ADVOCATES EXCELLENCE
AN INTRODUCTION TO ADVOCATING EXCELLENCE
Leaders describe a compelling picture of what the future could look like and appeal to others to share in future success. Speaking with clarity and confidence they generate commitment and enthusiasm for a shared vision or cause, and illustrate for others how their ambitions can be realised. They set high standards for people to live up to by painting pictures of what excellence looks like and encouraging others to work towards that picture.
THE FUTURE
31. I describe a captivating picture of what the future could look like. Or put another way: see your way to being a visionary.
Want to engage great people fully? Then you’ll need to create a shared vision of excellence.
The clearer people are about what they are trying to achieve, the greater the likelihood that they will be able to perform at a consistently high level.
You will, doubtless, have heard that if you can dream it, you can do it. Probably not helpful advice to take too literally but it does align to the idea that visualisation is a key tool, employed by the highest performers in all sorts of fields from sport through acting to the military. ‘Seeing’ a future state builds a sense that something is achievable and provides a sense of certainty that otherwise would be missing. This sense of confidence, in turn, makes ‘going for it’ engaging, rather than frightening.
The richer the mental picture people can build, the better you and your team will be able to absorb and own the vision that you have created. The most effective visioning has even resulted in athletes increasing their physical strength during experiments without them even going into a gym.
Anita Roddick, inspirational founder and leader of the Body Shop International plc, declared that only you can see your vision. She makes a really important point: only you can see your vision as you see it and if you remain in a locked room and create the vision in isolation, your team will probably not get it. It will be something so unique to you that you will have difficulty sharing that effectively with others.
The key message here is to engage as many people as you can practically in the creation of your team’s vision. Spend time on it. A vision is not something achieved on a team away day. It often takes many iterations and refinements. However, the clearer your purpose, the easier you will find creating your vision for what you are trying to achieve.
LEADING MY TEAM
- In your next one-to-one meeting with members of your team, ask what they think your team could or should be achieving.
- Gather all the responses together and identify any clear themes. Compare these themes to your own ideas for the future of your team and the team’s purpose.
- Next, spend time with the team shaping a vivid picture of what the future shape of the team will be and what the key achievements should be.
- A helpful question to use here is, ‘When we achieve our mission, what will this team be like in five or ten years’ time?’
- It is useful to ensure you engage further with at least two people – one champion who loves the new version of the vision and one sceptic who is much less engaged. Work with them both together and separately until the vision is shaped to a place where both can ‘see it’.
LEADING MY ORGANISATION
- It is likely that your organisation has already created a vision. Your first job as a leader is to get familiar with that vision and understand its implications in relation to your role as a leader.
- The organisation vision will either be explicit about, or infer, certain values and standards for leaders. Check your actions against the vision frequently.
- Ensure that the vision you create with your team, and the key objectives you set, are aligned with the wider organisation-level vision. The work your team is doing should be in service of the organisation achieving its vision.
- When your line manager sets you a project or objective to deliver, always check it against the wider vision. If you can’t see a connection between your work and the organisation’s vision, ask your boss about it. Make sure you can see direct connections.
- When your organisation creates a new vision, ensure people know you are keen to get involved. Really engage at the early stages if you can. This will give you a great insight into the strategic thinking of the organisation and help you align the work of your team more fully.
AMBITIONS
32. I illustrate to others how their own ambitions can be fulfilled. Or put another way: be able to respond to ‘What’s in it for me?’
Followers are unlikely to commit to your ideas and projects unless the connection to business results is clear and, importantly, they can see some benefit for themselves. It is quite simply human nature to ask questions in this way when being asked to join something that will be challenging and hard work. ‘Why should I bring my discretionary effort to work in order to support your idea?’
Creating meaning requires that you understand the make-up of your audience in detail so that you can make connections and have an impact. When planning, excellent communicators work from their audience back to the message, whether they are planning for one person, three people or a hundred people. They research their audience as follows:
- What is on the mind of the audience right now?
- What is keeping them awake at night?
- What are their current challenges and how can what you want to say help them?
They design their communication so that in the early part of the conversation or presentation they are connecting in an area that matters to the listener, adapting their approach in order to embrace the audience’s point of view.
Research tells us that you have not communicated well unless people:
- are clear on what you are saying
- accept that what you have to say is important
- feel concerned enough about the issue to want to do something about it
- have a clear idea of what it is they want or need to do as a result of your communication.
No matter how well you planned, you will need to learn to adapt your communications on your feet. Gather information constantly that could in any way be useful to you in building engagement. Learn about your audience’s hot buttons in the moment and make adjustments to the message and your delivery.
LEADING MY TEAM
- Review the frequency of meetings you hold with each member of your team. Alter your diary to guarantee you meet with each person at least once a fortnight. Less frequently than that and you’ll fail to be sufficiently up to date.
- Make the one-to-one meeting a chance to discuss their work but also create time explicitly to explore what is currently important for them, where their thinking is in relation to how the team is operating, how you are leading them and so on.
- In team meetings, ask your team to review their work against the purpose, vision and mission of the team. Regular check-ins about these key strategic team tools offers opportunities for each person to take ownership for keeping the team on track – a track that they were involved in designing.
LEADING MY ORGANISATION
- When you have an important presentation to make to your line manager or members of a senior team, plan the presentation in detail from the perspective of the audience first. Only then consider the content.
- Here are 10 helpful questions you can ask yourself to help raise your awareness of your audience. The answers will help you shape your content.
- Who is in the room?
- Why is each person present?
- How might each person feel about the subject of your presentation?
- What is in it for them if they do what you are asking them to do?
- How do you make your message more appealing for each audience member?
- How do you need to show up in order to influence effectively? How should you dress? What level of energy should you convey? What tone of voice?
- How can you help each person to solve their problems?
- Are you clear on what you want them to do?
- How might they resist your message and how will you deal with this resistance?
- What sticky moments or tricky questions do you anticipate and how will you respond?
HIGH STANDARDS
33. I set high standards for people to live up to, including myself. Or put another way: become the standard bearer.
Leaders are very good at setting clear standards, which they communicate clearly to the people they lead. If we went to speak to your team, how clear would they be about the standards you expect of them?
If you know your own purpose as a leader and you have worked with the team on identifying its purpose and the role of each individual within the team, then clarity about standards should not be a problem. The fuzzier you are about the purpose, vision and mission of the team, the more difficult it is for people to know what you expect. So, your first step in improving your leadership is making sure each member of your team has a clear sense of the team’s purpose, vision and identity.
Once you have these strategic tools for your team in place, you can drill down into the detail of:
- the results you expect people to produce
- how you expect people to behave.
You and your whole team will benefit if everyone knows the specific details around these two key areas. Without being dictatorial about it, you should have a clear idea of what you perceive as excellence in the two key areas of performance and behaviour. Everyone will benefit further if deciding and codifying these into a ‘Ways of working’ document is a shared experience across the team.
Beware: don’t mistakenly assume, as many leaders do initially, that because everyone has agreed standards, they will magically come to pass. No, they won’t.
Highly excellence-focused teams need the leader to reinforce the consistency of the standards. This is mostly due to subtle differences in interpretation of what was meant by a particular standard, or simply that old habits can take a while to change. In a team setting, the leader acts as a guide and mentor to ensure consistency.
LEADING MY TEAM
- From today, each and every time you set the team (or an individual) a key objective, be sure to get a commitment from them as to ‘how’ the result will be achieved, in addition to the details of ‘what’ success looks like. Outputs and behaviours must be aligned to the team purpose and vision.
- Without micro-managing the work, regularly schedule in updates on progress.
- Canvas members of the team, peers, customers and relevant others about how the project is progressing and feed comments back to the team or individual.
- Recognise where great work is being done and challenge any areas that are not sufficiently close to the agreements made at the start of the process.
- As great results get delivered, through discussion with your team develop a ‘Ways of working’ document that sets out how your team produces excellence. These principles will act as a guide and set the standard for future performance.
LEADING MY ORGANISATION
- A minimum requirement is that your own track record of ‘what’ and ‘how’ you perform as a leader within the organisation is as good as you can make it.
- Remember, we’re not looking for perfection but building to excellence over time.
- Review areas of your leadership that are currently not to the standard of excellence your organisation expects from you. Commit to making changes to up your game.
- Volunteer for project teams outside your area or take a particular area of burden from your line manager and set your own personal standard before starting. Commit to how you will ‘show up’ and the excellence in the work you will produce and hold yourself to such commitments.
- Where you see behaviour that is not ok, find a way to challenge it or report it. Certain things you can challenge in the moment, and that is sufficient, such as tittle-tattle at the water cooler. Other things that also need you to report on them include workplace bullying. Don’t be afraid to hold others to a high standard too.
CLARITY AND CONFIDENCE
34. I speak with clarity and confidence in public forums. Or put another way: speak up! We can’t hear you.
If you are not committed, somehow or other it will show through like a spotlight as you speak. People can smell passion and commitment and energy and determination – or the absence thereof.
Tom Peters
The best leaders have passion for their subject. If you want others to care as much as you do about your message, you need to express this. You will manage to express this with greater energy and clarity if you have a deep connection with the message. When what you say is really important to you, then you can communicate more naturally and confidently.
Before you can convince an audience to accept anything you say, they have to accept you as credible. Ask yourself:
- Do the people I am communicating with respect me?
- Do people feel that I am trustworthy?
- Does the audience believe I know what I’m talking about?
Critically, it isn’t enough for you to know that you are living these principles – your audience needs to know this.
Our values are our beliefs in action. They are expressed through what we do, what we say and how we say it. Values make us believable in the eyes and ears of the listener. Researchi on ‘source credibility’ tells us that in order to convince people we must be worthy of their trust and be competent at what we do every day.
Importantly, we need to couple this trust that others place in us with being dynamic and inspiring. People will respond to you if you share your passion for your subject – and they will see right through you if you pretend. Stand up for something that you truly believe in and you will find a way to connect.
LEADING MY TEAM
Whether you are communicating just to your team or a wider audience, here are tips for communicating like a professional:
- Rehearse: a great business speaker like Steve Jobs made things look effortless because of his obsession with rehearsal.
- Practise without slides or script: if you are going to talk to the audience, you will need to be able to speak without detailed notes.
- Record yourself on video: play it back and note where you could improve. In our experience, this is an underrated mode of practice and so easy to do now with mobile technology.
- Rehearse in front of a trusted friend: get them to give you some honest feedback on your conviction and clarity.
- Rehearse responses: work on answering tricky questions that you anticipate being asked. Use your values as a guide.
- Ask for feedback: after a ‘live’ piece of communication, invite feedback on your performance from members of the audience.
Communicating as effectively as you can, also set a standard for members of your team when it is time for them to take the spotlight.
LEADING MY ORGANISATION
- Commit to developing into a really effective public speaker. As we have shown, it is a vital skill set for you as a leader. Moreover, becoming recognised as a great speaker will result in you being asked to do more public speaking, which in turn raises your profile as a leader within and beyond your organisation.
- Look for opportunities outside your organisation to speak in public. Start small and in an area in which you are confident of your knowledge. It may be that you start by finding speaking occasions where you could talk about a passion of yours that is not work-related. Go and speak to pupils at your local school or chamber of commerce. Any chance to develop this skill should be taken. Take a deep breath and go for it!
COMMITMENT
35. I demonstrate excitement and commitment to the vision. Or put another way: we’re all buzzing now.
Is it a good thing to build a work culture and environment where there is a sense of excitement? Is work the appropriate place to have a constant buzz that is generated by the leader and perpetuated by the rest? Let’s see.
We guess that, like many of you, we were raised to respect authority – unquestioningly. We were also encouraged to view work as a place where serious endeavour and application were rewarded. Yes, we know: well-intentioned but naïve!
Much of this hard work ethic was helpful, of course. However, the thing it prompted as a by-product was that it proved hard to do anything other than find work an incredibly serious place. In our early careers – albeit in quite different spheres – we were always careful not to be seen to be enjoying our time too much because we were surrounded by leaders and managers who viewed work similarly to the way we did: all work and no play.
But there is a serious flaw in the way leaders are thinking if deadly serious is the over-riding organisational tone. It assumes that a serious environment reflects, or at least produces, a committed attitude. It doesn’t necessarily. It is worth recalling here that correlation is not the same as causation.
On the flip side, too much whooping and hollering doesn’t work too well either. After hundreds of meetings with leaders over the last 17 years, we are convinced that ‘fluff’ doesn’t cut it. All noise and no substance is certainly not leadership. At best it’s cheerleading and at worst it’s inefficient and patronising.
However, it is also certain that a sterile environment that fails to seize opportunities for building genuine excitement about whatever is trying to be achieved is not effective leadership either. At best it’s controlling. At worst it fails to maximise the parts of being human that excel and produce incredible results when energised to do so. The best leaders understand the need for such well-balanced enthusiasm and create ways to generate it, especially at key times and on important projects.
LEADING MY TEAM
- Develop a sense of the mood of your team. Is the energy high and engaged at the moment? Is there a quiet sense of determination and effort? Are people exhausted and lacklustre? These are all sensitivities it will be useful for you to learn.
- It behoves you to be aware of your own mood and energy and how that might be impacting the team. A leader’s temperament is infectious, so be acutely aware of what you are projecting.
- Check in with each of your direct reports regularly to see how they are feeling. This helps you to assist them early if the need arises, or challenge where appropriate.
- Just varying how you do routine tasks can provide the little injection of energy that is required. The list of possibilities is endless but includes:
- holding a team meeting at a different time or location
- accompanying a team member on a customer visit
- attending a conference with a couple of the team.
LEADING MY ORGANISATION
- Commit that whenever you are outside of your team setting that you will be an ambassador for it. Represent the team with energy and commitment to the greater good.
- Where you can, inspire others to up their game. When you have developed a good relationship with peers and more senior leaders, hustle them along a little if you notice they don’t seem to be giving everything required to perform at the highest level.
- Offer to act as a mentor within the organisation. Be keen to help other junior leaders develop and make sure you role-model excellent behaviours when undertaking this important role. Note: if you can’t bring your best self to such a role, please don’t offer.
- Seek opportunities to share the vision of your team with others. This will set you apart as a leader who is driven to deliver great performance for the benefit of your team members, customers and the wider organisation.