Compliance training, scheduling, feedback, team meetings, one-on-ones, and your own work. The duties of a people leader feel, and often are, endless. Just when it seems like you’re making headway another deadline or drama pops up. Some of the steadfast rules of work — the best performers do work they’re really good at, there is a model that the best leaders fit into, and the best leaders give feedback — have stopped being effective. Holding on to these outdated ideas and practices is getting in the way of leaders leading and workers working.
In 2008, Malcom Gladwell wrote that “ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness,” meaning that extraordinary performance comes through ten thousand hours of practice. Becoming an expert certainly requires hours of study and practice. Becoming extraordinary however, is a whole different endeavor. Being extraordinary at work, that amazing combination of things that results in an employee contributing above expectations, sustainably, is hard, but certainly not impossible to achieve if you know the secret. What’s missing from most approaches that claim to help achieve extraordinary performance is love for the work. You can be really good at something, an expert even, but without passion for the work, sustainable extraordinary performance isn’t likely. In fact, data from The Marcus Buckingham Company, an ADP company, shows that employees who love the work needed to achieve their priorities are over three times more likely to be all-in at work.
This isn’t a fluffy, impractical, only for a select lucky few, approach. The key to discovering work that you love starts with paying attention to how you feel about the things you’re doing. Work is an emotional experience. When you find yourself doing something at work that makes you feel energized, write it down. Do that for a few weeks and see what patterns emerge. It’s not always easy to steer your work towards those activities that you thrive on but knowing what those activities are is the crucial first step.
Doing and feeling more extraordinary at work is not only great for you as an individual employee but also has a positive ripple effect if you are a leader. However, many of the leader practices that have been taught over the last few decades have been more of a hinderance than a help when it comes to leading direct reports. Take for instance a leader competency model. It’s generally a mishmash of behaviors that someone thinks leaders should exhibit, and interestingly is usually in some circular type of graphical representation. The challenge with these types of models is that very few of us ever fit perfectly into those models. And striving to fit into the model perfectly is an exercise akin to splitting atoms. Can it be done? Yes, but not without a whole lot of work that only very few people can ever do. The answer is to not expect every leader to be carbon copies of each other. Think about the two best leaders that you know. They most likely lead very differently. The best leaders find their own best leader model. To find your model pay attention to when it feels like you’re more of a partner with your direct reports and less of a supervisor. Write it down and draw your own circular model, rather than relying upon someone else’s.
The last bit of leadership myth busting is to double down on frequency and cut back on the complexity. Too many leader development books, articles and classes focus on what employees are doing wrong and how to get them to do it right. Feedback can be necessary when a standard isn’t being met or a process isn’t being followed. But the assumption that everyone is doing something wrong that needs to be corrected is simply false. Employees may do things differently but that doesn’t make them wrong. The secret to helping employees perform at their best isn’t feedback, it’s frequent connections about their most important work through the lens of each employee’s unique strengths. This isn’t an “everybody gets a trophy approach.” This is a proven technique that increases the likelihood of employees being all-in by on average two to three times. Frequent weekly connections about an employee’s most important work with a focus on seeing the employee for the best of themselves is common sense. It just isn’t common practice in the world of modern day leadership. The five-minute practice of asking each direct report what their priorities are for the week, if they need anything, and how they are feeling about work is so simple anyone can do it. The small percentage of already great leaders do it naturally. The rest of us can do it too.
We’ve been trained that leading is complicated, messy, and hard. Sometimes it is that. But is doesn’t always have to be hard. A big part of why it gets hard is that connections with employees are infrequent and focused on telling them what they’re doing wrong. Leaders who increase the frequency and focus on the best of employees more than not are not only better to work for, they are better to work with.
