 new mobile-device models. Few imagined that this juggernaut, brandishing vast resources with such steely determination, could be quickly brought down.

In retrospect, it seems inevitable. Nokia was so immersed in executing its strategy that it lost sight of its purpose. When Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone as “a leapfrog product that is way smarter than any mobile device has ever been, and super-easy to use,” Apple started “connecting people” at astounding new levels. Nokia’s purpose had been co-opted, making its myriad strengths irrelevant. The once-dominant Nokia soon lost much of its market cap and was eventually acquired by Microsoft.

Being more productive is about working smarter, not harder, and making the most of each day.

While this is no easy feat, getting more done in less time is a much more attainable goal if you’re not sabotaging yourself with bad habits.

Following are 16 things you should stop doing right now to become more productive.

As entrepreneurs, we often work late into the night, only to roll out of bed the next morning, picking up where we left off. One day bleeds into the next, making it seem as if we're always doing, doing, doing and searching for new and novel ways to do more.

The truth is, your desire to do more and get more done will lead you not toward greater productivity, but toward burnout, if you don't take time each day to check in with yourself, and set your intention for how you want your day to proceed.

Abraham Lincoln is credited with saying, "If I had six hours to cut down a tree, I'd spend the first four sharpening the axe." There is no evidence to suggest that Lincoln actually said this, but the point is not lost on us. How we prepare to do the task before us determines our success.

Do you remember that executive who was such a natural? She never seemed stressed, always knew the right thing to say, delivered good results consistently. A born leader, right? Just had the right genes for leadership from the start.

Remember that other boss you had? He was rubbish. Not much point trying to fix him. He just wasn’t a leader.

That’s how it looked. But it wasn’t true.

My company’s research from multiple fields, as diverse as neuroplasticity (the ability of the brain to form and reorganise synaptic connections, especially in response to learning experience or following injury) and musicology, shows that skills are not as innate as we naturally believe.

And that applies to leadership just as much as any other capability.

The contemporary business world lauds those who are seen as creative. Innovators such as Elon Musk and Jony Ive have become household names. Yet, for many of us, despite our best efforts to be recognized as creative thinkers, our suggestions in meetings are ignored and our pitches to bosses get rebuffed.

If your colleagues have already formed an opinion of you as technically competent but a little staid, it’s going to take a lot to change their minds and get them to listen — a situation that’s especially true for women, who, research suggests, are often unfairly viewed as less creative than men.