What Makes a Great Leader?
| Great leaders are comfortable with leading people who are technically more capable than themselves. They trust their team members and give them space to grow and make mistakes! They embrace failure and can recover from it. |
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the qualities of great leaders. I’ve read a lot about the topic; and almost everything I read seems to be written from the perspective of somebody in a leadership position, assuming authority, and carrying a huge ego! In this post, I want to offer a different perspective, reflecting on my own experience reporting to supervisors, managers and tech leads that I’ve worked with in the past 15 years.
I have identified two important traits that one must have to be a great leader, when working with highly intelligent, self-motivated, and autonomy-craving people. In my own work, I use my experience and these two traits as a guidance when I lead people and projects. Of course, depending on the situation, the type of tasks, and the people you work with, other qualities might become more important.
Ability to recover from failures
The first distinguishing characteristic of a great leader is her confidence in her own ability to recover from failures, and to handle unanticipated situations. This kind of confidence comes with years of experience working on various projects (not necessarily leading them), facing challenges, and correcting mistakes.
Such a leader knows that small mistakes or misses of the team will not easily damage her reputation or threaten her success. She also knows that making mistakes is the only way to grow. As a result, she can give her reports the space to be themselves, make their mistakes, find their own ways, and grow! She knows if individuals in the team grow, the team grows, and their success is her success.
Of course, this only works if you have self-motivated and capable people in your team. A great leader is good at discovering talent, skills, and unique qualities in others, assigning them the right tasks, and giving them credit for their good work. A great leader with these qualities can focus on her main job, which is to empower her team and help them grow and bring their best selves to work.
An experienced leader capable of recovering from failures has things under control without having to micromanage. This gives her time to develop herself as a leader. Her involvement, therefore, is often in the form of reducing chaos, reducing workloads, and building a safe space for everyone to cooperate.
I have been lucky enough to work with one or two leaders like this during my career.
Ability to lead more technically adept people
A great leader is comfortable with and capable of leading people with expertise and skills beyond her own! She can happily and respectfully delegate responsibilities to those more technically capable than herself; and is nevertheless capable of integrating the outcomes of their efforts into a larger cohesive whole. This is the only way that a team can achieve anything beyond the capabilities of a single person.
This quality is crucial for effective leadership, but is difficult to acquire and develop. On one hand, a robust personality is needed to successfully navigate interactions with individuals across hierarchical levels, varying technical expertise, and diverse backgrounds, all the while demonstrating compassion, patience, and humility. On the other hand, an effective leader must have a depth of technical knowledge, breadth of experience, and the capacity to judiciously respond to an array of potentially unforeseen scenarios. If you have done only one thing in your career, it is unlikely that you’ll be able to make the call when you face a new situation.
Many people in leadership and management roles struggle with leading more experienced or more technically adept individuals. They often perceive leadership as delegating tasks one could manage independently but lacks the time for! While there is merit in delegating such tasks, its effectiveness depends on considering the interests and career aspirations of the team members receiving these assignments. Failing to do so can result in a demoralized team. To have a productive and successful team, you have to go beyond delegating the tasks you can do yourself. You have to allow and encourage your team to do things you cannot do, or cannot even imagine! You have to give them the space to be creative in their own ways.
If as a leader, you ever find yourself in a situation where you think you can do something better, or know exactly how something should be done, then do it yourself; nicely and quietly, without even thinking about delegating it or discussing it with anyone! Unless you are delegating the work to a team member who is passionate about doing that particular piece of work; perhaps because of a personal interest, a learning opportunity, or career development opportunity.
In my career, I’ve seen inexperienced managers, whose notion of leadership was merely a mechanical task delegation. At times, I’ve felt trapped, my skills wasted, and my effort ineffective. I’ve felt that the knowledge and capabilities I could bring to the team were capped by those of my manager.
If this is your leadership style, take some time and rethink your approach because you really need to change it. If you make your knowledge and capabilities a cap for the knowledge and capabilities that your team brings to work (perhaps because you want to have full control over what they do), then the collective achievements of your team will be confined to what you alone could accomplish – perhaps a bit faster, if you are lucky. If, instead, you are open to letting your team bring all their talent, ideas and capabilities to the project, and can support them in contributing in ways you could not imagine, then your team will accomplish much more than you could ever imagine, and those achievements will be yours too.
One of the managers that I loved working with, and still consider the best manager I ever known, always said that she was not a technical person, and left the technical work to me. Indeed she was not deep into technical details as much as I was, but she was very bright, had a breadth of technical understanding, and was always on top of everything, with full control and clarity over the overall direction and progress of the project. She was particularly great at giving me exactly the kind of help I needed. When I had a new idea, and needed to know who could help, my manager put me in touch with the right people and teams. We worked in harmony, and were successful because we brought complementary skills and knowledge to the team. I had the technical knowledge, and she had the organizational knowledge and connections that I lacked. She considered her main job to serve her team, and it is that mindset that made her so great and successful.
What can you do?
I hope this post helped you see leadership in a new light. Whether you are in a leadership role or not, if you are not happy with your situation or team dynamics, the best chance you have at changing your circumstances is to talk to your team or manager, in a candid manner. Regardless of your roles, it is important to see each other as equals, who happen to have taken different responsibilities, based on their talents, skills, experiences, and hopefully interests. Keep in mind that others, whether in a leadership role or not, like yourself, are allowed to have flaws, space to grow, and things to learn.
Update 26 Nov 2023: I finally got the time to read through How to Lead a Team (Google SWE book). If you want to learn more about how to effectively lead a team, and positive patterns and antipatterns of leadership, this is a good read. If you are in a leadership position, this is a must read.