Nurturing Leadership

I’m not one to pick the battle between whether leadership can be taught or is innate, but I do think leadership can be nurtured. The earlier the better.

The more natural leadership is as organic behaviour patterns than learned practical exercises, the better.

The concern I have is that leadership has been made into this mythological style that one needs to be either trained in or born with, when, realistically speaking, it’s not that hard of a concept to grasp.

Yes, for a guy that talks about leadership a lot, gets on the circuit and does talks on the subject, I'm telling you this isn't hard.

I find it ironic that leadership was about how a leader led his or her people and yet we believe there is a magical formula that we all need to learn that will make us natural born leaders. Leadership is unique to the individual, unique to the people you lead and unique to the environment you are in. It is not a strict set of guidelines that you follow or study that makes you a good or a bad leader.

At times I equate leadership to humanity and being a person above all else. Don't get me wrong, I'm not asking you to hug trees, I'm not that person, but I am the one who says being a Manager alone is not enough.

And I will also say that being a Leader is not always about making the easy calls that makes everyone happy. In fact some of our greatest leaders have had to make some of the toughest decisions, at times impacting the lives of those they lead.

Leadership is more than just softening Management and the traditional hierarchy. It’s about an approach, about how you believe you want to show up and work with people around you. It is about being tough yet human. It is about being inclusive, yet knowing when to make the decision. It is about having fun but getting the job done. It is about engendering thoughts, new ideas and creativity, all the while keeping an eye on your objectives.

Leadership is one of the biggest contradictions in organizational and personal styles one can have. Yet it works. Perhaps it is because we are contradictions in our own lives and in our own ways that this fits so well.

Find your own contradictions, find your own style. It will drive you further than you ever have. Challenges, opportunities, and all.

One of my best worst leadership mistakes

We have a recruitment process at WeUsThem that, for a small business, is rather arduous and lengthy.

Recruits have multiple levels of sorting and filtering they need to go through before they even walk through the door. After vetting their resumes, the candidates have an initial short meet and greet with the hiring manager followed immediately with a skills test. Should the candidate make it through the first round, it leads to a meeting with my business partner and I. If they are a potential candidate of choice at that point, they meet with rest of the team. If there’s a positive nod from the team, the candidate’s references are checked out and an offer is finally put forward.

Now, you must be thinking as to why a small business would put itself through such a lengthy process, and what the purpose may be. There are a few reasons for this, which are:

1- We want to make sure whoever we hire fits with the “je ne sais quoi” of our team. It's taken a long time for us to put together a team that just works and to maintain this is absolutely paramount. This harmony and chemistry, the ying and yang is unique to our team and we do what we can to maintain this.

2- We want the right sets of skills that are “beyond the paper”. We test not just for work-related skills—we also test for creativity. Thinking on your feet while applying your skill sets is an important asset for us.

3- We want each team member to take ownership for including others. Our potential hires will need to work and be comfortable with each other.

In the case of our most recent hire, we went through our typical process, step by step. Once they made it through the first round, it was time for them to meet with my business partner and I. After we met and the candidate left,  my partner and I found ourselves with two very different opinions. While she believed they would be a good addition to the team, I had my sincere doubts.

Together, we decided to let them progress to the next round to see what feedback we would receive from the team and, once again, he made it through.

I admit, I was worried. For the first time, after recruiting hundreds of people in my former careers I had an uneasy feeling on this particular hire. Although we have a probationary period in place, I did not want to invest in someone who just wouldn't work. But, due to our process, I was outvoted, outnumbered and outgunned.

Three months ago, this individual joined our small but mighty rag tag team and just completed their first review.

There is no other way to say it: I was wrong. The hire carved a unique place for themselves in our team, while also providing us much needed support.

I honestly had thought I made a mistake when letting my team outvote me to hire this individual. I’m proud to say that I’m glad I was wrong and that my partner and the team were there to catch me. This hire was my best worst mistake.

Our recruitment process may sound absurd for what we do, but we don't just add employees to our team—we add family members, as my partner would say. This multi-layered process brought us another member who adds to our strengths and works cohesively in a fashion we are comfortable with.

It's only been three months, but the teachable moment of looking back and relying on group think allowed us to gain an important cog in our WeUsThem machine.

Leadership inherently requires trusting your team and building in the capacity so that you can be caught by those that you surround yourself with. Build a team, one that takes ownership and voices their concerns when you may have missed something. This collaborative leadership style will bring about organic leadership training, growth and progression for your team while ensuring the ethos of the business continues to remain as you had envisioned.

I have always said that successful leadership needs to be about a bottom-up model than top-down and, clearly, this is another example of how this truly works. Building those conditions are important and, perhaps, you too will make a mistake you’ll eventually be proud of.

Going for the Crystal (Gold)? Invest in Ideas or …?

by Ashwin Kutty

Winning an award is quite a cathartic experience. If you do end up winning does that mean you have now accomplished all you can in that category and have mastered it enough to be recognized by peers and industry leaders? Or does it mean that you now need to move on to other categories and master those to see if you can do as well?

Seated: Leslie & Faten
Front Row: Mitch, Ashwin & Anthony
Back Row: Staff off ill, on vacation, and yet to be recruited and all our families
Corner: Gollum

I have never understood individual awards as well. Don’t get me wrong, I love being hailed as a fearless leader for the country, but does it happen without the support of those around me? Does it happen without the teams that help me reach these zeniths? Does it happen without the families that suffer through your hunger for more and what they have to put up with, i.e. the late nights, the conference calls (both video and audio) during vacations and god knows what else?

I was recently honoured & humbled by the Peter Brojde Foundation & CATAAlliance's Next Generation Executive Leadership Award which I was pleased to receive at the Gala in Ottawa earlier this month. The work for which I was nominated included a large team of professionals from Information Technology to Marketing & Communications to vendor partners to frontline staff to Finance & Decision Support and a whole bunch of others that helped me get the project off the ground, underway and a runaway success.

I am only as successful as the team that supports me. Even in this instance, there are those that are not pictured in the photo above, but they know who they are. Crazy ideas, fantastic innovations and creative explorations are great, but to make them a reality requires execution. An idea without a successful execution strategy has no meaning. As an Angel myself, my strategy has always hedged on a solid team that can execute over one that may have a better idea.

Putting together a team is no easy task, and with one of my recent ventures, this has never been truer. I have been painstakingly slow about recruiting my team and this has been primarily to ensure that the team I put together is a reflection of the culture, the atmosphere and the environment I want in the space. The team, like my partner and myself receive an equal vote on who comes in to the fold. They get a deciding vote as they take ownership for how the team functions.

Small and Mighty far outweighs Large and Insignificant. I believe in small teams that make up the larger whole and the power of these small teams drive the innovation in this country.

So my thought this Monday afternoon that I would share with you is, give your teams the power to decide how they would like their team built. Give them ownership for their own teams and watch the accountability and performance rise. Simultaneously you will find there to be a downward trend of personality issues and conflicts in the workplace as the team will self manage the relationships. Diversity in a team is good and this will be managed quite well - people by nature do not want competition in their own niche, they would rather partners that complement them than substitutions, driving diversity in thought and approach.

With that, have a glorious week and to our team at WeUsThem Inc. and their families, a hearty congratulations on this beautiful award.

Excelling vs. Growth

I read this article (http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2011/10/america_excelling_at_mediocrit.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date) that is specifically around the US and how mediocrity in comparison to some other countries is seemingly the order of the day. Although I do not buy that to the tee, what I do say is that there is a sense of "just getting by" in the world today that tends to be a rampant infectious disease that is creeping up at various levels.

I read yet another article a few months ago in HBR (Harvard Business Review - forgive me, I do not have the URL for the original) that spoke of how one leader/executive could not move ahead in her organization as she was considered to be a disruptor, a pusher, a go getter and sometimes did so to her peril. Her colleagues, her staff, etc. were so disenfranchised that the solution she was provided was to tone her capabilities down. She was passed up for vertical movements within the organization as she was seen as a lone ranger. Once again, although I do not agree with the tenets of the argument, i.e. be overly successful and disconnect with your team, I do concur with the thought that leadership needs to engender a culture of creativity, innovation, dare I say drive to achieve more than the norm.

As the first around mediocrity states, there is a sense of "just enough" around us; I would suggest that the corporate culture of push push push may have gotten a bit softer in this new era. I do find that with the advent of social media and this new focus towards social collusion, both private and corporate, there is a refocus in employee priorities and the penetration of the social dynamic is an important factor in the being of people today.

I would argue that whether we call it mediocrity, whether we strive for excellence, whether we want a refocus, whatever or however we phrase it, the growth phenomenon needs to be instilled within the corporate setting. All the Google'isms aside, whether it is a 80/20 focus on efficiency or a blend of corporate and social cultures, a highly caffeinated boost to our corporate micro-economies are required if we hope to make a dent on what I suggest is perhaps the key to a succeeding failure.

Corporations have been toying with new mechanisms to reengage their employees, and one of the common themes we continue to forget is that, the monetary and non-monetary methodologies we have used for decades still have some meaning left in them. The simplest options sometimes are the quickest ones with the most results. All the buzz words and the new age paradigms aside, people fundamentally want to enter a workplace they can work in, grow and perhaps earn some recognition while doing so. Nurturing this ideology while understanding that not everyone fits this mold, will perhaps get us further quicker and easier than all the techniques, self-help books would teach us.

Leadership, some say is a burden, I say its a privilege and to earn this privilege requires strength, creativity, innovation and a blend of caffeinated zen that allows for the creation & management of incremental growth within a state of calm. The challenge in this dictum is to ensure you not only do this, but to remain sustainable, engender it within your team; not recruit it, but engender it.