It’s almost midnight, the band plays, and the waiter pours. The bubbling foam atop your fluted glass previews what lies below—lovely champagne to cheer your heart and soul.
But what if your friendly waiter simply served you the froth on top? No way to toast the New Year, is it?
Beyond Frothy Fads
Don’t make the same mistake with your leadership development in 2019. Look past the foamy bubbles of today’s fads, to the essence hiding below: the timeless core of what leadership is, and what you must always do to build it throughout your career.
But it’s easy to get distracted. The leadership development industry has exploded in recent years, and, alas, there’s more than enough froth to confuse any aspiring professional. Too much shallow or gimmicky advice: about quick digital solutions, magical time management, secret leadership sauces, metaphors from history or Shakespeare, breathless predictions about the “completely new future.”
Abandon the ephemera. Build your capability on five fundamental principles:
1. Aim at what “leadership” really is. “Leader” has come to mean too many things—someone with an imposing title, or upper box on the org chart; or someone who simply challenges authority to stand apart from the crowd; or your eager-beaver colleagues who keep raising their hands for extra assignments. Cut to the core! If you want to build leadership, keep your aim on what leaders achieve: they create significant impact by building an organization of people working together on big common goals.
2. Leaders worry about motivating and aligning people, not specific structures of organization. Leaders achieve impact by mobilizing followers to get something done. The context for that can take many forms: a corporation (e.g. a big or small for-profit business); an extended enterprise (e.g. Amazon and its ecosystem of suppliers and sellers); a network (e.g. communities of open software developers or affiliated non-profit agencies); or a movement (e.g. armies of volunteers who followed Martin Luther King’s civil rights initiatives). Leaders also create impact in smaller-scale ways, e.g. with a team, a partnership or some other unit within a larger organization. What ultimately matters is not the form or structure, but how leaders assemble the necessary talent, and coordinate and inspire people so they can achieve major goals together.
3. “Management” is not a dirty word. The collective work of the team, corporation, network or enterprise doesn’t have to flow only from a leader’s hands-on direction; great leaders also drive results through indirect or intangible means with followers—appealing to purpose, building cultures of commitment and performance, encouraging others to take leadership on their own accord.
But achieving impact with any kind of organization always requires some management too. For decades, business academics have argued that leaders are different from managers, prompting too many would-be leaders to shirk from overseeing (or even engaging in) operational activity. Don’t get hung up on the labels, and be willing to step into some everyday real work. If you’re going to have impact with an organization, you have to develop enough experience to sometimes manage others. And doing so, by the way, also builds better judgment for you to hire and guide others who sometimes provide management for you. Leadership must be more than just having big thoughts or making motivational speeches at all-company meetings.
4. Build your leadership by on-the-job experience with critical organizational practices. You have to get good at a lot of things to be a successful leader—but start by prioritizing your development around a short list of must-do’s. Here are five fundamental practices that are always part of driving impact through organization. (“Practices” because you build knowledge and skills hands-on, reflecting and improving over time.)
- Building a unifying vision: setting out goals and a picture of success to provide purpose, motivation and ownership for the people of the organization
- Translating vision into strategy: working through choices about where and how to move the organization towards shared goals, and create distinctive value; and then planning and coordinating action
- Getting great people on board: recruiting, engaging and developing great talent through a “social contract” that promises growth, reward and relationships in exchange for people’s achievement
- Delivering results: establishing disciplines to ensure continual high performance by all members of the organization
- Innovating for the future: maintaining a dual focus on present performance and future opportunities, to keep the organization sustainable amidst changing trends and new challenges of competitors
5. Practice also “leading yourself.” Many leadership books emphasize what might be a sixth practice—focusing on what you do for yourself “to be a leader,” e.g. building your character, understanding what’s important to you, developing certain “leadership behaviors,” etc. Those aren’t wrong—but don’t get too buried in yourself. Keep your leadership focused on energizing the broader organization that will lead to major impact.
So, structure your self-care around four themes, to make it most effective for both you and your enterprise:
- Understand yourself—engage in regular, reflective diagnosis, so people following you know who you are, can better work with you at your best, and adapt to where you most need help
- Grow yourself— keep building specific knowledge and skills, so as you get better at your job, you are also improving the broader organization
- Share yourself—always develop other leaders, expanding your own growth through the give and take of teaching others, while also expanding the distributed capacity of the enterprise
- Take care of yourself—avoid burnout, cynicism and your own lesser performance, by harmonizing your work and personal life; keep yourself healthy, and ensure that the most meaningful things to you are always part of your everyday work.
Come January 1, make your leadership development resolution on the simple metaphor of that glass of New Year’s champagne: “Yes, I will enjoy some occasional froth, but only as a complement to the real wine below. I’ll keep my focus on the enduring fundamentals of impact, practicing the practices that have always moved organizations and leaders towards their common goals.”
Originally published on Forbes.com