Improve Your Leadership Skills : An interview with Oxford Professor, Michael Smets
What makes a good leader? And how can you improve your leadership style? We speak to Michael Smets, Professor of Management, at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, for his advice and tips on leading a team during these unusual times.
This is a bit of a philosophical question to start with.
Are leaders born, or are they made?
Whether leaders are born or made is a perennial question of leadership, and there has been some evolution in thinking over time. Early on, people looked at leaders' physical characteristics, and research concluded that leaders were either particularly tall or particularly short. That doesn’t really help us to understand who makes a good leader. We’re now arriving at more of an understanding that leaders are made, nurture versus nature, and there’s significant research into how those leaders are made.
We talk about the crucible moments of leadership, which is typically some moment of crisis, opportunity, or adversity that helps us to hone our leadership potential. Especially during current times, many political leaders and also business leaders are changing their leadership style. Unexpected people are rising to positions of leadership in the pandemic.
I think what’s also important to remember is that leadership is not the same as management, in the sense that leadership is a mindset, a willingness to make a positive difference. It's not a hierarchical position or a job title. Leadership is the sum of our experiences and our response to those experiences, rather than an innate portfolio of inherited characteristics.
In terms of getting a sense of your own leadership style and what you might be doing right / doing wrong, I wonder if you have any advice for people on how to improve their leadership?
There are two common mistakes that we are prone to making when assessing our own leadership. Typically, we either rely on our own understanding of what we think we are like as a leader. However, as we all know, it’s difficult to accurately assess how others see you. The second common mistake is that we model our own leadership on previous leaders we have encountered. So, we say, “I would like to be like person A,” or “I definitely don’t want to be like Person B.” What that does is to prioritize our own preferences and not the preferences of those in our team.
The key thing about leadership is that it is not really about you. It's about others. First and foremost, it is about understanding how others want to be led and how others perceive you. So, the first thing you need to do is understand is, “What do my team members want and need in terms of leadership? And, how do I measure up against that?”
How to achieve this? In an ideal scenario, we would look to create psychological safety within the team. This enables people to speak up when they feel their needs are not being met. This means that you avoid more difficult conversations down the line.
We can also think of using more ad-hoc check-ins and 360-degree surveys, where we collect feedback on our leadership in a more formal way. But the preferred option is always to empower your team to create psychological safety so that people will comment on your leadership and their experience of it on a more continuous basis.
How do you create an atmosphere of psychological safety?
The most important thing is that people feel valued and respected for whatever views they bring to you. The worst thing you can do is just dismiss what they have to say as invalid or irrelevant. Because that means you are not only dismissing the point they are raising at that moment, but you are also de-motivating them for raising any future issues. It's giving people the sense that their opinions are being valued and heard, and it also means demonstrating a sense of openness, or even vulnerability, that you welcome other people’s help in developing yourself.
As I like to point out, if you are a superhuman heroic leader who can do everything yourself and don't need anybody's help, you don't need any followers. But without any followers, then you are also no leader. So I think this notion between being open, inviting help, and accepting that help is the key to an atmosphere of psychological safety that empowers people to share their views on a continuous basis.
Many people have been thrown into a situation where they have to lead a remote team.
Any advice on shifts people need to make to accommodate this change?
I worked with many executives, particularly during the early weeks of the pandemic, to navigate this new normal of leading virtual teams. Lots of consultants, for example, who had client calls on Zoom. What many people said, which I thought was interesting, was that the tone has completely changed. We are no longer sitting in a board room; everyone dressed in suits and ties or other business attire. We are now talking from living room to living room.
Typically, business communication is about the transmission of information, but early in the pandemic, it became much more about human connection. “How are you holding up?” So, the context and environment in which we talk helped having this more human connection and being a human first and foremost before you are a leader.
On the other hand, this may be the flip side; these conversations are now much more carefully orchestrated. It is difficult for a team member to bump into a colleague or their boss at the proverbial water cooler and have a very casual conversation. Now you have to make an appointment. This gives things a more formal feel. So, once you’re having the conversation, it’s easier to be human and to be vulnerable. However, in setting up the conversation, there is a higher bar. So, there needs to be a much more proactive invitation by team leaders to give team members an opportunity to talk.
For people who aren’t happy with their team's performance, could it be anything to do with their management style?
And if so, what can they do about it?
This is a question that is particularly relevant in moments of crisis. I think we need to be very mindful of the tone that we set for the team and the climate that we are creating. Very often, when we have a considerable asymmetry in knowledge or seniority, it is easy for team members to feel silenced. Then the team leader may feel dissatisfied with the performance of the team. Certain information is not being shared, or some team members are reticent and withdrawn, and it’s easy for the team leader to think these people are disengaged and de-motivated.
However, it might be their own actions that have created this situation. For example, if as a team leader, you talked over members in a previous meeting or team members feel intimidated because the team leader is a renowned expert. Team leaders should always first look at themselves. What is the climate that I created for this team, and could I change it so that more team members feel empowered to participate?
A company called Esme created something called Riff Rooms. It’s a video chat software, basically like zoom, which monitors who speaks and for how long and how often people take turns. So, in a meeting, you get a visual representation when a particular team member hogs the conversation or when others don’t get a chance to talk. That’s an indicator of the energy and the engagement of the team.
More broadly, this leads us to the question about how team leaders can start to monitor, not necessarily their team's performance, but at least the level of engagement. If they find they are always the one constantly talking, that is an important first indicator of why other team members are not talking.
As we move out of lockdown, we need to be more inclusive, democratic and empowering as leaders to give our teams some participation in what the future will look like. The key to this is reflecting on the question, "Is my leadership appropriate for the people I’m leading and the situation?” How we manage this transition period from pandemic to post-lockdown will be about building a way that’s better for the future.
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