Intentional Leadership

The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things - Ronald Reagan

I recently had an opportunity to attend a talk by Morgan Stanley's Vice Chair and MD Ms. Carla Harris. Her talk was about being intentional in leadership and I took the following notes to not only reflect later but also share with others interested in learning about leadership.

Her talk was only about 60 minutes, but she truly compressed the gist of her years of experience and the message from her several books in this short time. During the first half she talked about how we can make leadership intentional. I captured her 8 points on the topic which I'll try to summarize below. 

Authenticity 

You must be authentic to your intentional leadership. Your authenticity is your distinct competitive advantage. Nobody can beat you the way you can be yourself! Anytime we can be who we really are, we'll outperform everyone else. So, being intentionally authentic is the base of being an intentional leader.

Trust 

You must be intentional about building the trust. How do you build trust? Simply, you keep delivering - over and over and over again. 

Clarity

You must be intentionally clear about goals, expectations and performance from your team. You may not be able to project the performance of the year, quarter, month or day but you must make intentional effort to be clear about that with your team and then you must create hope for your team members and other leaders.

Intentionally Create Leaders

Once you get to the leadership seat, your job is to create other leaders. That’s how you amplify your impact and your contribution. Once you are on the leadership seat it is not really about execution (checking the boxes on a list), it is about empowering other people. For leadership is a journey from execution to empowerment. How can I disrupt myself out of my seat to the next base? All of that can only happen if you're empowering other leaders.

Be intentional about Diversity

People have experiences. Experiences build perspectives and perspectives create Ideas. To arrive to that one idea which will become your competitive advantage, you must start with a lot of people in the room, which means lot of experiences, which means lot of perspectives leading to lot of ideas and then finally landing on that one winning idea. That is the business case around diversity. If you have homogeneous thinking on the table, you'll have a gap in your go to market strategy.

Intentional Innovation

Which means you must teach your teams how to fail! If people are afraid of failure, they will not take the risk to innovate because they think there will be out sized retribution if they make a mistake. How do you do that? You need to celebrate the failures. The only reason we don't take risks is that we're scared. Fear has no place in your success equation! FEAR: False Evidence of things Appearing Real! Failure always brings you a gift and that gift is called experience...and there is no shortcut to experience.

Intentional Inclusion

What does it mean to be an inclusive leader? How does it manifest itself? How does one show up as an inclusive leader? The simplest way to do that is to solicit other people's voices. Be intentional on inclusion from your team members. Everyone values being heard! By inclusion, you've communicated that you're all hearing and all seeing. People value being seen, especially by the boss. You've created connectivity in that environment. You’ve not only inspired but you have now fostered collaboration. Now people are not afraid that someone is challenging my idea. They are now thinking that someone is listening and seeing my idea and trying to make it better. What you're really aiming for is that your team members say that this is 'my team'! Especially the millennials, X'ers and Z'ers value transparency, inclusiveness and feedback.

Be the Voice

As a powerful intentional leader, you must be able to call a thing a thing. You must be willing to call a thing a thing. You must give voice to the thing that is really burdening the people working in the team. When you're willing to call it out, they are willing to own it and, more importantly, push past it.

The next half of her talk was about three key lessons (pearls) from her books: Expect to Win and Strategize to Win (these are on my to-read list)

Perception

Perception is the co-pilot to reality. How people perceive you will directly impact how they deal with you. Yes, the reality of how smart you're has something to do with your success. Yes, how hard you work has something to do with your success, but the very big component of success is the perception that the marketplace has about you! What lens are they looking through when they are looking at you? It is important that if you want to maximize your success, you value the adjectives that are associated with your success. If you don't understand the adjectives, you can work hard, but you won't maximize your success in that seat you're sitting at because you're working in a way that is inconsistent from the way they are thinking about success. If you're expected to manage a large group of people but you're not perceived as inspiring, motivational and organized it doesn’t matter that you can do it. Doesn’t even matter that you did do it! - you won't get the opportunity to do it if you're not perceived as such. Remember that you can train people to think about you in a matter you want them to think about you. How do you do that? You pick 3 adjectives that you'd like people to think of when you're not in the room (all important decisions about your career are made when you're not in the room: compensation, promotion, new assignments all decisions are made when you're not in the room). Pick 3 adjectives which describe you who you think you really are. Remember no one can beat you in what you really are! And pick 3 adjectives that are valued in your organization. Where they intersect, is how you should behave consistently in the way you want other people to perceive you. Simply create a consistent behavior around those three adjectives. What got you to the seat will not allow you to ascend that seat to the next level. Ask your boss what needs to happen to get the title of an out of the box performer? If boss says, well I don't know - you always do a good job! Note - this is a problem!! If your boss can't tell you what success looks like, you'll never maximize success in that seat because success will always be shifting. That will make your performance vulnerable to outside influences on your boss. If you're boss cannot tell you what success looks like, give her several ideas and ask her what she likes and what she doesn’t like - you'll have your adjectives to work on.

Networking

There are two types of currencies in any environment: Performance currency and Relationship currency. While performance currency starts creating diminishing returns after several years, the relationship currency never makes diminishing returns. While you set an expected performance level on the performance currency (and it starts making diminishing returns) the next level is to mint the relationship currency. Your ability to ascend will be the result of someone's judgement! Judgement whether or not you're ready, whether or not your team will follow you and judgement whether you'll be ultimately successful or not! Judgements are directly influenced by relationships. Everyone has the power to mint both the performance and relationship currencies. Result of previous experiences (successes/failures), performance and relationships is the hard earned personal influential currency. That is the hardest currency to mint. Who will spend his hard earned, personal, influential currency on someone that he does not know? While you're shying away from minting that relationship currency (making new relationships), your ability to ascend may not be influenced by 'if someone likes you' but it will be influenced by 'if someone knows you'! While your performance currency may get your name called in the room when you're not in the room, if no one in the room knows you (because you haven't invested in the relationship currency) they simply go to the next name and that has absolutely nothing to do with your ability to do the job.

Expectations

Expectation that you'll do well. This is the most important component in anybody's success. You must use everything in your tool-set to maximize your success. Everyone has 3 things in the tool-set: 1. Academic background 2. Experiential learning and 3. Network, yet the one tool that is grossly underutilized is the network.

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The author is a Senior Business Solutions Architect with AT&T Global Services and a Consultant at TELEPACKETS INC. He is a Professional Engineer with APEGA, holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from UET, Lahore and a Master’s degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Concordia University, Montreal. His interests include reading, writing, photography, painting, promoting human development using Information Technology, Applied Research, Innovation, Leadership, Stock Markets, Investing and Religion. He lives in Calgary, Canada and can be reached at uwaqar@gmail.com. He tweets at https://twitter.com/engruw