If you take a leadership course, read a book on leadership,
or scour the web for resources, you will see that there is no set formula for
being a great leader. However, there are
common traits and qualities of leaders that are mentioned time and time
again. You can even find the A to Z of
leadership qualities on the internet which includes Xenophilous as a trait (ya,
had to look that one up and I am not sure I agree … but it was entertaining)!
The best leaders I know have the following qualities:
1.
They have the ability to create a believable vision
and strategy. 2. They are trustworthy.
3. They are great communicators.
4. They are persuasive and can motivate those around them.
5. They are willing to take risks.
6. They can make decisions.
In the next set of posts, I will go into detail on each of
these, giving examples of the great things that can happen if you make proper
use of this quality and the ugly side of things if you don’t.
The good news is that you can learn these skills. Some will
come more naturally than others. For example if you are very charismatic,
motivating people will be easy for you. But even if you are not, there are ways
that you can be persuasive and get your team excited about what they are doing.
If you are shy then being a great presenter takes some practice, but listening
is just as important as talking when it comes to being a great communicator
(this is not obvious to everyone, sadly) and often shy people have more
practice at listening.
Now, you may not agree that these six qualities are the most
important. There certainly are others that I considered for my list. But these
are the ones that I value in people who lead me or who are part of my team in a
leadership role. In a past company, I had a CEO and an architect with these
qualities and they were two of the best leaders that I have seen in my career. At first blush, you might not have thought
that these two people shared the same qualities. One was a very outgoing person
who seemed to relish attention, the other quiet and reserved who was happiest
coding away by himself in his office. But in many ways they were quite similar.
The CEO could set a clear vision, communicate it, and get
people motivated. There was a time at the company (during the dot bomb years) that
we had a 5-1 reverse split, our stock was down to about the $1 level from a
high of over $180, we could no longer spend money like a bunch of cocaine
addicts and had to lay off more than
half of our staff. Despite all of that, he came up with a vision for a company,
a strategy for turning it around, and then was able to get key members of the
staff to be believers. It was a big a
risk. There was equally as likely a chance that we would fade and wither away
as that we would succeed. The CEO loved risk if it came with a big reward (me ….not
so much … taking risks was always something I needed to work at). But it was not a foolhardy risk as he had a
talented staff that he got to rally around his vision. He made sure that we were really believers by
using a technique that we eventually called his “are you in or are you out?”
speech. After a strategy discussion or
presentation he would ask whether or not we were completely committed to the
strategy; by asking if we were “in or out” and saying that if we were “out” we really
should leave. He would judge our commitment by our reaction (the occasional
person did leave but most stayed). Once, after a particularly hard day where I
had agreed to take on more responsibility and had laid off more staff, he asked
the question at a late night planning meeting.
I was a bit angry when I answered “how much more do I need to be “in” to
prove it to you”. That to him was a good
sign regarding my commitment. During the 3-4 year period that it took us to
pull through, he was forced to make many a hard decision and he did. In the end, under his leadership we saved the
company, became profitable, and made a name for ourselves in our new
market. In retrospect, given the facts
of the situation, it is hard to believe that I made the decision to stay with
the company. But it was my trust in the CEO, his clear vision for the company, his
ability to make me understand it so I could guide my team effectively, and his ability to keep me and my peers
motivated through those tough times, that made it one of the greatest successes in my career.
The leadership skills of the architect were similar but looked
very different to most people. He was very skilled in the software business
with a wide range of experience. His technical papers and technical
presentations were superb. They lacked the showiness and humour of the
marketing presentations but were incredibly comprehensive, well laid out, and
easy to understand. He had a gift for
making the difficult topics accessible to the entire engineering team and for
providing a clear approach to solving technical problems. He was always interested in feedback on his
work; in fact, he was very uncomfortable when he did not get some kind of
meaningful critique or thoughtful question about it. It was not that he lacked self-confidence
but it was that he wanted people engaged and he wanted the communication to be
a dialogue; his papers were not to be taken as an edict. He was not only a technical guru; he understood
the importance of balancing engineering requirements with business needs. He
could make tough decisions when they needed to be made. He used to come to me
as his manager and tell me “time to shoot the engineers and ship” (I still make
use of that phrase). He knew when people were really tinkering and it was going
to do us no real good to keep coding. He
would recommend short cuts when they were needed and would also stand up to
disagree vehemently when he felt the wrong technical or business decision was
being made. Despite personally being a
very risk-averse person, he was willing and able to take calculated risks at work.
This was something that he learned to do
as it did not come to him naturally. The engineers and management trusted him, valued
his communication skills as well as his problem solving skills and knew that he
could make seemingly impossible things happen on an engineering team. Despite being very different from the CEO, he
too, was a great leader. *
With some practice, you can improve your leadership skills.
Think about the six qualities. Have you met leaders in the software industry
that had these qualities? Can you emulate their approach? Which of these
qualities do you need to work on the most? Start there. You can start taking
more risks. Or you can start practicing your two-way communication skills.
There is one other quality that leaders have that I did not put
my list, simply because I think that it is something that applies to everyone
in the software industry. You should always be learning. If you want to broaden
your skills in leadership and management, an easy way to start is by following
Harvard Business Review on twitter or subscribing to their daily blog notices
in email. They have excellent free resources on their site. I spend a few minutes each day on their site
and sometimes hours if the information is particularly interesting. If you have
other resources like this that you read daily, please share them with me.
*I would not normally name anyone that I describe here but I
would like to acknowledge the excellent work of the architect described in this post: Tom
Kelly. I had the pleasure of working with Tom for over 14 years at 2
companies. He was a real treasure. Tom
passed away last June and is sadly missed and fondly remembered each and every day.
