Your leadership style will shape your team's culture
A good people leader's first priority is to spend time leading people - that's the job!
My last article about data lakes and oceans touched a bit on the culture of how businesses work and should come together in the data environment, but what about the leaders of these organizations? I've recently found myself having many conversations about leadership styles. Some companies are looking for servant-leaders to run organizations while others want to hire player-coaches to make sure the people leader has a stake in the game. Meanwhile it seems like every company wants to transform and be more digital. I would greatly appreciate your thoughts on the topic either below or in a private message.
"Player-coaches rarely perform these roles as effectively as they could" - Boston Consulting Group
I used to think that I was a great player-coach. I ran a large IT operations organization early in my career and I was hands-on, technical, and owned a scope of work separate from my reports. These reports were 3rd party contingent workers, though, and the real heavy lifting from a coaching and guiding perspective happened via their in-company managers. While the team was very productive and our internal customer satisfaction numbers sky-rocketed, in retrospect that had a lot to do with me from a decision-making perspective, but nothing to do with me from an employee-development perspective. I did love working with that team and still have a great relationship with former team-members, but if I had also had to be a stronger coach during that time, something would have had to change.
According to a study by the Boston Consulting Group, player-coaches are "bad for sports—and they are bad for business." When a coach is busy playing, she is unable to get the full lay of the land of the business; unable to make connections with other leaders and customers; and she is unable to spend time moving obstacles and players around on the court for maximum impact and success.
Being able to make an impact, though, is important to many people! I have always tried to define what is my role versus what is delegated to someone else on my team. In that way, maybe I still retain a bit of "playing", but usually only to stay connected to the business and other senior leaders.
"The servant-leader is a servant first. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first." - Robert K. Greenleaf
Servant-leadership, although first written about back in the 1970's by Robert K Greenleaf, seems to be having a resurgence 40 years later. This philosophy emphasizes that coaches should be very in touch with the needs of the team members that work for them. This subservience pushes the importance of the team up the value scale while reducing the importance of the people leader himself. The idea is that by taking care of the team in such a way, they will be more motivated and productive through an enhanced sense of dedication to each other and the leader.
According to Mind Tools, a website dedicated to providing skills for an excellent career, servant-leadership is more of a set of behaviors than a leadership style. While there are definitely characteristics that are important to motivate employees, personally I would caution against going overboard. A leader needs to be seen as a person of authority. True, making sure the team is equipped and motivated to be successful is key, as is asking for input on strategy/decisions, but historically speaking, servants do not earn the type of respect that leaders need to make and be accountable for decisions. Cheryl Williamson, in a Forbes article, gave four good examples of what an all-in servant-leader should consider doing. A servant-leader needs to do those things while still challenging and stretching the team members in ways that they may not like in order to help them grow.
"[Transformational] leaders and their followers raise one another to higher levels of morality and motivation." - James McGregor Burns
I connect most with the Transformational Leadership style as described by Mind Tools and James McGregor Burns in his 1978 book "Leadership". This philosophy blends elements from other styles and behaviors while pushing team members to achieve the vision of the leader. It's the leader's responsibility to sell that vision and build a sense of trust and buy-in, with which servant-leader techniques can be very helpful. The idea of "managing delivery of the vision", though, contains a treasure trove of things like accountability, shared responsibility, stretch goals, targets, and gamification that all can be great tools to also shape the team, as individuals and as a unit.
In a former role, I built the service delivery branch of GE's People Analytics organization. I brought 10 internal employees on board by selling them the vision that we would be the source of reporting and analytics across the entire company. We would support > 4,000 HR professionals (et. al. employees needing people-related data) and we would, with the help of 12 contingent workers, transform how HR leaders accessed and used people data. I took time to explain blogs from our CEO and highlight how our work directly led to one of his primary goals for the company: to attract and hire the best talent from around the world and help them build meaningful careers. I had weekly team meetings in which we used our own operations data to have competitions and to engage each other in knowledge and relationship sharing that accelerated our development as a team. I also had bi-weekly one-on-ones with everyone in order to connect with them and understand how I could support their personal and professional development. At the end of the first year, we were consistently highlighted as a high-performing team that allowed the businesses to reduce internal overhead costs while supporting a growing need for better people data and analytics.
Your company's corporate culture will play a huge role in which style will be most successful. Personally, I've always found great value in continuously encouraging my teams to think differently, challenge the status quo, and improve themselves and the business (especially when it comes to data and analytics work!). Transformational leadership has worked very well in that regard and I've been relied upon by my company to lead the change time and time again. Do share your thoughts and experiences; I'd love to hear about different successful leadership cultures.
Matt Brooks is a seasoned thought leader and practitioner in data and analytics; culture; product development; and transformation.