LEADING AN AUTOCRATIC DEMOCRACY 

There’s a term I’ve used for 30 years now, and that’s an autocratic democracy. Good leaders run an autocratic democracy, okay. They seek all of the input they can. They demonstrate that they’ve contemplated and considered that input. But at the end of the day, they make the decision. The decision is theirs. The adverse outcomes are squarely on them, and the positive outcomes are squarely to the credit of the team. So good leaders can engender confidence and trust in the people that they lead. 

FAIL FAST OR DON’T FAIL AT ALL 

Fail fast means if you’re faced with incomplete or imperfect information, make a decision. But the more imperfect you believe that information to be, or the more incomplete you feel that information is, the more frequently you have to check your progress in moving towards the goal or the outcome that you would envision when you made the decision. In other words, fail fast. Find out if you’re going in the wrong direction quickly and then adjust. 

Good leaders insist that the metrics against which they measure performance are clear and objective, and good leaders also recognize when faced with adverse outcomes. Don’t paper over it. Don’t explain it away. Address it. Make a decision. Pivot and keep going forward. 

GOALS MUST BE ACHIEVABLE 

The more often that people can actually achieve the target that you set for them, the more they’re able to envision achieving the target you set for them, the more likely that success will motivate them to keep going forward. I’ve seen some companies set targets that we all know that they’re not going to achieve. 

So when setting goals and setting the impact of achieving or not achieving those goals, good leaders understand the psychology of the people that are trying to achieve those goals, and they adjust for that psychology. 

IS THERE AN END IN SIGHT? 

Good leaders also engender in their teams that you don’t have to know everything to move forward and give them the confidence of going towards that edge, not knowing what’s on the other side of that edge. But what they try to do is they give visibility as far forward as they can to all the people that are involved in the process. 

And as people move forward, the quantity or level of visibility increases. If you always only see to a certain point and beyond that, you don’t know that makes progress sort of undefinable. But when you say we can only see this far now, but as we progress, we’ll increasingly see more and more towards what that end state is. You’re going to find that your team gets the sense of progress while actually achieving progress. And good leaders know how to do that. They know how to what I call open the box.  Black boxes are not good for leadership. You need to open the box. People need to see inside of it. To the extent that you can. 

FINAL THOUGHTS 

The best advice I can give a leader besides simply lead, is that the people you’re leading are not homogeneous, that you need to understand each member of your team as individuals, and then understand how they fit into the collective of your team. Too many leaders take what they’re given and make assumptions about them based on their education, based on their gender, based on their origins. The truth of the matter is to people that look, feel, and sound, the exact same might be motivated completely differently. The objective or the mission of a good leader is to know the people on your team as individuals.