Leadership roles and leverage points

The role of leadership is to transform the complex situation into small pieces and prioritize them. - Carlos Ghosn

Leadership isn’t the title; it’s the traction generated. In any complex project, authority alone doesn’t move the needle. What makes the difference is knowing where to apply pressure, whom to inspire, and how to build trust in environments riddled with uncertainty. Whether inherited or earned, influence must be converted into leverage - and that leverage depends on the foundation leaders set, the motivations they nurture, and the dysfunctions they dare to confront.

Leadership is the ability to influence others in ways that enable them to accomplish desired results. Organizations need leaders at many distinct levels. Everyone must tailor their leadership approaches to each unique situation that they are presented with.

Some leaders may inherit positional authority from their place in the organization. Other leaders must instead achieve results through alternate means. The first of these is the ability to influence or gain cooperation from others through persuasion or rewards. The second is power, which is a stronger form than mere influence; power means you can enforce actions through consequences resulting from accountability.

The ability to exert leadership relies on which of these relationships can be accessed. Any leader must lead followers, and these followers must share knowledge, beliefs, and values for a leader to develop and extract value from these relationships. These relational attributes collectively form the glue that binds a workgroup together into an interdependent whole.

As a result, a leader's destiny is often determined by the environment that has been built for this foundation. The success of this foundation relies on the following factors:

• Purpose - the community's pride of accumulated accomplishment and the values they believe that enabled those achievements

• Direction - the changes the leader and team members feel are essential for their success, survival, and growth

• Commitments - the active involvement by team members in shaping the outcomes they are expected to pursue

• Ways and means - the interactions between key roles and processes that are essential to achieving those outcomes

• Norms - the community's standards and expected behaviors that all team members agree to be held accountable to

• Priorities - an awareness of the specific actions that must be done next, by whom, and by when for commitments to be realized

• Authority - a clear delineation of who can make decisions and how decision-making boundary disputes will be resolved

• Reporting - how information and status will be shared and represented

• Backing - a sense of whether the leader will go to bat for the team when they need it

Whenever this foundation is incomplete, a leader must help to resolve these gaps, while concurrently minimizing the impact of these gaps. Once this foundation is in place, a leader's work has just begun. Each team member still needs to be motivated to act, even though the carrots and sticks which provide this motivation may vary over time and across individuals. These motivations include:

• a desire for popularity and the respect of their peers

• a personal commitment to excellence

• personal ambition

• a need for employment security

• financial incentives

• personality tendencies (for self-glorification, criticism, etc.

• fear of failure

Experienced project leaders also recognize and help to correct any ineffective behaviors that people may exhibit because of their history, attitudes, or situations. These ineffective behaviors can include:

• stalling, bluffing, or making excuses

• making false or misleading statements

• resorting to unreasonable appeals to higher authorities

• adopting passive/aggressive behaviors

• employing direct frontal assaults on, or authority challenges to the leader?

• engaging in entrapment, smear tactics, or appeasement

Experienced leaders don't launch a counterassault when people use such tactics. Instead, they seek to broaden the collective understanding of the situation and learn how to deal with it constructively. This learning usually focuses on preventing problems before they occur. Proactive efforts to do this usually draw from effective strategies such as:

• introspection into the underlying root causes of process or quality problems

• coaching team members on improved discipline, work habits, and reinforcement of desired behaviors

• sharing perceptions of reality and connecting with available facts and data

• maintaining a consistent focus on the most important requirements and objectives of the effort (including the ability to rapidly reallocate resources to the corresponding most important tasks)

• adopting effective decision-making techniques

• developing an ability to anticipate, understand and address risks and system constraints

A project's success does not hinge on whether these strategies are checked off by players as something they support. Indeed, in large projects, such practices will usually be evident to one degree or another, depending upon the situation and people involved. And people need to believe in the endeavor, and to be nurtured, coached, and motivated to pursue excellence.

Rather, the realization of success relies upon both the consistency and effectiveness of the execution of these strategies over time and how well each team member's insights can be utilized in helping the group shape its own destiny. When this can be done, it imparts a degree of control to the team, which is especially important when trust or respect has been broken in the past.

For example, it doesn't matter whether requirements are used or not, if they are the wrong requirements, or if they are not useful to the team who must try to implement them. It doesn't matter if risks are tracked or not unless they are legitimate threats to the endeavor (vs worries). Everything else is often just going through the motions.

As a result, each project leader's primary mission should be to establish clear expectations about behaviors, help resolve the most serious risks, and actively remove the roadblocks that obscure progress, so team members can achieve desired outcomes in practical ways.