If you are looking for something more inventive and advanced than the usual leadership advice, this article, ‘5 Unique Tips for How To Be a Better Leader’ contains some novel strategies to get you started.
Most leadership advice centres around recommending:
- Improving General Leadership Skills (such as communication, strategic thinking or resilience)
- Engaging More with Your Team (for example by increasing feedback, facilitating team building or rewarding achievements)
- Continuous Learning and Development (such as attending training, reading books or acquiring a mentor)
These are all valid and important recommendations. Fail to get these right and you will fail at the first hurdle.
However, if you are looking to move beyond these fundamentals towards something that really sets you apart as a great leader, here are 5 tips for starting to increase your impact and success beyond the baseline.
Table of Contents – ‘5 Unique Tips for How To Be a Better Leader’
1 – Understand that Most People Want to be ‘Participatory Followers’
Inevitably, only the minority of people are leaders and the majority of people are followers. However, most followers still want to have at least some influence on, and direct connection with, their leaders.
Our most recent research confirms a very strong correlation between people’s happiness and satisfaction at work and the following factors:
- Direct access to senior leaders
- Involvement in decision-making
- Autonomy and independence at work
- Responsibility and status
Essentially, the higher the levels of each of these four elements, the higher people’s satisfaction and happiness at work – dramatically so.
This makes intuitive sense. To use a simple example, compare how stressed you would feel in these two different scenarios:
A – You are being chased by a savage dog which has just attacked and seriously injured another person. Whether you are likely to escape or not depends on your own actions.
B – You have just seen on the news that a dictator in another country has targeted the country you are living in with chemical weapons. There is no action you can take to avoid exposure, you can only wait and hope that you are not too badly affected.
Most people would say they feel less stressed by scenario A (although both of course are extremely stressful!) – why? Because in scenario A you have some degree of influence and control over what happens to you. Even a small amount makes a big difference to how you feel.
Most organisational structures are built around a fairly rigid pyramid-shaped system, where in essence, the higher up the pyramid you climb the greater the levels of the 4 factors outlined above.
But what if you as a leader could increase the levels of these 4 factors for all employees, even for those at entry-level? The result would be a happier team, increased loyalty, greater insights for leaders and improved company culture, just to name a few of the benefits.
Facilitating increases in these factors for all levels of employees also isn’t in fact as difficult as it may at first glance seem – for example, even 5-10 minutes of direct access to a senior leader by an entry-level employee once every few months can produce significant returns, not only for the employee but also for the leader – often a new and fresh perspective or ‘insider knowledge’ can produce invaluable insights.
2 – Working on Your Weakest Points Produces the Biggest Wins
People’s natural inclination is to focus on trying to improve the things they are already reasonably good at. This is understandable – none of us like focussing on, or being immersed in, the things we are not so good at.
It is true that if you are (for simplicity’s sake), say 85% good at public speaking for example, that participating in public speaking training could get you up to 90 or even 95% perfection for this skill.
But how practically useful is this incremental improvement? For the amount of time, money and effort you are investing, are you getting a commensurate improvement in your skills and consequently in the experience of those you are speaking to?
Consider conversely, that you are reasonably bad at remembering people’s names and basic details about them outside of their job role. Let’s say you are about 45% good at this. Learning a couple of basic techniques for improving your memory in this respect could relatively quickly, cheaply and easily get you up to being around 75% good at this.
How much practical impact would this improvement make? Usually a very significant amount. People are heavily influenced and impacted by leaders remembering their name and even one or two personal details about them. Much more so than they are by whether a leader is ‘really good’ vs ‘really very good’ at public speaking.
Most of the time it is true to say that going from being ‘amateur’ at something to becoming ‘intermediate’ at something is relatively easy and quick to achieve. But going from ‘intermediate’ to ‘expert’ requires a lot more commitment and effort.
As such, to make yourself a better leader focus first on the dramatic improvements and big wins that can be achieved from working on the areas where you can shift from ‘not so great’ to ‘pretty good’. Once you have done this, you can then deal with perfecting and refining the skills you are already competent at for the additional marginal wins.
3 – Surround Yourself with People Who Are Playing at a Higher Level than You
We all like to feel that we are good at something. It’s completely normal.
However, the problem comes when our role of leader means that we are no longer aspiring upwards, or are no longer competing for a position. The most comfortable and easy thing to do, is to simply sit in your existing position.
Even if you are not consciously choosing to tread water, it is always tricky to ‘know what you don’t know’ – without others to compare yourself with, how can you judge your abilities or understand where you could be better?
At whatever level of leadership you have achieved, one of the best things you can do to become an even better leader is to surround yourself with people who are better than you, and especially with people who are quite different to you.
How does a tennis player improve? By playing someone better than them. How does a tennis player with a strong forehand and weaker backhand improve? By playing someone with an awesome backhand who forces them to regularly respond with a backhand.
We all need new contexts, alternative comparisons and different points to aim it if we are going to improve in any area. Surrounding yourself with people who are leading at a higher level than you are can really help you take a big leap forward.
It also needn’t be surrounding yourself with leadership examples from your industry or field – great leadership skills can be found in many different areas, and in fact often the biggest improvements and best leadership ideas can be sourced from the most unexpected of places.
For tips on how to retain and develop high performers and high potential people, read our article ‘Developing High Performers’. To discover why you should close the gap of ‘how’ to achieve an outcome by replacing it with ‘who’ can achieve an outcome, read our article Why ‘Who’ is More Important than ‘How’. |
4 – Understand People’s Overwhelming Desire for a Particular Goal-Type
Surprising as it may seem, most people in fact don’t really enjoy achieving goals that are simple to achieve with little effort. We may think we should do, but the evidence tells a different story.
For example, the idea of hedonism is extremely appealing in principle – living a life where you don’t have to work for your money, spending all of your time on leisure activities and having fun. Yet we are surrounded by many examples of unhappy wealthy, unoccupied people. Yes, it is true that there will be a period of time during which a person will enjoy the hedonistic lifestyle if they achieve it. But it never lasts very long.
Most people thrive on purpose and a sense of achievement. For example, when do you feel better about yourself – after an evening sitting on the sofa watching tv and succeeding in sending a few texts, or when you have achieved a great result from something challenging at work, or have beaten your personal best in an activity?
We all like sitting on the sofa sometimes, but if most of what we are achieving are easy goals that require little input or effort from us, the majority of us tend to become dissatisfied.
Most people obtain the greatest satisfaction from goals that have a decent chance of being achieved, but only with a reasonable amount of effort.
Some personality types also thrive on chasing goals that are rarely achievable, even with a great deal of effort, but these tend to be the minority of people, and such additional detail is beyond the scope of this article.
Great leaders develop the art of knowing where to pitch the level of goals they are asking people to aim at – for most individuals the ideal is to set goals for them that are achievable, but only if they expend a reasonable amount of effort to do so.
5 – Harness the Disproportionate Benefits of Cross-Pollination
Many leaders will spend a lot of time chasing around trying to make a process a little faster, a product a little shinier, or a team a little sleeker. Whilst it is of course useful to try to optimise all aspects of the existing business wherever possible, the reality is that these tweaks often yield no more than incremental improvements in results.
For really disproportionate benefits and growth, looking outside of the industry or market standard is often the key. If you can find a new method that transforms business operations, a diversification that takes you to a whole new level or a creative idea that upends the business model, that is where the really substantial gains can be made.
A good place to look for these radical interventions is by examining what other industries or markets are doing. Are they using processes that could transfer to your operations? Do they solve a problem in a way that is totally different to your current solutions? In other words, what can you take from them and apply to your business that no one else in your industry is currently doing? Such cross-pollination from other industries is frequently the catalyst for significant, unprecedented progress and market-leading positioning.
If you have enjoyed our article ‘5 Unique Tips for How To Be a Better Leader’ you may be interested in reading our article ‘How Leadership Coaching Shapes Stronger Leaders’ To gain a deeper understanding of what leadership coaching involves, read our article ‘What is a Leadership Coach?’ To discover what management coaching is and how it differs from leadership coaching, see our article ‘Management Coaching’. To explore how to tackle difficult and time-critical business decisions, take a look at our article ‘Making Difficult Business Decisions’. To harness the self-fulfilling prophecy at work, see our article ‘Self-fulfilling Prophecy in Business’. |
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