Operator Notes: Nurturing Effective Leadership
This is a guest post from one of our many community members; Eric Nehrlich. Eric is the founder of Too Many Trees; an executive coaching service dedicated to helping and supporting entrepreneurs, founders, and executives become world-class leaders. He draws on 20 years of experience in the tech industry to help leaders have more impact. Eric helps clients gain clarity on their priorities so they can consciously place their focus and attention where they can make the biggest difference. He loves to identify and challenge mindsets and/or habits that are holding clients back from their next level of leadership. Before becoming a coach, Eric spent 10 years as an engineer and product manager across several startups, before joining Google and eventually leading business strategy and operations for the Google Search Ads product team as Chief of Staff for six years.
As an executive coach, I’m often asked how I help people become better leaders.
Some people believe that you have to be an enthusiastic extrovert to be a “natural” leader, or that you can’t be a leader unless hundreds of people report to you. These beliefs start from the mistaken idea that people are either leaders or not, based on their innate characteristics or organizational role.
What is Leadership?
Instead, I think of leadership as the actions involved in mobilizing people to get things done. What I like about this definition is that anybody can demonstrate leadership, regardless of their position or their personality. A shy entry-level worker that inspires their coworkers to make something happen is acting as a leader. It also means that leadership is observable; you aren’t showing leadership if people don’t follow your lead.
“A shy entry-level worker that inspires their coworkers to make something happen is acting as a leader. It also means that leadership is observable; you aren’t showing leadership if people don’t follow your lead.”
In other words, you aren’t a leader just because you have a big title or have a lot of people reporting to you. We can see effective leadership in action by what a person does to mobilize others and how others respond. This turns leadership from being an undefinable innate quality into a set of skills that can be studied and practiced.
With that in mind, there are many ways in which you can show leadership, including:
Setting a vision and identifying an important goal
Finding others who are interested in working towards that goal
Influencing or persuading those people to take action toward that goal
Managing the actual process of doing the work to achieve that goal
How To Improve Your Leadership Skills
If you want to become a better leader, look through those leadership actions, pick one area where you want to show more leadership and brainstorm some possibilities for what would help you be more effective. Some common answers might include executive presence, better decision-making, greater inspiration, or conflict resolution. Then think of a leader you respect who demonstrates that skill, and consider their actual behaviors as they lead. Compare what they do to what you do; that difference will give you tangible actions to try if you want to improve your leadership in that area.
This sort of behavior change requires the conscious effort of deliberate practice to change your default habits, the way you have been reacting for decades. Doing things differently will feel awkward and will take longer, like trying to write with your left hand if you’re right-handed. And most people find it particularly difficult to make that effort to change their behavior when they already feel too busy.
Change Requires Letting Go
This is why we have so many leaders who are overwhelmed - they have more scope than they can handle with their previously developed skills. Developing the necessary new skills requires more capacity or awareness than they have available, so they keep doing more of what they have previously done, even though those actions are no longer helping.
And there’s a good reason for that - it’s hard to let go of what previously brought you success! For example, engineering leaders often build their career on being the expert who solves problems, and knows the answers. They are rewarded for that behavior in school, as individual contributors, and even as a first-level manager. But when they reach the director or VP level, they can become overwhelmed because they still feel they have to know all of the technical details while solving every problem for their organization. To effectively lead at their new level, they have to let go of what previously worked for them (being the expert), and develop new skills and behaviors (empowering others to be the expert by coaching them up and consciously delegating to them).
Building Self-awareness
This behavior shift requires the self-awareness to admit that their current way of doing things is not effective for managing their increased scope. Self-awareness improves effectiveness at every level of leadership, from personal development, realizing that your previous behavior patterns are no longer serving you, to company leadership, and understanding how processes and even people that were previously critical to success are now holding the company back.
Such self-reflection is often dismissed as navel-gazing, as you may not feel you have the time to reflect on whether your behaviors are serving your intended goals, either as an individual and as an organization, because you have so much to do. But not spending that time can be far more costly in the long run as you keep replaying the same issues; Amos Tversky once said “You waste years by not being able to waste hours”. So when you discover something that’s not working, give yourself the time to understand the root cause, and experiment with different behaviors that could be more effective; while it may feel awkward, such experiments are the only way to find a new path forward.
If you want to grow your scope and impact as a leader, you will need to keep challenging yourself to let go of what previously worked, so you can develop new leadership skills to handle a greater variety of situations. Paying attention to how you are enabling others through your actions is one of the most impactful ways you can spend your time, because effective leadership of collective action is how you will change the world.
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