Forget the cute posts about Leadership Qualities. Here are 5 Brave Steps instead

I am sick and tired!! 

I am literally sick and tired of seeing all these posts, articles, and videos describing the traits of good leaders, how good leaders should act, and so on. No matter if these are in the form of images, info-graphics, or posts.

And with this amount of content, I started really to believe that we are lying to ourselves because all this content will not really solve the leadership problems that we have inside our companies.

People are not missing information. People are fully aware of how a great leader should act and what he or she should do. But they are still not executing. They are not behaving or acting as good managers no matter if they have good intentions or not, and no matter how much knowledge they have regarding leadership.

Do you want proof? Simple.

Stop 10 people on the street and ask them the golden question ‘’what are the characteristics of a great leader?’’

You will be surprisingly shocked that everyone knows the right answer. You will hear instantaneous answers such as integrity, honesty, fairness, team player, and on. You will hear answers that can fill books.

Now let me ask you ‘’if almost everyone knows how a good leader should act, and on top of that, all of this educational content is available online and offline, then why do we have horrible managers? Or why do managers who know by heart the traits of great leaders act in contrast to what they know?’’

When people become managers, they need to start applying a new set of behaviors. And to apply and sustain a ‘‘NEW’’ behavior, we need mainly 3 things:

1) To identify the right behavior. For example, you read a lot about leadership and you identified one way of behaving that you would like to try.

2) Execute this behavior while accepting the fact that mistakes will happen and that you will not feel comfortable applying this new behavior at the beginning.

3) Time. To build and sustain a new behavior until it becomes second nature, you need to give yourself time.

Information is available to a big extent. People already know how a true leader should act. And even if they do not know, there are thousands of courses and books about this topic.  Now, let us move to the execution part.

Managers do not behave as they are imagined to behave because they discovered that being a good leader will make them lose in today’s era and work environment.

Yes, maybe they will win the love and respect of their teams, but if they do not deliver, then they will be out of the game soon in this competitive world. The toxic environment and the pressure forced on them by the top management is destructive.

Let’s take an example.

Let us say that you were newly appointed as a manager of a team. As a new manager, you start with good intentions, and you want to be a real leadership role model.

Step by step during the fiscal year you feel the pressure to deliver and hit the targets. Not only this, each year you hit the numbers, the management sets stretch targets, and you feel more and more under fire to deliver.

You start spending more time at work, your work-life balance fades away, and you do not remember the last time that you saw your daughter or son at home while he or she was still awake. All of this for a bunch of a few extra dollars or euros per year.

Ah by the way, do you know that after reaching a specific salary range, any additional salary increase will not make you feel happy and will be meaningless? Because every 1 dollar of salary increase will bring you 100 dollars’ worth of more pressure and tasks to do, and more time at work. So you will not have the time and peace of mind to enjoy the money that you make.

Under all this pressure to deliver, angry executives pushing you, and a lack of your basic needs, you start to change. You start ‘‘shooting’’ randomly on anyone. You start doing this because your capacity and patience are over. You do not have enough capacity to handle your team's problems and to grow them, because you are now focusing more and more on how not to get ‘‘shot’’ by the management during the next meeting, and you will do this at any cost.

Your perspective changed from ‘’I want to create a great team culture and help my team’’ before being a manager to ‘’I want to survive and keep my position’’…Welcome to the middle point of the rat race.

You know, Mike Tyson the legendary boxer summarized this situation in a quote that I adore. He said ‘’everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.’’ And now, you are punched in your face, and you have no plan except survival.

So, what is the solution? How can we really fix leadership problems within organizations?

The solution is divided into two parts…

Part 1 is about correcting the wrong beliefs, and part 2 is about the action plan. And I will start now by correcting some wrong beliefs.

First, as a rule, you must know that the true measure of a leader is not during the calm time.

Any person can do well and be a great manager during a calm time. The challenge is what type of actions and decisions this manager will make during the hard times. When he or she is under fire. This is the true measure of a leader.

Second, leadership is NOT ONLY about results.

I know a lot of horrible leaders that deliver because their teams are afraid of them or want to avoid them.

There are also companies that achieve great financial results not because they have a great culture or because they are a wonderful place to work, but because they are industry leaders that built names 30 or 50, or even 80 years ago.

And this reputation and what they accumulated financially in the past are why people and clients keep coming to them over and over, and that’s why they are still in business.

And by the way, this is very dangerous because sometimes winning makes people blind and unable to see their real problems. They think if we are winning then everything should be ok.

Third, I saw a lot of companies hiring or promoting a good person (who has the potential to become a great manager) to a managerial role in the middle of a messy situation and expecting him or her to deliver. This will rarely (if ever) happen.

Getting a potentially good leader and putting him in an organization that is suffering a lot of internal problems, with not enough resources and collaboration, and most importantly openness to change from the people around him or her, will not change anything.

In fact, you will lose this ‘‘potentially’’ good leader sooner or later. It is exactly as if you said ‘’Lionel Messi’’ is the best football player in the world, let us invest all our club money in buying him and do not bother thinking about the other team members because Messi will do everything. He is the best player in the world.

And of course, this is a horrible approach, because no matter how Messi is talented, he is only flourishing and winning trophies because he has the ‘‘right combination’’ of good players around him in Barcelona, AND the organization is helping him. It was the combination itself between talent, teamwork, and culture that made Barcelona successful, not the talent of Messi alone.

(p.s: this article was written during his peak time at Barcelona, but later on during his last years in Barcelona when the management of the club changed, and even now, after he moved to Paris Saint Germain, it became even more clear how important it is to find the right recipe between the team, the management, and the organization).

Fourth, stop obsessing about the quarterly results and thinking short term only because ''you believe'' that investors and shareholders are expecting to hear good news every quarter.

Instead, explain to shareholders the truth and what is in your head and that they might be sacrificing short-term performance for the sake of long-term success. People and investors invested in Facebook, Amazon, Tesla, and more companies during their early days even though, at the time, the short-term performance and the return on investment were very low.

Now, let us move to part 2 which is the action plan.

1- If you want to know if a company is a good place to work for or not, and if you want to assess the leadership performance inside this company, then look at the sensitive positions such as the CEO, the president, and General Manager.

Focus carefully on their actions and listen carefully to what is being said about them. Focus on their reputation regarding their characters, behaviors, and what they care for and believe in. If they have the right attitude and behavior, then most probably most of the executives will have the right behavior also, and this will impact the organization. And the ones who will be misfits because they are not behaving right will feel like outsiders and sooner or later will leave.

Think about it for a moment, who will you choose to work on your team? Someone who is totally different than your character and behavior? Or someone who is aligned with and supporting your vision, behavior, and culture?

And even if you filled an executive position, and you found one of your team members not aligned with you, then most probably sooner or later he or she will leave because you will not tolerate each other (unless you keep him or her only because he or she is achieving results no matter what his behavior is and with this, you are making a big mistake).

So, in short, you and your direct reports are reflections of each other’s characters, behaviors, and actions.

2- The right leadership starts by selecting the right CEO for the company (as well as the right people on top, and in key sensitive positions. The more huge the company is and especially if it works in several locations, the more important it becomes to hire the right fit in key positions, and not only the CEO).

Appointing the CEO in big companies is the responsibility of the board of directors. If they choose a CEO based on his or her previous results or if company politics got involved in the selection, then it is over. The selection should, of course, include his or her previous performance, but this is only one selection criterion and not everything.

3- If the board chooses the right CEO with the right attitude and behavior, he or she will choose the right executives. He or she will choose people who are similar in behavior to him, and who can help him promoting the company culture that he or she wants.

4- The CEO should give clear instructions that hiring and keeping employees should be based on their attitude & behaviors and if they can fit the company culture or not. He/she should ask his/her top managers, middle managers, and HR not to hire or keep people only because of their previous results or their C.V.s, but mainly for their characters and if they are a cultural fit or not.

5- Choosing the right executives and heads of departments will ensure that the vision of the internal culture that the CEO wants to build will be transmuted to the rest of the organization effectively. This will ensure that at least they will try to make the right selections when they are choosing middle management.

And when this happens, a potentially good leader will not find himself under fire most of the time to deliver. There will be a balance between calm times and pressure times. And even during pressure times, this will be healthy pressure. And when this happens potential leaders will have a real chance to flourish and apply great concepts if they were trained and prepared correctly.

Is this going to really happen? Can really a big organization start fixing its culture and leadership problems from up till down?

I am sure that a lot of the people who will read this article will say it’s not possible because there are a lot of other factors involved inside organizations that make it harder to make true changes or make a crucial decision.

Nevertheless, I shared my true opinion instead of just moving with the flow and writing more and more about beautiful leadership traits and wonderful rosy role models that we rarely see inside our organizations. Or that we see, but only during calm times.

Stop dreaming about beautiful leadership and idealistic traits. Let us move one practical step towards really fixing the workplace.