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When British leadership development consultant Katie Best asked executives from 120 organizations to reveal their most pressing challenges, 50 per cent named leading change, 37 per cent executing strategy and 36 per cent motivating teams.
“What I found particularly interesting was how very few people saw decision making and leading others as challenges. However, the research elsewhere repeatedly shows that leading others is one of the biggest complaints of those being led – that their leaders are not up to the job,” she noted in an email exchange after I read her book The Ten Toughest leadership Problems.
The 10 she chose to focus on aren’t ranked in terms of most important or difficult to handle. Instead, she went from those most personally derived – ones where we get in the way of ourselves – to the biggest corporate problems. You may therefore want to rank them in importance yourself as you read the list: Personal effectiveness, decision-making, influence, individual performance, engagement, teamwork, hybrid and remote working, delivering on strategy, culture and values and leading change. You might also want to ponder the managers around you and what are the toughest for them; what is the organization, generally, struggling with most?
Most on her list are perennial issues but dealing with a remote and hybrid workforce is new, primarily a product of the past five years. Her approach is to dig in and define the issue clearly, because remote and hybrid work is an umbrella phrase for a number of specific tests it creates for managers – things we took for granted that we no longer can.
She asks: Is it harder to talk – to know when somebody wants to chat with you or to check in with them? Are you under-sharing, as you stick to just the most important stuff with fewer chances to talk? Is online work leading to more distraction? Are team members finding it harder to create and innovate? Does there seem to be less trust, as is common with online connectivity compared to face-to-face? Is it harder to observe what others are doing? Is it harder to build careers, with fewer chances to network and share information? Are you finding a weakening of culture and values when you are no longer working in an office space loaded with the artifacts of culture and surrounded by people having conversations and interacting in a way that is culturally aligned?
If you are in a position to develop the organization’s policy, she reminds you that there are benefits from a remote and hybrid policy, notably autonomy and flexibility, a greater chance for deep work and the opportunity to reduce the time, money and carbon footprints. If the challenge you face is managing a remote or hybrid work force, she suggests concentrating on three key areas:
- Communication: How will people communicate with one another to ensure that fairness is being maintained, that sufficient knowledge and information are being passed around and that problems are being flagged?
- Co-ordination: How will you co-ordinate work to make sure that colleagues are aware of what others are doing so they don’t duplicate efforts or leave tasks out?
- Culture: How will you talk about the culture, bring it into being and reflect your values in the work you do? How do you keep culture front of mind?
Of the other tough leadership problems she presents, influence is the one that probably gets the least attention, perhaps because it involves – or should involve – subtleties or because the idea of wielding power can be personally unsettling.
“Establishing and using power and influence at work is always hard. And our increasingly flat hierarchies, which mean people aren’t keen on being told what to do, have made it harder,” she writes in the book.
Dealing with the issue starts, she believes, by describing it specifically in a few sentences. Who are you trying to influence – are they a junior, a peer, a senior or a client? What have you done, if anything, to try to get them to do what you want them to do and why has your approach not worked? How do you think they see you? Do they see you as someone they are prepared to be influenced by?
She highlights three common practices that can fail:
- Are you using pressure, which is creating resistance?: “When you need someone to do something for you and you are worried you are not going to get anywhere, it can be tempting to apply some pressure. However, pressure is the least successful type of influence technique and more likely to lead to situations where people resist what you are asking them to do, perhaps through annoyance or trying to retain their sense of control or because you haven’t tried to win them over,” she notes.
- Are you ignoring emotion?: Leaders have a tendency to overuse rational attempts, assuming data trump everything. But our brains react better to emotional arguments than rational ones.
- Are you worrying about being manipulative?: Some leaders shy away from warmer influence techniques such as ingratiation, personal appeals or inspirational appeals to the other person’s values from a fear of seeming manipulative. If so, you may be missing out on an effective pathway to influence others.
Sharpening your influence skills can help with the tough challenge of leading others, one of the challenges she suspects from her questionnaire leaders are less effective at than they believe.
Cannonballs
- Thirty years after he first penned a definition of strategy, former Rotman School of Management dean Roger Martin has updated it. Old version: A strategy is an integrated set of choices which positions the firm in its industry so as to create sustainable advantage relative to competition and superior financial returns.” Sharpened version: “Strategy is an integrated set of choices that compels desired customer action.”
- The notion of co-CEOs – or appointing two people to share a lower-level position in an organization – usually comes under attack as confusing and thus damaging. But Michael D. Watkins, a professor of leadership and organizational change at IMD, notes a study of 87 public companies led by co-CEOs between 1996 and 2020 found that they generated average annual shareholder returns of 9.5 per cent while the duo was in charge, better than the 6.9 per cent average for each firm’s relevant index.
- Renee Sieber, associate professor in geography at McGill University, describes the current AI era as “a hammer in search of a nail.”
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.