What type of leader are you?
You can usually tell by looking at your inbox. If it’s full to overflowing and you never get to the bottom without working silly hours or over the weekend, the chances are you are leading by activities and at risk of becoming too deep in the detail of your business.
The alternative is leading by outcomes – which not only allows you to disengage from the daily detail and the stems the flood of operational emails, but it allows you to grow the capabilities of your team while focusing on doing what only you can do – asking the right questions to help your people think.
The key as outlined to my Oxford-based peer-advisory group just before by guest speaker Mark Fritz is to think, discuss and lead by outcomes because outcomes are the language of achievement.
What you should care about is the outcome not the activity that was performed to generate the outcome. So start thinking in outcomes.
How many times have you heard someone say “We need to call a meeting to discuss this”. But of course discussion is an activity not an outcome. How much more empowering is it to frame your meetings as outcome focused – “Let’s have a meeting to make a decision, take action, create alignment” all of which are outcomes which move the project forward rather than activities that don’t.
Oh and don’t attend the meeting – allow you team to be creative in the meeting and to find the right solution to the problem themselves – and thus grow through the process.The best leaders don’t care too much about how someone is going to achieve something, they care about what, why and when and most importantly who – and leave the who (the person who takes ownership of the project) to work out how they are going to deliver the desired outcome and crucially what the milestone of the project are.
If you hang on to the project so long that you’ve started to work out the how you are going to do it and what the milestones are, it’s only ever going to be your project, not the person you has responsibility for delivering it. The leader’s role is to decide who gets the project, not how it’s going to be done because your how is limited by your experience and knowledge and is therefore necessarily more limited than the capability within your team.
So unleash the creativity within your teams and allow them to feel the motivational power of making choices – and really owning their projects.The role of the leader is to ask the right questions, not provide all the answers – unless of course, you really like having that inbox from hell?