5 leadership principles from great leaders

I was fortunate to work with some great leaders, and I thought, why were they so great? What was unique about them? This inspired me to write this article and refer to some of their principles.

Care personally and challenge directly

The concept of radical candor has been there for a long time, but people find it difficult to practice in real life. The important thing here is to stay genuine and not fake it. When you say you care personally, you genuinely need to care about their wellbeing and support their development. Once you establish that relationship, they won’t mind when you challenge them. However, there is a thin line between challenging someone and being a jerk. So, you need to ensure that everyone in the team understands that you want them to succeed.

The head of engineering Anirudh Chauhan demonstrated this principle during his tenure at SAP. Ani would always treat all his reports as buddies. He would go above and beyond to make the team happy by always wearing a smile on his face, going for walks, organizing events, and always finding opportunities to do small talks. He would even speak about his blunders in life, which showed humility. But, when you are in a meeting with him, he would stay laser-focused on the goals, challenge your thought process, and seek the best out of you. He inspired the team to break silos and challenge the status quo. He made the environment so inclusive and welcoming that everyone felt like contributing even more. He would entirely take care of the teammates by caring about their well-being and career aspirations. He always tried to make the workplace fun and inspiring. I remember when we all did a plank competition in the evening, with our CTO joining the party.

He left the company after a reorg, but his entire team is still in touch, and they meet from time to time and share the great time they had when they were together. This is an excellent example of leadership because you become a talent magnet, and people flock to come and work with you.

Listen actively and provide feedback wisely

Active listening is a skill that everybody should practice. Active listening is not about staying silent while the other person is speaking or repeating word-by-word what you heard.

According to research from Zenger and Folkman, we’re doing it all wrong. Instead of thinking of a good listener as a sponge — absorbing everything but providing little feedback — a skilled listener should be thought of as a trampoline who amplifies and supports a speaker’s thoughts by providing constructive feedback. The active listener should understand the context, have deep empathy for the speaker and then ask questions to better clarify and engage in the conversation.

There will be situations when people want to vent or speak out and may not be looking for any suggestions; in that case, you can even ask them what they would like to do next and ask more questions to clear their thought process so that they can find an answer to their question. In another case, you may need to provide constructive feedback to help them with the situation.

Give ownership

I worked with a design manager at Intuit, and she would always tell her new hires that she hired them because she trusts them and they have the skillset needed to make the product successful. And they should only escalate to her if they cannot handle a situation by themself, but she will always be there to talk or bounce ideas. This changes the whole conversation as she gives her reports full ownership of the projects. So, her reports have complete control of their goals and deliverables. If something goes wrong, they have the full support from their manager to make course corrections and get back on track.

Ownership is a mindset; it is a feeling of owning the results. When employees have the feeling of owning what they are doing, they go above and beyond their responsibilities. They bring innovation to the job. They don’t turn off their brains at 5 o’clock. — Gene Hammett

Great leaders do not hold back and stay transparent, and when people fail in their work, they take full ownership of their failure and allow the team to make the necessary corrections. To give complete ownership:

· Include people at all levels when crafting the vision and planning the roadmap.

· Embrace transparency.

· Empower others to take risks.

· Allow employees to define their own success and keep them accountable.

· When they do well, make them the product’s brand ambassador.

Appreciate publicly

Many people leave their job because they feel unappreciated or under-appreciated. There are tools in companies where you can provide monetary awards or send a thank you note as a token of appreciation. But this doesn’t change the feeling of unappreciated. Appreciation should happen publicly and timely. When you see someone has done something beyond their responsibilities, you must make it visible to the rest of the team and appreciate them for going above and beyond. Recognition of the effort and hard work could work as fuel for creativity.

To excel as a manager, you must match the employee to the audience he values most. One employee’s audience might be his peers; the best way to praise him would be to stand him up in front of his coworkers and publicly celebrate his achievement. Another’s favorite audience might be you; the most powerful recognition would be a one-on-one conversation where you tell him quietly but vividly why he is such a valuable member of the team.— Harvard business review

An excellent manager at PayPal, Willy Lai would always email his staff and other leaders when someone from his team did well. He would not miss any opportunity to ensure that his team’s hard work is unnoticed. Praising publicly also creates a healthy competition in the team and encourages others to step up.

Inspire a shared vision

In many cases, leaders fail to envision the future, they can tell you what is not working and how to fix them, but they find it hard to get a clear picture of the future state and motivate the team to get there. Being able to envision the future has a tremendous impact on people’s motivation levels.

People describe their personal-best leadership experience as times when they imagined an exciting, highly attractive future for their organization. They had visions and dreams of what could be. They had an absolute and total personal faith in their dreams, and they were confident to make those extraordinary things happen. Every organization, every social movement, begins with a vision. It is the force that creates the future. — James M Kouzes ( Book: The leadership Challenge)

When Dinesh Sahane took the CTO role at SAP Ariba, he set a vision to transform the entire platform to a service-first approach and called it “Platform as a service.” This changed the whole mindset of how the team used to think of platforms in an enterprise company. This also changed the conversation of how to approach enterprise solutions. When the team started to unfold the vision, the service approach opened the door to many innovations that the team had never thought of before. Everyone chimed in with ideas, and a shared vision emerged from the platform organization. They delivered some extraordinary innovations in a very short time. It was a lot of work in a short amount of time, but you will not see the tiredness in their faces but a sense of satisfaction in delivering those products.

I hope this helps, and feel free to post your comments below or ping me on LinkedIn if you have any questions or want to discuss any leadership topics.