Explicit leadership; friend or foe?
Explicit leaders are generally directive, often stubborn or bullish, decisive, associated with clarity and in many cases the person everybody turns to in the heat of the moment. On the surface that sounds sexy and in high pressure, emergency or adrenaline fuelled environments, this kind of leadership is a sexy: “cometh the hour, cometh the man” quality. In addition, explicit leaders can be friendly, likeable people with a steely edge which can create a strong sense of security with the team that's following.
As a young man in leadership roles I relied very much on fitness, strength, attitude, opinion and decisiveness as characteristics of my own personal leadership style, until I got “bounced” a few times and found myself in predicaments that needed more mental agility than physical dominance to overcome. It's during these moments that you discover a more implicit style – one that is engaging, enquiring and ultimately in my mind, more enjoyable.
The real challenge I want to pose here is about the sustainability of explicit leadership in the long term. Let's have a look at some examples of explicit behaviour.
Directive and decisive
Both vital traits but what happens when you are not there? Who's making the decisions? Decision making is simple with experience, I've been doing it since age 18 as captain of sports teams, Naval officer and business leader. I was brought up to believe in decisiveness and responsibility for your own decisions. However, at some point you have to realise that this is a skill that needs honing. If you are making all the decisions for your team or worse still, do not enable them to make decisions (whatever the consequences), the team will not develop effectively and ultimately require constant micro-management, primarily because the chances of your staff making effective decisions at key moments under pressure, is limited by the lack of “skills practice” and can lead to a breakdown of trust between you and them.
Clarity of vision
A prerequisite for leadership; if you have no vision or clarity of vision, how on god’s green earth can you inspire others to follow you? (And I'm not just talking about figurehead leaders – Branson, Gates, Ghandi etc). What's the vision for your team, department or division? Some leaders are happy if the team becomes a clone of them – a terrible vanity that leads down the path to singularity, destroys diversity and ultimately, creativity. It's important to have a vision and to be able to sell it to the team, that's explicit, but what happens if the team doesn't buy into your vision? Then we start to hear some beautiful language in the form of “Just do it!,” “Get on with it” “It's your job, that's what I pay you for” “I don't pay you to think” and so on. Great in the short term but a super breeding ground for viral discontent.
Outcomes and impact
Absolutely essential. I love a good outcome, to see a result, get a win. This ties directly into vision as most of us worry about the bottom line, so let's get our heads down and “just get on with it.” Great mind set which can lead to a trail of destruction. Team leadership particularly needs awareness of resource management including your people. It's very easy to offload this responsibility to HR; what message does this send to your team? If you are disengaged from the team, they will disengage from you. Effective delegation needs awareness of what the team can truly achieve. This is an art form in my mind and takes time – growing a leadership brand takes time. Ultimately we buy into certain brands because we trust them. How many leaders (particularly junior leaders), actually think about their own impact on their environment? Very few, in the pursuit of explicit top down directives...
Some of the worst examples of explicit leadership involve underlying coercion or threats. Leadership is a skill and not always innate but the “I'm the boss, do what I say” pathway will cause a lot of problems.
Example – during a couple of months at sea heading to the Middle East, in a small ship with a complement of less than 30 crew, we had a Captain who clearly knew his stuff. Obsessed to the N-th degree with format, presentation and detail, but absolutely no empathy with his team. Despite the disciplined working environment, by the time we arrived in a high pressure operational area this professional body of men couldn’t wait to get off the ship and away from the man who was totally unaware of the morale of his team. More than 15 years down the line I remember this vividly. The team was falling apart at the seams and the man in charge could not see it – everything was too “shiny and process driven”.
Explicit behaviour is natural and sometimes necessary. However, to be an effective leader you need to be aware of when, how and why to employ it:
What’s the impact?
Is it required?
Does my team trust or respect me more like this?
Don't threaten
Don't pull rank (a clear sign of a lost leader)
Mitigate anger / frustration / accusations
Don't jump to conclusions
Don't make too many assumptions
Don't engage in emotional blackmail; it's dirty.
In Part 2, we'll have a look at implicit leadership and how it differs from explicity.
Angus Peacock, November 2013
There’s a lot to be said about leadership, whose style is best and what we remember about great leaders. Bottom line is, you look through business, military and political history there's no one size fits all solution. People are different, personalities are different and essentially those who lead generally have a cause, a brand, a set of values or ideals that those who follow want to be a part of, often temporarily.
So instead of trying to compare and imitate personality types, this article explores some of the differences between explicit and implicit leadership.
Simply put, being explicit (in this context) means telling someone exactly what you want or expect from them, while implicity, relates to a more collaborative approach to leadership.