Leadership - rely and can be relied on

There are people who bring energy into the room and there are people who drain the energy in the room. If you had a grim feeling when you heard the word 'leader', you haven't discovered how exciting and meaningful the word leader is.

To state the obvious to have some context, for most people who become leaders, leadership is about the status it brings and the pass to command people at their will. Of course, there are moments where you have to get your team to trust your judgment but if routinely it is just commanding people to do things, they and/or the organisations they lead become irrelevant and experience a slow death.

The first limb of leadership is about having a team you can rely on. The second, and more important one is, that you are a leader who can be relied on by the team too. Not just for short-term bursts of performance but to do great things sustainably, when executing visionary multidecade plans into the future.

Leaders are discovered

When I was a kid, I was curious to find a conclusive answer to the question 'are leaders made or born?'. Based on personal experiences, what I have heard from top CEOs in Sri Lanka and content from top CEOs around the globe, the stories point to the conclusion that the leaders are discovered.

People think leadership starts when someone formally appoints you as a leader. But the truth is, that is just recognition for you already becoming a leader. Leadership starts much before you get a title. It starts when you can inspire a group of people. You become a leader when your vision can be relied on by a group of people and when you can rely on them to put in the work needed to get there. When those results get noticed, you get deserved the formal appointment of a leader. Of course, there are leaders who start with the title. But if they just resort to the title they and/or the organisations they lead become irrelevant and experience a slow death.

Individual performance is not enough

I had always been a great individual performer in pretty much anything that I found exciting. That performance often continued to become better as I learn more efficient ways to do things. But individual performance alone does not make us leaders. I played chess as a hobby since I was 6 years old. When I was around 11, I was a much better chess player than anyone in our age group in school and was above-average even in the entire country considered.

I felt that I deserved to be the captain of the school chess team. But I was not given that. The culture there valued seniority (birth year) over performance. Arguably the ones appointed did not do any better job than I could have done. But, in retrospect, I was not an objectively suitable leader either for just being a good individual performer. As a leader, your task is to make sure your team performs to their best. You should be a leader who can be relied on to build an environment that allows the team to perform well. You should be able to rely on your team to make the best use of that environment to be effective and efficient. Of course, if you can become a great individual performer too, that is great. But that is not the most important criteria.

They are as imperfect as we are

When getting to work, we often forget that we are dealing with people. We forget that everyone is as imperfect as we are. If you appraise your team when they do good things and lash out at your team when they fail, you are not relying on your team (not to mention, in reality, most people take credit for the wins and lash out at the team for the losses). You are expecting a predictable output as if they are a machine that can always produce an expected output for every input. You might be able to treat like that and get away with it in the short term but in the long term, no one would want to work with you. Having the freedom to fail brings out their best.

You should be a leader who can be relied on to not reduce the chances for silly failures to happen and build an environment where the same failures do not happen twice. As a leader, you must be able to embrace the failures, incorporate them into the learnings and be able to rely on your team to not repeat the same failure. Of course, there are two types of failures (experimental failure and operational failures as Jeff Bezos puts it, but that's for some other time).

Finishing thoughts...

Those were the three important areas I wanted to cover in this article. How does reliance work when getting started as a leader, when performing and when failures happen. This is not exhaustive nor can it be ever exhaustive. The way we look at leadership today is much different from how we as a civilisation looked at leadership a few decades ago to a few centuries ago.

I discovered the leader in me when I was 15 when I wanted to step up at an outing when the team I was losing from was a fun activity. Since then I have led so many teams in different dynamics. My teams and I have excelled at many things and similarly, made plenty of mistakes (will share these in future articles, nothing I haven't fixed).

It is a learning process. You cannot learn to be a leader by reading it somewhere. But I hope this will guide you and enable you to validate some of your learnings or remember these points when you go through similar experiences.

I also want to share one more thing. At the end of the day, we all are humans. If you can build relationships with your teams that last beyond your tenures, that is something worth being proud about. If you can also facilitate building relationships not just with you but also between the team members too, that is commendable. Such long-lasting relationships may be able to testify how you have been a good human, in addition to being a (good) leader.

Dedicated to my Gavel mentors and the Executive Committee (EXCO) with whom I discovered the leader in me. A quote from the About Me page: 'I led the Gavel Club less like a club/society and more like a start-up. Incredibly proud of what my executive committee (EXCO) and I were able to accomplish'.