Running a company is a grind. Overwhelmed with the daily onslaught of problems, it is easy to fall back into bad leadership behaviors. I found that keeping leadership aphorisms (or hacks) around me would refocus me back to healthy leadership behaviors.
Here are 15 I kept around me all the time.
1. You Get What You Tolerate
If you tolerate bad behavior, you will get more of it. Shut down toxic people and do not allow the bad behaviors to continue.
2. Stay on Target
The more clearly you can define, describe, and quantify an expected outcome, the more likely you (and your team) will achieve it. Keep people focused on the goals, so they keep moving forward and do not become mired down in frustrations and mistakes.
3. Hope Is Not a Strategy
Unfortunately, the word “hope” has become weaponized in many organizations. Rather than defining a strategy, a plan, or a goal, people will hope everything works out the way they want it to. When things inevitably go wrong, they will treat the outcome as entirely out of their control.
When you hope for an outcome, you ceding control to fate. This makes employees passive participants in an effort, rather than active players.
To stop this, prohibit the use of the word hope in any work-related discussions. Require people to use the word plan or intend in place of hope. This reinforces the notion that they are responsible for the outcome and are expected to actively work for success.
Do not hope for success, plan for it.
4. Success is Born in Failure
Mistakes, errors, and failures will teach you more about how to be successful than any success will. You must aggressively analyze your failures and face what you did wrong.
This is especially true for sales. If you lose a deal, you must find out why you lost it.
5. Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail
People without a plan will take an entirely predictable failure and turn it into an entirely unnecessary emergency. You, your team, and your company must have a plan for – everything.
This is a frequent problem in product development. If you fail to precisely plan what the next version of a product will be, it is easy to keep pushing the deadlines out indefinitely.
6. Make It About Them
Employees will naturally direct their frustrations, failures, and fear on a leader. To counteract this, you must redirect conversations away from yourself and toward the employees and their work. Moreover, never vent your own frustrations to employees, as this only makes you sound petty and vindictive.
Make your team feel heard, needed, and important.
7. I Did Not Know What to Do, So I Did Nothing
When confronting a challenge is seldom a good idea to do nothing. Do not allow ignorance or lack of experience to stop you or your team from trying. Even a bad outcome is better than none. You can learn from a bad outcome, you learn nothing from doing nothing.
This is an example of an “intolerable” or the opposite of a core value. It is something you explicitly want to discourage in the company.
8. Do Not Take Advice from People Who Have Accomplished Nothing
Be wary of advice from people who have never been a founder or leader before (especially investors). Advice is plentiful and most of it is useless.
9. What Annoys You is Your Greatest Teacher
People or behaviors that annoy you provide a valuable window into your own personality. Look past the person and personalities and reflect on why you are annoyed. You may discover a lot about yourself.
I had a sales manager who drove me crazy. He was an inflexible, hard-charging, opportunist who did not know when to shut up. He annoyed me because his bad behaviors reflected some of my own bad behaviors. Learning how to manage him helped me manage my own behaviors.
10. Start With Why
This statement comes from Simon Sinek’s famous Start With Why video.
Before you jump into any large effort, make sure you and everybody else knows why you are doing it. As Sinek points out, organizations that can clearly define their purpose are consistently more successful.
11. When There Is Success, Look Out the Window; When There Is Failure, Look in the Mirror
This is a reminder to share success with your team. However, when there is a failure, reflect on your own behavior and actions. Take responsibility for failure and work to get better.
12. Questions Beat Answers
Rather than telling people what to do, ask them instead. Curiosity is a potent leadership tool. When you ask questions, you show interest in the other person’s ideas. This makes that person like you, and consequently more receptive to direction.
Asking questions also makes employees own the answers, reinforcing accountability. When you tell people what to do, then the solution belongs to you, which means employees are not responsible for the outcome.
Let them find the answers themselves.
13. Less is More
Intelligent, confident, and ambitious people are concise. They say what needs to be heard, and nothing more. The more you talk, the stupider you sound.
14. No Verbal Agreements
Bad employees will routinely try to gaslight leaders with decisions and agreements that never happened (or are substantially different). To avoid this, require all decisions or agreements to be in writing. This avoids misunderstandings and ensures accountability.
15. Perseverance Furthers
This was my father’s advice for most situations. He got it from the I Ching, an ancient Chinese book of proverbs. This simple concept carried me through a lot of dark times as a founder.
All your problems have a solution. You merely do not know the solution, yet. Persevere and the answers will emerge in time.
Conclusion
While these aphorisms do not solve all leadership challenges they can help. I hope…er…I plan for them to help you. 😊
This was originally published on Medium June 8, 2022.
