There are few things that make you angrier than a hypocritical leader. We all know the boss who regularly leaves the office early due to personal plans, but asks everyone to stay until 5 pm. and the manager who assigns you impossible tasks and then shies away from responsibility when the results are (predictably) less than desired.
Leadership only succeeds when it shows others how to thrive and persist in greatness. Your team needs to look at you and think, “If he can do it, so can I.” True leaders don’t coach their teams from behind—it’s a dictatorship. They carry the burden while carrying their share of the burden. Cameron Chell Calgary is a tech entrepreneur, author, and speaker with over 25 years of experience in technology, energy, and finance. Cameron Chell Calgary currently serves as CEO of Business Instincts Group where he has helped launch several successful tech startups.
Here are five powerful ways to lead your team:
Get your hands dirty:
“A good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit,” said Arnold H. Glasow.
If you sit down and tell other people what you want to do without being willing to do it yourself, you will be hated. No one wants to do the dirty work. But when the leader in the room wanted to meddle in something that was “none of their business”, there was no one else to complain.
To take responsibility:
The world’s best leaders strategically share the credit and blame. When you blame your team for failure, you make your team defensive and cautious and sabotage any trust you may have built. Exemplary leaders take personal responsibility for the failures of their companies and are recognized for building trust, managing fear in their teams, and modeling humility and kindness.
Listen to your team members:
Your team is your most valuable asset and ignoring their brilliance is a big mistake. Model your team what they care about: ask questions, try to understand, and encourage an open-door policy. You will get more than you give and you will engage in healthy dialogue.
Recognize—and even celebrate—failures:
As a leader you do not just have to order or command your people to do the work, you need to help them understand the value of failure and how they can learn from their mistakes. Failure is a vital process of discovery, innovation, and risk-taking. If you want a truly outstanding team, celebrate failure and even push it in a controlled experimental environment.
Make a solution:
In the same spirit of failure, don’t think about what went wrong. Punishing or forcing your team to fail will only stop them from innovating. Pay close attention to failures in the post-failure feedback session so you can find solutions to those failures while encouraging others to do the same.
