How to be an effective leader
It involves doing a lot of things that you probably think are a waste of time
Everybody has an opinion on what leaders should do. (Even me: here, here and here.)
So what do effective leaders really do? How do they actually spend their time?
Harvard professor John Kotter decided to find out. He shadowed 15 high-performing executives, interviewed them, and talked to their subordinates. This took months.
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What he got was an accurate look at how effective leaders spend their day, the patterns behind what they do and how they do it.
Via John P. Kotter on What Leaders Really Do:
Kotter points out that many people would be critical of the above schedule.
It doesn't seem to be how effective leaders should spend their time (unplanned, not talking to key people, disjointed conversations, etc.)
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It doesn't look like the leaders in the movies.
This pattern of activity looks like a scattered and unsystematic way to achieve goals — yet it's very consistent among top executives.
Why?
Because book theories about leadership are often created in a vacuum, not from the realistic POV of a leader.
The above style and schedule helps real world leaders overcome two of their biggest challenges:
- "Figuring out what to do despite uncertainty, great diversity, and an enormous amount of potentially relevant information."
- "Getting things done through a large and diverse set of people despite having little direct control over most of them."
Being an effective leader means getting accurate, relevant information can be difficult because you're never on the front lines. And then taking the right action can be difficult because it always is done through other people.
Imagine fighting a boxing match but you're not in the ring, you're in another room. Someone needs to come tell you whether you were hit, how hard, how painful it is.
Then you need to tell them where and when to hit back.
Then you need to wait to hear from that person whether the punch landed and was effective.
And it's always a game of "telephone" because people convey information differently and sometimes downright inaccurately. (Oh, and some of your employees aren't very good at their jobs.)
The above style allows leaders to casually gather the information they need and get objectives accomplished without blindly making rash decisions or alienating subordinates.
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