10 Key Ways To Lead Senior Teams At The Executive Level
If you’re reading this and work in HR - or you want to take your leadership skills to the next level - next time you start your day, go into a meeting, or observe your senior team, think about horses!
Last month Ascend worked with a leadership team of an American Defence business in Virginia, USA - our Successful Teams diagnostic had pinpointed that the most important area of development was building trust across the team.
We decided that a fun and effective way to learn about trust, connection, communication and leadership was by horse whispering.
One morning, the US team spent time with a human / equine communication specialist learning the parallels between leading a horse and people successfully.
Here are 10 leadership strategies you can start implementing today that will help your leader and/or team go from mediocrity to high performing:
1. Lead from behind as well as the front
When leaders lead from the front, they run the risk of leaving those who are less talented behind; however, when they lead from the back, they bring everyone with them.
Every great leader knows that not everyone changes and moves at the same speed. If they’re leading or have ambitions to cultivate a high performing team, it’s important they let everyone catch up and adjust to the change. This all comes down to communication, whether it’s:
Enhancing their communication
Changing the frequency of their communication
Changing the way they communicate all together
One of the best ways to do this, is to have the leader speak last in meetings. This allows everyone the opportunity to contribute their ideas, without being influenced by their leader’s.
If any member/s have been left behind, the leader must slow down in their communication, which helps the team member/s gather and understand all of the necessary information they require in order to move forward.
Most importantly, the foundation of all excellent leaders’ communication is ensuring each member absolutely understands HOW and WHY they need to move and take specific actions.
2. Leaders need to build an authentic connection first, before they take action
It’s key that leaders connect and build rapport with each team member, before the team takes action.
Leaders can build rapport by asking questions, showing interest in their members’ lives, finding common ground and more!
They can enhance their connection by using positive body language, intuition, tone of voice, giving off a relaxed and comfortable reassurance, observing how the other person is responding and adjusting, just to name a few.
Before asking, are you ready for the next step? The leader must feel a strong connection to their team member. If they do, the member will confidently follow their direction.
Just like with horses, when you stroke their withers, the side of their neck, talk to them and feel relaxed with them, they’ll follow your actions, as both sides feel comfortable.
If the person feels wary around the horse and doesn’t build that rapport and connection, then the horse will also be wary and not follow their instructions or actions. The same is true with people.
3. If the leader hesitates, their team will notice. The leader must think things through and be deliberate with their actions and words.
When leading a horse, if you don’t look deliberately in the direction you want to go in, or lack confidence in what you’re doing and asking of the horse, then the horse will pick up on this straight away and question your leadership.
Leaders must be confident in their ability to lead and courageous enough to step out of their comfort zone, whether it’s admitting they don’t the answer or getting out of the way to lead from the back.
When a leader communicates confidently and deliberately, and transmits courage and confidence, members will follow their instructions and directions without hesitation.
If what a leader is saying, how they’re saying it and their body language is mismatched, it shows a lack of confidence and people will not follow leaders who lack confidence.
If your team is experiencing this, then your leader needs to create congruence between what and how they’re communicating and their body language. When all of this is aligned, it creates and transmits confidence - and the team will follow them unquestionably.
4. Don’t let your leader give up if they don’t follow her/him straight way. They probably will follow her/him, as long as they’re confident and communicate clearly.
As we said above, leaders must be confident, communicate clearly, persevere and try new things.
Everyone processes change in their own time and travels at different speeds. It takes time to reflect and work things out. Don’t let them be perturbed when people don’t follow them straight away.
Just like when we were with the horse, it didn’t come immediately. You had to stay strong and true to your earlier actions. If you did this, then the horse followed you. If you backtracked or doubted your actions/instructions, then it wouldn’t come to you.
If your team leader is experiencing this, sometimes repetition of direction and instruction is required, but not necessarily in the same language.
5. Non-verbals are just as important as verbal cues (if not more so).
We’ve mentioned congruence before when it comes to verbal and non-verbal cues, and that’s because congruence between these two things is the key to a truly great leader.
A leader’s words, tone of voice and body language must match up, otherwise it creates confusion amongst individuals and the team as a whole.
Hand gestures, how and where a leader looks, where they stand and more, are just some of the non-verbal cues that are important to clear and confident communication.
To lead a horse, it isn’t what you say that counts, but your body language. You had to stand in front to lead from the front or go behind its driving line (front leg) to lead from the back. Your leadership style differed according to where you stood.
This is the same when you’re leading a high performance team, non-verbal cues communicates to the team your level of confidence and leadership style and abilities.
6. It takes courage to lead and it takes courage to follow (sometimes!).
Everyone always thinks it’s courageous to lead from the front, as the leader experiences things first. This is can be difficult and challenging, because they must make sense of it first and create a path for others to follow.
However, what if we told you that it’s more courageous to lead from the back?
When a leader leads from the back, they put their ego to one side and live in a more uncertain space, because they’re letting others lead from the front. Their team members experience more development, become tougher and use a different set of skills that are likely stronger than yours in that situation.
It takes courage to say I’m going to lead from the back, because the best person in this situation isn’t me.
7. A leader must listen with their ears (and eyes) and be receptive to feedback.
First off, a leader must listen to what’s going on around them:
What are they hearing? (what’s being said, what words and tone are being used? Where’s the emphasis? What emotion is being portrayed? Is there any incongruence?)
What body language is being used?
When you were with a horse, you could see how they were feeling and adjust your leadership accordingly. For example, if they horse stuck its tongue out and licked you, then it was enjoying itself. However, if the horse’s ears were back, then it was feeling startled, wary and nervous.
Secondly, leaders must listen to what’s going on within themselves:
How are they feeling?
Is how they’re feeling effecting the way they portray confidence?
Are they following their intuition and hunches? Or are they ignoring them?
Do they need to change their behaviours and/or the way they’re leading?
Are they aware of their biases and ensuring they’re not taking the team in a certain direction?
8. Remember, a gentle push goes along way.
A leader must be firm to break through inertia and assertive to create movement, and when coupled with confidence and clear communication, the momentum generated will be unstoppable.
It’s best to lead from behind when there’s inertia or a lack of action/movement within the team, because the leader is able to push people forwards and out of their comfort zone and into the leadership and/or development zone.
When leading a horse, you don’t want to give it a shove - but a nudge. When they’ve been standing for a while, their legs lock. To unlock their legs, they need a nudge to become unbalanced and as a result, they become more malleable to following your direction.
9. A leader needs to empower and, of course, correct when necessary.
An excellent leader knows that they need to give their team members the space to do the right thing, but also be close by to ensure they keep interest, continue with great performance and travel in the right direction.
A leader can achieve this, when they’ve built a solid relationship with individual team members and know that their instructions are understood and followed.
This is just like when leading a horse. Once you’ve built a good rapport with a horse and it understands your instructions, you can stand in the middle of the pen and let the horse go round and round, until you want it to change direction.
Once you stop being involved and directing the horse, it will lose interest, give up, stop and/or pick up bad habits.
So when you give the horse space and autonomy, but don’t completely abandon and leave them to it, it will keep interest, continue with good habits and follow your direction.
If you think the horse is going to lose interest soon, then move closer and communicate!
If the horse does lose interest, then you need to re-engage and re-connect through conversation, listening, intuition, working out why they lost interest, changing your leadership style (e.g. from from the front to the back and giving them a gentle nudge) and more.
The same goes for a leader and their team members. Provide them with enough autonomy and space that they progress the team forward, but be on hand to guide them, keep them engaged and, of course correct when necessary.
10. Repetition is key. Communicate, communicate, communicate – and not just with words.
We may sound like a broken record, but congruency between a leader’s words, tone of voice and body language is vital to cultivating a high performing team.
A leader must not only communicate a consistent message to their team members, but keep a steady flow of information to them too.
If a leader provides them too much autonomy or their message is inconsistent and/or incongruent, the team will steer off course and/or lose interest.
As we’ve said before, if the leader doesn’t know something, then it’s important they communicate this to their team members. For example, if a big company restructure is imminent, the leader needs to tell them what information they currently have and that as soon as they have more, they’ll be the first to know. People don’t like uncertainty and won’t follow a leader who creates it.
