Today is the first of four short takes on leadership.
We'll discuss authentic, artful, effective, excellent leadership.
That's next.
♪
Hey, welcome.
I hope you're doing great.
In case we haven't met yet, I'm Barry Farrar.
I normally speak to a freedom issue on my podcast, The Barry Farrar Show,
and usually to some current event.
But since all real impact comes from leaders,
I thought I'd provide some short takes on what I believe will be helpful to any person
endeavoring to make an impact as a leader.
These four modules on leadership are certainly not everything on the topic.
They are, though, my thoughts on the four most important components of leadership
that allow for sustainable impact.
Now, I've personally had the honor of being in a leadership role for 35 years,
and that was for a number of different companies and nonprofit organizations.
I never ran a Fortune 500 company.
The largest company had 400 employees.
But I was, and still am, the CEO or the chairman, or both, in businesses and nonprofits.
On the business side, they span six different industries.
Nonprofits include political ones, ones that had some religious belief,
and then others with a humanitarian outreach.
I employed a similar approach, and in each instance,
the organization outperformed expectations.
Now, you don't have to be a founder or CEO for these ideas to have some benefit.
Whether you're a line manager or a senior executive,
I believe that these thoughts will provide benefit to your organization
and to those whom you lead.
I'd like to collapse the concept of leadership into four words.
Authentic, artful, effective, and excellent.
In this first module, we look at authentic leadership,
and this is through the lens of the role of a leader.
So let's first look at some definitions.
Leadership is all about change.
All change is the result of leadership, good or bad.
Leadership results in a difference between what happened yesterday and what's happening today,
and that is all change that's in an organization.
Leading is all about intentional influence.
Deliberate impact is what the role of leading is.
Leader is the person, and that's all about three things.
Character, competence, and community.
A good or bad leader is defined by these three things.
Character includes the integrity, the grit, and the openness of the individual who's actually leading.
Competence is the capability to do the job that the person who's the leader has,
his capabilities, his gifts.
And community is the degree to which the leader is good at creating the culture
that fosters a fun, energizing environment, or a productive, healthy, hard-charging environment,
or whatever the culture is.
Leader development is all about character transformation and personal growth.
And this is where you allow yourself to expand, to improve, and to change in positive ways.
When your character is aligned with truth,
and your capabilities are integrated with your actual leadership role,
you've got the potential to fulfill your call.
And that is the goal of leader development.
Unfortunately, many would-be great leaders fall short.
And that's usually due to character issues that have been unchecked.
People can feel it when a leader has serious character flaws.
And in the long term, they aren't that great at leading.
So to condense the character needed to be a good leader,
I take that down to one idea.
And I would just use the concept of authenticity.
Now, this is linked to the notion of humility.
Not a false humility, but the real definition of the word.
And that is that you have a sound estimate of yourself.
When we have a sound estimate of ourselves, we're easier to follow.
And this is the essence of an authentic leader.
You've heard people say, you know, that guy's the real deal.
That's authenticity.
It means that whatever you say is exactly the same thing as the reality that's on the ground.
And it means that what you claim is fully trustworthy.
Authenticity's not that complex.
Yet, it creates an environment of trust and mutual respect.
Not only is it linked to humility, it's linked to integrity.
Integrity's not only truthful, it's whole and complete.
This is the simple but powerful idea of being clear about your cultural pillars
and really meaning them, not changing them in midstream.
cultural pillars later.
To flush out authenticity, let's look at leadership functions,
leadership responsibilities, and roles.
First, leadership functions.
These can be roughly described in three large circles.
Lead, equip, and care.
In any organization, the three circles intersect.
Under lead, you have four primary functions.
You give direction.
You provide inspiration.
It's a reason, a purpose for the effort.
You provide discipline when needed.
You provide order and a layout.
You organize.
Under equip, you're focusing less on the actual task
and more on developing your team member
on how to handle the task.
You develop her talents.
You develop and celebrate a particular specialty
your team member might have.
You help your team member develop character.
You understand, or you help her understand
that everything's challenging.
So you help her with perseverance.
You help her see the benefit of finishing a job.
So you help her with excellence.
You encourage her to be open about her own shortcomings
so she can be more self-aware and improve too.
And this strengthens her internal grit.
Under care, you take care of the team member's career
and her personal welfare.
You empathize.
You build a relationship of trust.
You listen to them.
It's the real safe place.
It's not a place that isolates someone
from the reality of the world.
That's not a real place.
It's a place where your ability
to legitimately take care of your team
makes you the safe place.
Your care gives that team member the freedom to be open.
You provide a relational environment
where it's okay to make mistakes.
So when those three circles
of leadership function intersect,
we find a truth.
As a general rule, most of us are not great at all three.
I'd go so far as to say that, at least in my experience,
I've never known anyone who was great at all three.
You're usually dominant in one,
and then you're okay at another,
and then the third is it's just not a natural strength.
Yet your goal is to lead with these three functions
as a good steward of your leadership strengths.
So what I've learned over the years
is that an authentic leader will accept his limitations
and endeavor to work around the edges
to improve in areas he can for the benefit of others.
So what I'm gonna recommend you do
is just take a quick minute to reflect on your ability
in each of these three leadership functions.
Give yourself a moment to provide a real self-appraisal.
On a scale of one to five,
rank yourself with five being awesome.
If you're a five with the functions under lead,
you're probably a one or a two on equip or care.
The same is true if you're a five with equip.
You're probably a one or two in lead or care.
And if you're a five with care,
you're probably a one or two in lead or equip.
I've found that being honest with myself is freeing.
Now, take your four or five score,
and we'll just pick on me.
My highest score's in lead, equip's average,
and my natural care score is one or a two.
The idea here is to expect a low score
in at least one circle.
So take your one to three scores
and think about what you could do around the edges
to improve it.
I had a pretty high lead and a three on equip,
but I really wasn't natural or good with care.
Keep in mind that you can be a loving and caring person
and have a low care leadership skill level.
So don't get too distracted by the terms
outside of the leadership functions.
Anyway, I made it my goal to get to a three in care.
And over the years, I've mostly gotten there,
but I have to think about it.
I had to think of ways that I could change,
how I could improve and be more relational.
I actually began to deliberately say things
that would create more relational warmth
with my subordinates.
I even had to walk slower, force myself to sit down,
and especially around those that were two levels below me.
And then I actually became a little bit more that way.
Now, the goal here is not perfection.
That's not gonna happen.
You'll always be more dominant in one strength
over the others.
The goal is to know yourself well enough
to be able to self-correct.
If lead is not needed in a situation that much,
and care is gonna be more helpful than equip,
I at least have the tools to muddle through.
But the real goal is self-awareness,
and that takes humility, and that yields authenticity.
I've learned over the years that my subordinates
don't expect perfection, just authenticity.
And that has the nifty side benefit
of improving your overall effectiveness.
So those are the three leadership functions,
and if you're an authentic leader,
you'll be honest with yourself and others
about your strengths and your weaknesses.
in all three of the leadership functions.
Now, similar but different from the functions are the three
leadership responsibilities. These are the actual obligations of the
leader and those obligations need to be handled by someone
in leadership. They also have three intersecting circles.
The first is task. This is similar to the function of lead. This is where you give
direction, you clarify tasks and
clarify the vision, you provide structure to accomplish the vision,
this is where you support activities for a particular task,
this is where you dive into the problem-solving schematic. As a general
rule, this follows the high D from that disk test if you're familiar with that,
this is where one of your motivating drivers is really just to get
the task done. And if you have high
task, you have a naturally high concern for
all the duties and the vision accomplishment. The second leadership
responsibility
is inspire. Though the first three circles
under functions are not a hundred percent correlated to responsibilities,
this is kinda similar to equip. This is where you motivate followers toward the
vision,
where you encourage perseverance, where you encourage corporate
integrity, where you refresh the memory of everybody on the team
on values and the purpose of the organization and why there is an
organizational structure.
This is where the welfare of the corporate culture is emphasized
this is where your actions model inspiring people to follow you,
this is where you celebrate the values. You're a true believer
in the mission. You're contagious. The third
leadership responsibility is people.
Though these things are really independent and there's really
uncorrelated components between leadership functions
and responsibilities, this responsibility of people is similar to care.
This is where your responsibility is to develop people. This is where
you build relationships. This is where you solve relational problems.
This is where your people know that you have a high concern
for their personal welfare. So these are the three leadership
responsibilities. And if you can think of them as three circles, they have these
intersecting points.
So similar to functions, most leaders are not great at all three
responsibilities.
You're usually dominant in one and okay at another.
The third's just not that natural for you. Yet your goal is to operate to some
extent in all three responsibilities
and to know when you need to reach out for help in an area that you're not
that good at. So, being aware of my limits
and being willing to improve them has proven to be really helpful.
But don't overdo this. I think you should function in your strongest circle
most of the time. It's just good for you as an authentic leader
to be able to go through this self-appraisal exercise once in a while. It helps you
be more relatable. And even if you're a ten-talent man, you think you're like a
perfect leader,
you'll be the first one that I know, you need to convey to your team
that it's okay to improve and that it's okay to work together.
Here again, let's just take a minute to reflect on your ability in each of these
three leadership responsibilities.
The same scoring is here. On a scale of one to five,
rank yourself with five being awesome. If you're a five with responsibilities
under people,
you're probably a one or two on task or inspire. And just like before,
give yourself an honest self-assessment. Now,
take your four or five score, and let's say it's in the arena of people,
and do the best you can at an accurate
assessment of task and inspire. You're probably a one or a two, maybe a three,
in those other areas. Now, think about what you could do around the edges to
improve your lower score.
And that gives you to get those leadership responsibilities taken care of
better.
By the way, you can love people and have a low people responsibility score. So
again, don't get too distracted by the terms outside of the leadership
responsibilities.
Anyway, you can make it your goal to get to a three
in the areas that you're low, and you'll find that you'll become more that way to
an extent
over time. But if you score a one or a two,
that area is just not ever gonna come naturally to you. To grow, you're gonna have to
be deliberate.
And again, the goal here isn't perfection. But just like with leadership functions,
your leadership responsibilities will always have
within you one that's more dominant in one strength over the others.
The goal is to know yourself well enough to be able to self-correct.
What is the most important leadership responsibility in this
situation? Authenticity
is self-aware. It's not always about the person.
That way the leader can reduce his self-absorption.
Authenticity is the ability to communicate with a sense of confidence.
You never have to remember a lie. You don't have to triangulate your team.
You can handle both the functions of leadership and the response of
abilities of leadership well. In my experience, the more I simplify things, the more effective
I become. So I'm going to try to simplify authenticity as it relates to your roles.
Now you can collapse the functions and the responsibilities into just two overall leadership
roles. One's directional and the other is supportive. On the directional side, you are
clarifying where you're going and why. You cast the mission, the vision and the values
and you lay out the goals. You direct your team on what to focus on. These directional
initiatives are essential. The organization can't exist without direction. This is one
of the primary leadership roles. For those of us where this comes easy, we need to remember
there's another side. On the supportive side, you help people develop and accomplish whatever
you have them working on. You give them coaching, you facilitate, you teach, you encourage,
you model the right behavior and the right problem solving capabilities and you provide
the resources needed to be successful. Without the supportive role of leadership, there would
be no professional development, no great company culture. The organization won't long last
without the supportive role as well. So whether you're more naturally supportive or more able
easily to give direction, you need both to be effective over the long term. An authentic
leader is genuine. He understands the functions of leadership and is willing to make some
personal adjustments to make sure all three are handled. She understands the responsibilities
of leadership and is willing to think through the internal character issues that allow her
to enhance the completion of the ones that are not her natural gifting. All the functions
and all the responsibilities of leadership need to be accomplished. When we're honest
with what we are good at and not so good at, it helps us. Because then we can endeavor
to fulfill with others and openness, all the functions and all the responsibilities. And
that right there is authentic leadership. The authentic leader understands that he's
always either directing or supporting and he endeavors to balance the two for the benefit
of the organization. He's honest and he navigates the roles of leadership with humility.
Hey, thanks for joining us. Next time, we look at artful leadership to your success
and to your freedom.
Hi, I'm David Farah. Thank you for listening to my dad's podcast, The Barry Farah Show,
Culture Shift. Click subscribe now to be sure you don't miss an episode. Share this podcast
with your friends on social media and give The Barry Farah Show your five star rating.
See you next time.