The best leaders that I’ve worked with and for have typically all had one characteristic in common – what you might call a ‘high-reaching informality’.
High-reaching: what I mean by this is that great leaders get the best out of their people by encouraging their teams to think bigger, think harder, aim higher, be more creative whilst also being accountable, and taking ownership. They’re ambitious not only for themselves and for the organisation but also for the team members themselves.
They challenge everyone to do better. They naturally empower their people but do it in a way that catalyses performance by equipping the team with both competence and confidence. There’s a lot of talk of servant leadership these days, but in my experience the best leaders I’ve worked for have understood the nuance of dynamic leadership and combined self-awareness with situational awareness. They’ve understood when it’s right to be more directive, when it’s right to guide, when coaching is required, and when it’s better to let go.
The most important takeout here is that you’re adapting your leadership style according to context but also challenging people to give their best by asking productive and stretching questions, coaching or pushing for higher expectations and standards.
Unfortunately though, I’ve also come across leaders that seem to think that the best way to achieve this stretch is by trying to be cleverer than their team. They do it by acting like their trying to catch people out. It’s almost as if they believe that if they can ask you a clever question that you don’t know the answer to they can make you feel bad enough that you will do better next time.
And maybe that does mean that in the next meeting the team member will ensure that they learn all the figures off by heart to show that they’re ‘on top of their business’. But ultimately it’s not necessarily the most productive way of enabling the best work and all it has likely done is to make the team member feel annoyed, low in confidence or belittled. It’s very possible to set high expectations, and challenge the team to be high-reaching, without making them feel small.
So the best bosses that I’ve worked for have encouraged me to push harder or think deeper not out of fear, but out of a real (and very personal) desire to do the best work that I’ve ever done.
But the killer combination is when this high-reaching approach is then combined with an informality which builds, rather than destroys trust.
Informality: Some leaders seem to equate formality with gravitas or seriousness. But being formal doesn’t make you a serious person. As Ian Leslie says…‘being taken seriously is not quite the same as being serious’. Overly formal environments are more likely to be low in psychological safety, and less likely to encourage people to speak up, contribute their ideas, and challenge assumptions or norms.
In writing this post I’m borrowing from Matt Edgar’s idea of ‘productive informality‘ in which he describes an environment of implicit as well as explicit communication, openness, spontaneity, and collaborating as equals. Matt describes how useful this can be when trying to build in customer-thinking to solutions and when working together to design better services. Informality helps to break down barriers, reduces the toxicity and influence of internal politics, helps a team to get the best ideas and to be adaptive in delivery to arrive at better outcomes.
It’s useful to think of psychological safety as the bringing together of mutual trust and respect, and also comfort with dissent. Overly or inappropriately formal environments reduce trust down to a transactional relationship: I asked you to do this, so did you do it? Whilst dependability is important, trust is also built on competence, confidence, integrity, and empathy.
The ‘productive informality’ that Matt was talking about requires empathy and honesty to work, but it also means that teams can be empowered. Particularly when they have good levels of both competence and confidence. A leader that insists on being involved in every decision with a highly experienced and competent team is making that team captive – a recipe for frustration and a breakdown of trust. Similarly, late breifing or involvement, arbitrary timelines, inappropriately rigid specifications or rules can hamper mutual respect. Trust grows from informality and is earned through delivery.
If you were to look at this as a compounding flywheel it would probably look something like this – a virtuous circle where productivity and performance builds trust, which enables more informality, which facilitates continuous learning, which improves performance, which further builds trust, and so on:
This is the polar opposite from where leaders are driven by the need to show how much they know, ego, status, or control.
Great leadership for me means high-reaching informality.
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