Leadership Playbook
How to become a leader
Understand the challenge
When we talk about leadership, we distinguish between four traits:
- As a manager, I create and protect structures in which people can have specific experiences.
- As a leader, I work with people, help them to develop, find meaning and make sense of their experiences.
- As an entrepreneur, I decide on direction, take risks and execute tough decisions.
- As a domain expert, I understand and shape the business and the products
For a given position, I have an appropriate mix of responsibilities and I need an appropriate mix of skills and talents.
Understand where you stand
Situational awareness is the perception of environmental elements and events in relation to time or space, the understanding of their meaning and the projection of their future status.
As leaders we need to adapt to complex environments – this applies to every level, personal, team, strategy and product decisions and understanding the situation is the essential first step.
Situational awareness is a crucial basis for successful decision-making. A lack of situational awareness is one of the most important factors in bad decisions, some of which have serious consequences.
Focus on the goal
Focusing on the goal sounds so simple and yet is so often neglected.
Start with Why is Simon Sinek’s mission to help and inspire others at work.
He has three lessons on how they communicate and how you can adapt your mindset to inspire yourself and others.
3 lessons you should take away from Start with Why:
- If you want to inspire and excite others, always communicate your why first, the Why.
- Enthusiastic employees are the best resource for any company.
- You don’t need questionable sales tactics when you Start with Why.
Trust people
Trust is often demanded – but it’s not a one-way street.
Trust – or the absence of trust – has an immense impact on the way we work together.
People are treated like children in the company – at home they raise children and build houses.
They are expected to think like entrepreneurs and are not trusted to order books on their own.
If you want to build trust, there are clear conditions and behaviors that need to be in place for this to happen successfully.
Be authentic
Authentic leaders are positive people with realistic concepts about themselves. They encourage openness. Authentic leaders are able to improve the performance of individuals and teams by building trust and gaining enthusiastic support from their subordinates and colleagues.
Here are some concepts to help you assess yourself and better understand what you need to work on.
How to act as a Leader
Create a safe environment
The need for a psychologically safe environment is based on three key ideas:
- The brain treats many social threats and rewards with the same intensity as physical threats and rewards.
- The ability to be creative, make decisions, solve problems and collaborate with others is generally diminished by a response to a threat.
- The threat response is more intense and frequent and often needs to be carefully minimized in social interactions
Become a catalyst
As a leader, I often have the reflex to take things into my own hands or to determine exactly how they should be implemented – after all, especially in technology companies, the fact that I am good at this is often the reason for my promotion. So nothing could be more obvious.
But there’s a catch: it doesn’t scale and ignores the essential reason why I’m a manager: I don’t lead.
In this chapter, we talk about ways out of this trap. How do I do the best for the effectiveness of the overall system? How do I best develop my employees? How do I become a catalyst for them and my area of responsibility?
Drive relevant and purposeful interactions
If I want to fulfill my role as a catalyst, the most important element is that I engage with people. Develop empathy and – as we have seen – be authentic and consistent.
The next question is what my target image is: I want to focus everyone on further development and help them to deal constructively with obstacles and mistakes. In English, we also talk about a “growth mindset”.
Finally, I need tools for the most important interaction: the conversation. We will discuss one technique (“ORID”) here as an example.
Understand your influence
How do I make an impact? It is helpful to visualize the ways in which my actions (and, as a basis, my thoughts) have an impact.
Certain aspects are general: people have experiences, they adjust their behavior accordingly. In the long term, this influences the opinion of what is “normal” – as a collective opinion, we call this culture.
Of course, things are not so simple and unidirectional, but interactive and cyclical, so there is plenty of material for discussion here. In the team context, the focus is on interactions (and some structures, such as the aforementioned safe space), in the corporate context the focus shifts to structures, policies, governance etc.
Actively use feedback
The whole idea of agility revolves around shortening feedback cycles in order to better adapt to new circumstances or: to gain a basis for future decisions from the past.
We talk about empirical management, situational awareness, situational leadership and adaptive strategy – it’s always the same basic idea.
The active use of feedback is, if you like, one of the cornerstones of good agile leadership.
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