Leadership - Mel and Julie Miller

Tons of books and materials have been written and published on the topic of leadership. The following thoughts are NOT extracted from any materials except our own life experiences and are provided not only as a small reflection of our capabilities and experiences but also as an opportunity for those seeking leadership advice and guidance.

Good leaders are the result of many things: training, experience in life situations, and following the advice of other good leaders. You are not born into leadership, you grow into it.

Leadership means taking care of your people because they are what perform the mission and accomplish results in any organization, be it military, industrial, technological or business. Now "taking care of your people" means a lot of things. Among them:

Providing them the tools, equipment, time, and all necessary resources for them to accomplish their jobs.

Giving them the opportunities to exceed their own expectations. Challenging them to be initiative driven and creative.

Giving them good "strategic" guidance on the scope of their missions while providing them specific instructions as needed. Lead them, don't make them into slaves of routine step-by-step job duties boredom.

Praise, praise, recognize, award, and show genuine pride in their accomplishments. Praise them, praise them in front of their peers, praise them to your boss and others. You cannot overdo this. People want to do a good job and they get better when their efforts are recognized and appreciated.

Discipline them for infractions. Yes taking care of people means sometimes you have to "kick them in the b..t" for fouling up. However, provide them with the reasons for the discipline which are beyond they just broke the rules. Rules have purpose and being reminded of the reasons helps build appreciation and respect for the rules. Unlike praise, discipline is done in private.

Be aware of their personal life situations apart from the job. Be supportive and understanding and be available to offer suggestions or advice if asked. Be aware and understand that what happens to person outside the job has a huge impact on how they perform in their job. You want to be able to mold those experiences into positive job performance. As a leader you spend an enormous amount of time observing your team performing in an environment which represents only about a third of who and what they are. The other two-thirds of what your team is include family, hobbies, interests and behaviors completely un-related to the mission you are supervising.

A good leader can instill confidence in their people, are charismatic and are visionaries. They see where the whole organization is going and can take that vision and through their enthusiasm, commitment, and stead-fastness, get the entire organization moving toward that goal.

Leadership is not an end. It's the means to several ends. One of them is results. Whether it's a successful military mission, development of a product, a big sale, revenue increase or quarterly growth. Leadership is what helps get you there. Some leaders approach results with an attitude of the "right" way and the "wrong" way to accomplish tasks. Unfortunately, these leaders view right and wrong from only their interpretation, approaching task accomplishment with an attitude of "my way or the highway". The experienced leader recognizes there are many ways to accomplish a task and understands that the strengths and weaknesses of the team will define how some tasks are performed. In this approach the leader will find that team members often have a lot to offer and they will discover new, more efficient and better ways to get things done. Conversely, team members will gain confidence in their leader's experience and insight when "their way" turns out to cost more, do less, or take longer than an approach suggested or recommended by the leader.

Leaders are concerned about the quality of both the work and the results. Some leaders are only satisfied with perfection and golden quality in every task and result without regard to each task's relative importance or cost to the overall result. Sometimes, tasks and sub-results performed "good enough" are the keys to golden quality in the desired final product. This doesn't mean mediocrity is acceptable, it simply means that perfection (as defined by the leader's perception) in every detail may actually result in overall failure or cost over-run of a project.

The experienced leader knows that a task performed some other way than the way he would have done it, isn't necessarily wrong. The key to leadership and team success is to look at all the results without micro-managing every specific detail. The young leader will often direct task accomplishment in infinite detail, attempting to drive accomplishment as a mirror of how he would have performed. The result is frustration with his "stupid" team that just can't do anything right and an "I have to do everything" view of the job. It also leads to teams which are singularly un-motivated to do a good job because they will see it apparently will never be done "right".

Leaders have to learn the difference between leadership and management. There are times when the leader is also the manager but the roles the leader must portray are different. For example, we would hope that a CEO of a company is the leader. Through his or her vision and actions the company moves toward a goal and develops the entire organization into the best in sector. The enthusiasm, confidence, and ability of that leader to motivate and instill a sense of pride and loyalty to the organization is what differentiates that person from a first line supervisor or manager of a smaller team. However, when the CEO is dealing with the top level management teams, the leader may then have to put on the hat of manager. The manager must be able to ensure a smooth work flow, accomplishment of missions, equitable work load, good work environment and the list goes on. But when dealing with the human side of the team, the manager then becomes the leader. The leader needs to be able to motivate, cultivate, challenge, and all the other traits that instill loyalty to the team.

One misconception is that all managers are leaders. Unfortunately that is so far from the truth and what leads to placing mediocre people in positions of key leadership. A manager can make sure the mission is accomplished through sheer determination and micromanaging each step of the process but does not take care of the people and the team. In those cases the team is not cohesive and lacks the loyalty to perform under all conditions. You would probably see a high rate of employee turnovers in those cases. The team doesn't develop into a functioning team unless one other team member has taken on the role of the leader.