People constantly ask us, “How do you define leadership?” Although we have our definition, before responding we usually turn the question back to the audience and ask, “What do you think is the simplest answer to that question? What's the easiest way to know if someone is a leader or not?”1
Invariably, the answer we get is some version of this: “They have followers.” That's the aha moment. It is followers who define whether someone is a leader. There can't be any leaders if there aren't any followers. If you are marching forward toward a future destination and you turn around and notice that no one is there, then you're just out for a stroll. Leadership is fundamentally a relationship between those who aspire to lead and those who would choose to follow, and if no one is following you, then there's no relationship there. There's nothing that connects what you see to what they want. This is true regardless of whether that relationship is one to one or one to many.
Don't get hung up about being the leader. Even though Alan Daddow, at that time, was the person in charge at Elders Pastoral in Western Australia, he understood that his “responsibility was doing whatever I could to maximize the team's effectiveness.” Repeatedly, upon reflecting on their personal-best leadership experiences, people appreciated that it “wasn't about me; it was about us.” As Sunil Menon, research and development (R&D) director with Avaya, pointed out, “Leaders know that they need partners to make extraordinary things happen. They invest actively and heavily in building trustworthy relationships.” Like Alan and Sunil, you need to appreciate that success can be achieved only if you make everyone else in the organization successful at doing what they need to accomplish. People won't follow you for very long, if at all, if your message is “I want you to help me become successful.” They will follow you when your message is “I am here to help us all be successful in serving a common cause.”
Appreciating that leadership doesn't happen without having followers is humbling. It's a reminder that leadership is not all about you, the leader. It's not only about your vision or about your values. Leadership is about shared vision and values. It's about getting everyone aligned with a common purpose, a common cause.
The impact of this reciprocal relationship is quite profound. Would it surprise you to know that when people don't feel valued and appreciated by their manager or supervisor, they are more than four times more likely to look for another job compared with those who report strong relationships with their managers? Alternatively, does it surprise you to know that most managers fail in their careers because of poor relationships with their direct reports?2
Of course, no relationship can begin until people start talking and sharing information with one another; and someone has to go first in this process. You should be the one to go first in sharing yourself with others because that helps build trust. But nothing extraordinary happens if no one is willing to go second or third and so on.
In his famous speech during the August 28, 1963, Great March on Washington, Martin Luther King Jr. exclaimed, “I have a dream.” This dream involved images of the future: “On the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.” “One day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” “When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands . . .”
He also said, “This is our hope,” and exclaimed that the dream would not be realized unless “We are willing to work together, we are willing to struggle together, to go to jail together.”3 Those gathered at the Lincoln Memorial that day cheered Dr. King's message not merely because he was a dynamic speaker. They cheered and applauded because they could relate to the dream as their own. It was their hopes and aspirations he was speaking about, not just his own. They could see what he saw because he could see what they imagined.
Although you need to be clear about your vision and values, you must also be attentive to those around you. If you can't find alignment between what you care about and what others care about, then you won't find a common purpose or achieve much success. Almost no one likes being told, “Here is where we're going, so get on board with it”—no matter how dressed up it is in all kinds of fine and fancy language. They want you to be able to hear what they have to say, and they want to see themselves in the picture that you are painting. “What's in it for me?” is a fair and reasonable question.
This means that to become the best leader you can be, you have to know deep down what others want and need. You have to understand their hopes, their dreams, their needs, and their interests. You have to know your constituents, and you have to relate to them in ways they will find engaging.
The kind of communication needed to enlist others in a common purpose requires understanding people at a much deeper level than you may normally find comfortable. It requires understanding others' strongest yearnings and their deepest fears. It requires a profound awareness of their joys and their sorrows. It requires experiencing life as they experience it.
Being able to do this is not magic, nor is it rocket science. It's all about listening very, very carefully to what other people want. Nevertheless, what do you do if people can't articulate what it is that they want? What if people don't know what they need? That's even more reason to be a stellar listener. Listening is not just about the words; it's about paying attention. It's about what is unspoken. It's about reading between the lines. It's about noting what makes them smile, what gets them angry, how they spend their time (and not just at work), and so on. However, from a leadership perspective, what you can be sure of is that everyone wants a tomorrow that is better than today. They don't necessarily all want the same thing, but they all want it to be an improvement.
We can't emphasize this enough: Leadership is a relationship. Still, many people believe that you shouldn't get too close to other people in an organizational context because this will not only cloud your judgment about them but also interfere with your ability to make hard and challenging (or unpopular) decisions that affect them.
Sergey Nikiforov, now vice president and chief evangelist at enterprise software solutions company GOAPPO, earlier in his career told us that he “blindly followed this sort of advice for a few years without giving it too much thought.” One day, however, he decided to find out what impact “normal human contact” with people in his workplace would have. Therefore, he sent a note out to the technical staff and invited them to have dinner together at a local restaurant if their schedule permitted it. He came to the restaurant a little early and waited at an empty table with anticipation, wondering whether anybody would come, thinking that they might be suspicious of why he had asked them to get together in such an informal atmosphere, outside their traditional offices. Eventually, one by one, his colleagues started to arrive. Sergey said:
We sat there in awkward silence, staring at our menus for a few minutes, until I finally decided to come clean. I told them there was no specific job-related reason why we were getting together. All I wanted to do was to break down those boss–subordinate barriers, and get to know them better. I knew them as specialists very well, but I had only a faint idea of what these people were outside of work. I did not know much about them. I apologized, and explained that I hoped they would treat this dinner as a sign of goodwill, as a hand extended forward to welcome them as individuals, and not as technical minds.
It turns out they had similar thoughts about me as well: My subordinates knew me as a boss, and a specialist, but were rather uncertain about what kind of person I was outside of the company. We talked for four straight hours that evening! They were eager to share their personal lives, aspirations, hobbies, vacation plans, and a thousand other things. As I listened to them through the night, I realized how handicapped I was before without being connected with my colleagues at a personal level; how limiting my messages must have been without the benefit of a personal contact.
Sergey discovered that such a simple thing as hanging out at a dinner could help him find common ground with his colleagues, enabling them to listen to each other, as he said, “with open hearts.”
Finding common ground is what enables you to have something upon which to build. It creates the platform for constructing a better future. Understanding your colleagues in this way allows you to know whether the future you want to create will be a future others will want to live and work in. For example, recent research has found that millennials strongly favor work–life balance. They are quite willing to work hard and to undertake challenging assignments—in fact, they desire them—but they also want more personal time, more time with friends and family than prior generations expressed. Although it's not true of every millennial, most rank work–life balance ahead of status and money.4 Their boomer parents, on the other hand, rated work ahead of family life. Regardless of the generational cohort you are working with, enlisting others in a shared vision of the future requires that you understand their needs. To do that, you need to get to know your key constituents individually.
Connecting deeply with others enables leaders to appreciate what drives the people around them and what unites them. Leadership becomes a dialogue and not a monologue. It becomes a conversation and not a recitation.
There's a lot written about leadership that gives the impression that people only want to follow individuals endowed with charismatic qualities. This theory leaves the impression that to become a leader, you need to possess personal magnetism or develop the ability to charm and persuade, and then people will automatically follow you. Not so.
People want to follow a meaningful purpose, not simply do some work in exchange for cash. If you want to lead others, you have to put principles and purpose ahead of everything else. The larger mission is what calls everyone, leader and constituent alike, forward. It's what gives significance to the hard work required to do anything extraordinary.
Meaningful work is vital to full engagement. We find in our research that when people say they feel like they are making a difference in their organizations, their engagement scores are substantially higher than when they feel they aren't making a difference. Other researchers have similarly noted, “Employees who derive meaning and significance from their work were more than three times as likely to stay with their organizations—the highest single impact of any variable in our survey. These employees also reported 1.7 times higher job satisfaction and they were 1.4 times more engaged in their work.”5
There's a very substantial benefit to learning when you can find meaning in the work that you do. Whether it's learning to lead, learning to write computer code, or learning how to provide excellent customer service, having a self-transcendent purpose significantly enhances one's dedication to learning. Having a goal that has the potential to “have some effect on or connection to the world beyond the self” increases both your involvement and persistence in learning. Because of your more intense involvement, you will also be more likely to resist the temptation to engage in other pursuits even when whatever you are doing is boring.6 Learning to lead can be challenging and difficult and perhaps even tedious at times. Knowing that you are engaged in something that is bigger than you are, something that will improve the lives of your colleagues, customers, family, friends, or citizens of the world, makes the difficult challenges of both leading and learning a bit easier to overcome.
Research also shows that viewing your work as a calling as compared to seeing it as a job or a career leads to the highest levels of satisfaction with both your work and your life. Having a calling also connects to better health.7 Finding meaning and purpose in work has benefits that go well beyond a paycheck and profits. Becoming an exemplary leader is a very rewarding experience, one that brings with it not only a sense of accomplishment but also a feeling of worthiness and being of service to others.
The key message of this chapter is this: Leadership is not simply about you and realizing only your values and vision. It's more about helping others achieve theirs. For leaders and constituents alike, putting out discretionary energy requires that people feel their efforts are serving a larger purpose beyond the self. Your success as a leader links inextricably to how well you understand others' hopes, dreams, and aspirations. You have to find common ground with your constituents, and doing that means connecting with what gives their lives meaning and purpose.
In your leadership journal make a list of your key relationships. Include your team members, your manager, important internal and external customers, peers you often collaborate with, and anyone else with whom you are interdependent. If the list is too long, start with people with whom you have the most frequent contact. For each individual, ask yourself:
It's likely that you won't be able to answer all of these questions for everyone on your list—and even if you can, you might want to verify your assumptions with them. Schedule an informal face-to-face conversation. Tell them that you are genuinely interested in what they value and look for in their workplace, and career, and want to talk to them about it. It might go more smoothly if you give them some questions in advance because this kind of conversation can require some thoughtful preparation. Make sure the tone of the conversation is casual; this is not really an interview and certainly not an interrogation. It's also likely that they'll want to hear your own answers to these questions—so be prepared—but share in a way that keeps the focus on the other person and not on you.
Once you've recorded your answers, step back from the data. See whether you notice any patterns. What are the common themes in the responses that give you clues about a possible shared vision that unites everyone?