Five Ways to Excel as a Leader

To become a great leader, you need to know that you're in a leadership role. But that's just the first step. The next step involves maintaining your employees' respect. Without that, you may be the boss, but your leadership role will be short-lived.

The American Management Association conducted in-depth interviews with 41 executives and uncovered seven common traits that most often lead leaders to failure:

1. Insensitivity to co-workers.
2. Aloofness and arrogance.
3. Tendency to misuse information conveyed in confidence.
4. Inability to control ambition.
5. Inability to delegate assignments or promote teamwork.
6. Inability to staff effectively.
7. Inability to think strategically.

So how can those who lead maintain the difficult balance of managing the affairs of the company while maintaining the loyalty of their employees? What truly sets apart the mediocre, overbearing boss from a highly respected and effective leader?

The answer is that leaders lead people. A leader is someone others consistently follow. It stands to reason that people follow because they have a belief in the direction, integrity, and competence of the person in the lead.

As Kenneth "Thane" Walker once said, "A manager remains a leader only as long as he keeps proving that he is the superior man with the best method."

Speaking of methods, here are five ways to excel as a leader:

1. Sometimes leadership is merely letting people do their jobs.
   Willie Shoemaker, one of the best jockeys of all time, said that he kept the lightest touch on the horse's reins: "The horse never knows I'm there until he needs me." Management consultant Garry Jenkins puts it more bluntly: "The leader's role is to create a vision, not kick somebody in the ass."
2. Leaders cannot be aloof; they must constantly show that they care.
   People leave or love their jobs for a number of reasons. Ask yourself the following questions: How important do your employees feel in their work? What have you as a leader done to show your employees how important they are? When was the last time you made it possible for people to be proud of their achievements? How often do you celebrate successes? Chances are your answers to these few simple questions will closely reflect your employee retention rate.
3. A good leader keeps the entire team tuned to the fundamentals of success.
   Frank Leahy, the legendary Notre Dame football coach, always stressed fundamentals. After one especially bad game, he sat his team down in the locker room, picked up an object, and said to his players, "All right, men, let's return to the fundamentals. This is a football." One of his lineman, who was sitting in the back of the room taking notes, replied, "Wait a minute, Coach. Not so fast."
4. Leadership is getting your employees to compromise for the good of all.
   When Columbus was searching for the New World, his crew became discouraged and demanded that he turn back. So Columbus offered a compromise. He promised that if they would be patient and faithful just three days longer, he would abandon the enterprise if land was not discovered. Before the three days had expired, land was sighted, and the rest is history.
5. Leaders must learn to sacrifice for others.
   Take the example of Alexander the Great, who over three hundred years ago led his troops across a hot and desolate plain. Eleven days into the journey, he and all his soldiers were nearly dead from thirst. But Alexander pressed on. At midday, two scouts brought him what little water they had. It barely filled his cup. Alexander's troops watched in amazement as he poured the water onto the hot sand. "It's no use for one to drink when many thirst," he proclaimed. As a leader, Alexander gave his followers the only thing he had: inspiration. The influence of a leader persists long after the person is gone. Walter Lippmann said it best: "The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on."

Changing Companies’ Minds About Women

Leaders serious about getting more women into senior management need a hard-edged approach to overcome the invisible barriers holding them back.   

Despite corporate commitment to advancing women’s careers, progress appears to have stalled. The percentage of women on boards and senior executive teams remains stuck at around 15% in many countries, and just 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women.
The last generation of workplace innovations — policies to support women with children, networks to help women navigate careers, formal professional development sponsorship programmes — broke structural barriers holding women back. The next frontier is toppling invisible barriers: mindsets held by managers — men and women — that are rarely acknowledged.
    When senior leaders commit themselves to gender diversity, they mean it — but in the heat of the moment, entrenched beliefs cause old behaviours to resurface. Often, in our experience, executives perceive women as a greater risk for senior positions, fail to give tough feedback to help them grow, or hesitate to offer working mothers opportunities with more travel and stress.
    A survey by McKinsey conducted earlier this year indicated that although a majority of women who make it to senior roles have a real desire to lead, few think they have meaningful support to do so, and fewer think that they are in line to move up.
    Our ideas for breaking this cycle rest on our experience with senior executives, discussions with 30 diversity experts, and interviews with leaders at companies that have been on this journey for years, including Pitney Bowes, 38% of whose vicepresidents are women; Shell, where more than a quarter of supervisors and professional staff worldwide are women; and
Time Warner, where more than 40% of the senior executives in its operating divisions are women and where the share of women in senior roles has jumped 30% in the past six years. Great progress, but even these companies admit how much further they have to go.
Invisible, Unconscious & in the Way Our research shows that women comprise roughly 53% of entry-level professional employees in the largest US industrial corporations. But according to Catalyst, a leading advocacy group for women, they hold only 37% of middlemanagement positions, 28% of vice-president and senior-managerial roles, and 14% of executive committee seats.
McKinsey research shows similar numbers for women on executive committees outside the US — from 17% in Sweden to just 2% in Germany and India. Our analysis reveals that at every step along the US corporate-talent pipeline, the odds of advancement for men are about twice those for women. Nearly four times as many men as women at large companies make the jump from the executive committee to CEO.
Despite the best intentions of HR departments and individual executives, the experience of women starts to diverge from that of their male peers: Less opportunity for professional growth. Unintended performance bias and softer feedback. Fewer sponsors offering fewer opportunities. Lowered ambition.
A word about the role women play in this cycle: they start ambitious, and on reaching senior levels retain that ambition. But women also turn down advancement opportunities for reasons ranging from commitments outside work to risk aversion for positions requiring new skills to a desire to stay put in roles that provide personal meaning. By addressing mindsets holding women back, corporate leaders can reshape the talent pipeline, making it likelier that more women will retain their ambition.
Changing Companies’ Minds No initiative can be the “silver bullet” to advance women. The whole organisation must change. This goal requires real engagement up and down the line, including from women.
Corporate leaders need to see these changes as no less important than a major strategic or operational challenge. Efforts must be integrated into the organisation’s daily work through goals, performance monitoring, processes that force tough conversations, and serious skill building.
Make it Personal As a senior executive, you are already influencing your company’s approach. Shell’s executive vice-president of global supply and distribution, Peggy Montana, says, “When you look at corporate mindsets, change starts at the top. I haven’t seen change in diversity start from middle management.”
    In the early 1980s, Pitney Bowes CEO George Harvey learned that the most productive newly hired salespeople were women; many previously schoolteachers. He visited sales offices and discovered women “writing personal notes to their customers with a lot of conviction” — a practice that seemed to be driving sales.
    According to Pitney Bowes executive vice-president Johnna Torsone, Harvey’s recognition of the value of these committed women made him “determined to open up an environment that allowed people to come in who hadn’t had a true opportunity on a level playing field.”
    Their motivation would “increase the competitive environment for the men and for everybody else in the organisation”. The end result, Torsone explains, “was an HR strategy based on business”. 

This powerful idea resonates with our experience: companies are more likely to transform mindsets if they build their own case grounded in the impact women are having there. Harvey’s commitment also highlights the importance of having leaders start this journey by changing their own mindsets.