Testing leadership — should you follow your leader?
Your leader calls you to follow his or her lead. Now is the time to spring into action. There’s work to be done and some bruises to collect on the way. The road to victory is paved with challenges and it will not be easy. And at his point, you ask yourself: should I follow?
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a simple test to reveal if the person called your leader is truly a leader? To ask some simple questions, to test some basic behaviors and to easily determine how much of your time and effort should you put in following the lead?
Actually… I can give you such a test. Leadership is simple, and this simplicity is making it very hard for leaders to achieve it.
To be able to lead, a leader needs two fundamental elements: credibility and authority. You can acquire both of them in two ways: somebody would transfer them to you, or you build them in time, step by step.
The transfer mechanism is the one that typically gets a leader started: you get a diploma from a college or some certifications in your industry and credibility builds up. You work in the police force, or as a Prime Minister and your authority is inherited from your position. Or when you work for a corporation and the sheriff gives out a company-wide mail announcing that you get to be the new boss of something — authority delivered.
However, the transfer mechanism has some inherent weaknesses. Your certified credibility crumbles down very quickly when in practice you have no clue on how to execute what you are certified for. And the authority of a Trump presidency also goes down fast when doing all kinds of funny things.
So credibility and authority transferred are basically nothing without the leaders personally working out hard to build them too.
Let’s look at the combination of these two leadership traits and the effects they might have on your leader.
Combo 1 — the leader has authority, but no credibility. I was once appointed some kind of a team lead and service management expert for a family type like company. I was introduced by the boss and empowered with the authority to take the team to a different level. And in the next few months, I found myself taking almost daily exams to prove my credibility to the team. One day I was asked to help write down a few complicated queries (to prove I know SQL — as my certifications were showing), another to configure a service management tool (to prove that I knew ITIL). Too bad that when I finally gathered my credibility, the company went bankrupt.
Combo 2 — the leader has credibility, but no authority. Doing my “post-mortem” analysis on leaving a project where I did not succeed in achieving what I wanted, I concluded that although I made the right strategic choices, with a valid approach and generating the correct action plan I partially failed because I basically had no authority to follow up on it. The team accepted me and my brand and ignored my call to action as they were not only convinced that bad things can't be changed, but also that I do not have the mandate to change stuff.
Combo 3 — the leader has no credibility and no authority. This happens more often than it should. You get a new lead sent from above, with a crappy CV, with a dubious reputation, with an unclear mandate, that says all the wrong things at the wrong times and that triggers constant damage to the company, the project, the team and to people. And you would be tempted to think that happens more often in the public sector (where political appointments thrive), but there are plenty of examples in the private sector too.
Combo 4 — the leader has both credibility and authority. When a leader has both credibility and authority it is almost impossible for him or her not to succeed, whatever the endeavor and the challenges ahead. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, all had both, and people followed them in changing the world as we know it. And I promised myself that when discussing my next assignment I will make this a central element of my mandate: how to secure both credibility and authority so that I too, can succeed.
Having said all this, I come back to my initial promise: give you some simple tools to determine your leader’s credibility and authority. Here you have some helping questions:
Questions related to credibility:
- What is your leader good at? What is his personal brand? What is he known for?
- How are others talking about him? What stories do they tell?
- What is written in his CV? Did he do relevant work? Is he doing what he says? Is he putting his money where his mouth is?
- Is he living his story? Or only talking about it?
Questions related to authority:
- Where is his authority coming from? How much do you trust him?
- Do you accept his authority? If yes or no, why?
- Is his authority rising and falling in time? Why is that?
- How is he spreading justice? Is he balanced and equal?
- Is he running away from accountability? Or is he fighting with the troops?
To have a leader that is worth following, that has credibility and authority, is crucial for our careers. And I would have a tough time to choose what is more important for my leader, as both are key for his and my success. Without authority, there is not too much change one can make, and without credibility, a leader is tempted to ride the team hard, without caring too much about complexity and technical challenges, believing that teleportation is just a matter of will power.
So take a long, careful look to your leader and try to understand where he or she stands on the credibility/authority scale — as your personal success depends directly on this. Trust me.
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