The Parts of Leadership It's Hard to Prepare For

There is plenty that can be taught or learnt about leadership.

You can learn how to build a strategy, set objectives, manage performance, communicate a vision and develop a high-performing team. There are models for almost every conceivable leadership challenge, from giving feedback to managing change.

All of that has immense value, but there is a point at which leadership stops being something you can learn from a framework and becomes something you have to experience.

It happens when you are sitting opposite somebody and telling them their role is disappearing. When someone you have spent years developing tells you they are leaving. When an employee walks into your office having just lost someone they love and you realise there is absolutely nothing you can do to make the situation better.

From my experience, those are the moments that tend to stay with you and they are also the moments that reveal something important about leadership. The job is much more emotional, personal and human than many of the books and corporate guides would have us believe.

These are the parts of leadership that can be harder to prepare for, because they are less about what you know and more about who you are. Over time, I have come to think that they tell us at least as much about leadership as any strategy, competency framework or management theory. 

You can be the person everyone looks to and still have no idea what comes next 

There is a strange thing about becoming a leader and that’s the fact that people start looking to you for answers at precisely the point when you become more aware of how much you don't know.

The more senior you become, the more likely you are to encounter situations without an obvious precedent. The problems become bigger, the consequences more significant and the answers very much less certain.

You can be sitting in a meeting where everyone assumes you have the answer while a small voice in your head is asking whether you are actually up to the job.

That doesn't mean that you are an imposter - it means that you understand the weight of the responsibility.

Leadership doesn't require omniscience. The most important requirement is judgement. Knowing when to decide, when to ask for help, when to listen to somebody with more expertise and when to admit that you got something wrong.

There is considerably more strength in that kind of honesty than there is in pretending to be certain about everything.

The people you are proudest to develop may be the ones you have to let go 

One of the less comfortable rewards of being a good leader is watching people become good enough to leave you.

You may have spent years giving someone opportunities, encouraging them when they lacked confidence, helping them navigate setbacks and pushing them towards things they weren't sure they could do. Then another organisation offers them an opportunity you cannot match.

You can be genuinely delighted for them and still feel the loss.

I don't think there is anything wrong with admitting that. Developing people doesn't mean becoming indifferent when they leave and we need to acknowledge that their career belongs to them, not to us or our organisation.

If someone leaves having become more capable and confident because of the time they spent working with you, that isn't a leadership failure – it is absolutely a success.

There will be moments when the most useful thing you can offer is your presence 

As leaders are generally expected to solve problems, it is also our instinct to feel useful. Somebody comes to us with an issue and our immediate response is usually to work out what needs to happen next.

However, grief and personal anguish doesn't work like that.

When an employee tells you that somebody they love has died, or an important relationship has ended, there is no action plan that will make the conversation easier. There isn't a performance objective for getting through something like bereavement and no leadership technique that makes loss hurt less. That almost powerlessness is something that is pretty hard to sit with.

What you can offer is your presence.

You can listen and give them your time. You can resist the urge to fill an uncomfortable silence with advice simply because you don't know what else to say.

That can feel like doing very little, but in reality, it can be one of the most important things you do as a leader.

Not every problem needs to be solved by you. Sometimes people simply need to know that you are there.

People make decisions about their future based on how they experience your leadership 

We sometimes talk about organisational culture as though it is something created by values statements, policies and employee engagement programmes.

Employees experience culture much more directly than that because they experience it through their manager.

It’s the way you respond when someone makes a mistake. Whether you notice when somebody is struggling. If you choose to give credit or take it. Whether people feel able to disagree with you, and whether you make time for them when you are busy.

Over time, those interactions tell people what it is really like to work somewhere.

A leader can give somebody a reason to believe they have a future in an organisation. They can also, often without realising it, become the reason that person starts looking elsewhere.

That is an incredibly sobering responsibility.

It is also why leadership cannot be separated from the experience of the people being led.

You will have to tell people things they don't want to hear 

At some point, almost every leader has to have a conversation they would rather not have.

It might be a restructure, a missed target, a change in direction or a decision that is going to disappoint somebody. Often, by the time you are having the conversation, the decision itself has already been made. What remains is the responsibility for how you communicate it.

That is where leadership really matters.

You cannot always make difficult news better. What you can do is make sure the person receiving it is treated with honesty and respect. You can explain what you know, be straightforward about what you don't, and give somebody the space to react without becoming defensive.

People don't have to agree with every decision you make in order to trust you. They do, however, need to believe that you will tell them the truth and treat them properly when the truth is difficult.

That is a very different thing from simply following the communications plan.

There will be days when you carry the weight of a whole room of people

Leadership can be an extraordinarily emotional job, and in my view it should be - its about people after all and if there is one thing that will always be a human advantage, its emotion.

People will bring some of their most uncomfortable feelings to you. Their uncertainty, frustration, anxiety about change and their fears about the future. Sometimes they bring anger with it that has very little to do with you personally, but you are the person standing in front of them when it needs somewhere to go.

You can absorb a lot of that without even noticing that you are doing it.

The answer isn't to become detached or to pretend that none of it affects you. I don't think employees need leaders who are robotic or behave as though they are made of something different from everyone else.

But they do need leaders who can recognise their own emotional response and manage it.

There is a difference between saying, "This is difficult and I'm concerned too," and allowing your own anxiety to become the loudest thing in the room.

That difference can have a huge effect on a team.

Leadership is tested when the rules don't quite fit the situation 

This is not an argument against process, because good organisations absolutely need it. They need consistency, accountability and clear standards, particularly when decisions affect people's careers.

However, there are times when following a process to the letter is not necessarily the same as doing the right thing.

A person can be technically compliant with a policy and still feel that they have been treated badly. Equally, a leader can hold somebody accountable while treating them with considerable humanity.

The leadership judgement lies in knowing the difference and adapting to the circumstance..

I believe that good leadership means being able to look beyond the process and ask what the situation actually requires. Sometimes the answer will be to follow the policy. Sometimes it will be to pause, listen and understand what is going on before deciding what happens next.

The process matters, but so does the person standing in front of you.

You don't get to decide whether people trust you 

Trust is often talked about as though it is something you build and then possess, but it absoutely isn't.

It lives in the detail of everyday behaviour. You tell the team you'll do something, and then you must do it. You make sure that you give people difficult information rather than allowing them to hear it on the grapevine. This one is vital - you admit openly when you have made a mistake. 

None of those things is particularly dramatic, which is precisely the point.

Trust is built through repetition, often in those moments that nobody else notices. It can take years to establish and only a few careless decisions to damage and lose.

As a leader you do not get to say, "I've earned their trust," and move on.

You have to keep earning it.

There will be moments when other people need your confidence more than you feel confident 

There are times when everything seems to happen at once – that horrible phrase – the perfect storm.

The strategy isn't working. Something unexpected has happened. People want answers. The information you have is incomplete and the pressure to make a decision is growing.

You may be worried too, but the difference is that people are watching you.

That doesn't mean you should pretend everything is fine. In fact, false confidence can be more unsettling than acknowledging uncertainty. But there is enormous value in being the person who can say, calmly, "We don't know everything yet. Let's work through what we do know and decide what comes next."

Leadership isn't about the level of pressure you are feeling but it is about not allowing the pressure to dictate your behaviour.

Long after the decisions are forgotten, their impact on people remains 

This is the ultimate leadership lesson in my view.

People will remember some of the things you achieved, maybe a successful project, a major change or an important decision. In reality I suspect that, years later, many of the details will have blurred.

However, what I believe tends to remain are the ‘human moments’.

The person who believed in you before you believed in yourself like the manager who gave you an opportunity. Or the leader who listened when things were going badly and helped you come up with a plan. Maybe, the person who treated you with dignity during a difficult life period. Or that boss who told you the truth about your performance or behaviours, even when it wasn't easy to hear.

Those experiences become part of how people remember their working lives, their career and their contribution.

Leadership is more than knowing what to do

Of course leaders need to understand strategy, make good decisions, manage performance, understand risk and deliver results. 

But when the pressure really arrives, people aren't looking at your qualifications, training or credentials - they're looking at you.

They're watching how you handle the difficult conversation, noticing whether you listen. They're deciding whether they can trust you with something personal or to do the right thing with information that they give you. They're looking at what happens to your behaviour when things go wrong.

This is absolutely where character becomes more important than any technique that you can learn, and it is why I think Leading with Humanity is such an important conversation.

Leading with humanity isn't about being soft, avoiding difficult decisions or putting compassion ahead of accountability. Sometimes the most humane thing a leader can do is have the difficult conversation, challenge poor behaviour or make a decision that nobody wants to hear.

It is about remembering that every decision that you make eventually lands on a person and that a leadership decision that looks entirely rational from a distance can feel very different to the person sitting on the receipt of it.

That doesn't make leadership less commercial or less strategic - it just makes it more real.

That is the part of leadership that it is very tricky to fully prepare for: you can learn the frameworks, study the theory and become very good at the mechanics of leadership, but sooner or later, someone will sit across from you and need something from you that isn't in the your prepared toolkit or handbook.

In those moments is where your humanity will tell them far more about you and your leadership than any strategy document that you produce ever will.