How to Be a Great Leader

December 16th, 2009

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a great fan of Seth Godin. I receive ~ and read ~ his blog post every day. Yes, he writes every day, sometimes on weekends! And they’re almost always thought-provoking. So are his books. In fact, I’m reading two right now: The Big Moo and Tribes.

Anyway, he wrote a post entitled “How to be a great client.” You can read the original if you want. What I’ve done is take poetic liberties and reframed, and in some cases re-languaged his points around the topic of “How to Be a Great Leader.” I hope you benefit from what I’ve done. Equally important, I hope Seth feels honored by what I’ve done. Thanks, Seth, for being such an inspiration!

As a leader, your job isn’t to be innovative. Your job is to foster innovation. Big difference.

Fostering innovation is a discipline, a profession in fact. It involves making difficult choices and causing important things to happen. That includes setting the tone and creating the culture in which it’s safe and people are encouraged to innovate and collaborate. Here are a few thoughts to get you started.

• Before you expect others to be disciplined, demonstrate you are disciplined yourself.
• Be honest about what success looks like, what your resources actually have, what’s needed, and how committed to doing what it takes (as long as it’s legal, ethical and moral.)
• If you can’t write down clear ground rules about which rules are firm and which can be broken on the path to a creative solution, how can you expect others to figure it out?
• Simplify the problem relentlessly, and be prepared to accept an elegant solution that satisfies the simplest problem you can describe.
• After you write down the ground rules, revise them to eliminate constraints that are only on the list because they’ve always been on the list.
• Hire the right people. Don’t ask a mason to paint your house. Part of your job is to find someone who is already in the sweet spot you’re looking for, or someone who is eager and able to get there.
• Be honest about resources. While false resource constraints may help you once or twice, the people you’re working with demand your respect, which includes telling them the truth.
• Pay as much as you need to to solve the problem, which might be more than you want to. If you pay less than that, you’ll end up wasting all your money. Why would a great innovator work cheap?
• Cede all issues of irrelevant personal taste to others. I don’t care if you hate the curves on the new logo. Just because you write the check doesn’t mean your personal aesthetic sense is relevant.
• Run interference. While innovation sometimes never arrives, more often it’s there but someone in your office killed it.
• Raise the bar. Over and over again, raise the bar. Impossible a week ago is not good enough. You want stuff that is impossible today, because as they say at Yoyodyne, the future begins tomorrow.
• When you find a faux innovator, leader, or team player run. Don’t stick with someone who doesn’t deserve the hard work you’re doing to clear a path.
• Celebrate the innovator. Sure, you deserve a ton of credit. But you’ll attract more innovators and do even better work next time if innovators understand how much they benefit from working with you.

What do you think? Are you inspired and ready to lead, to empower others, and to create an environment that fosters innovation? I hope so. Your company’s life depends on it!

Entry Filed under: Uncategorized