Leadership: Our People and Our Communication

I recently shared with a friend notes of my take-a-ways from the book, The Zillion Dollar Coach, which is about Bill Campbell, who was an exemplary leader. Campbell absolutely understood that leadership is not about our being great, rather it is about helping our people be great.

After rereading my notes, I am converting the messages to this short article. These are valuable lessons for all of us and are especially relevant today with our teams being dispersed. Our future will be different and communication, connections, and relationships founded on admiration and trust will be vitally important.

• Meet, in person or virtually, with team members and appropriate colleagues every week (or two) to discuss challenges and how to help our company be even more successful
• Assure team is communicating well, and that tensions and disagreements are identified and discussed. And definitely assure that when decisions are made, everyone is on board, whether we agree or not
• Do not tolerate internal competition
• Be it in person or by phone, Face Time, or Zoom, get to know our people ask how they are doing and how we can help
• Prepare for 1:1 conversations, which are the best way to help people be more effective and grow, e.g., “What are you hoping to achieve?” “What would be helpful to discuss?”
• Individual and group meetings, again in person or virtual, are forums to discuss the most important issues and opportunities, get everyone on the same page, encourage (insist?) on the respectful debate, and then make decisions
• In group meetings, there can be no passive-aggressive, rather we want a respectful debate, to assure all perspectives get heard and considered
• Coach difficult high-performing individuals as long as value outweighs toll on others. Note: to me personally, this is debatable. I say coach the person who is a problem, and if no attitude change, he has to leave
• If must let someone go, assure their heads are held high, be generous, celebrate their contributions. I definitely agree with this
• Build trust – be positive, no talking behind one’s back, do what we say we will be genuine, celebrate the successes of others
• We want people who are humble, honest, and hardworking, when necessary
• And we want people who are coachable, have an openness to learning, and always improving. As above, humility is essential
• We must listen with full and undivided attention, not judging, not thinking about what we will say, and we ask questions to clarify and get to real issues
• Couple negative/constructive feedback with positive/caring; if negative, do it privately and be timely. Don’t tell, ask questions and share stories
• Have and honor courage – for the good of the team and company. Be willing to take risks, everyone fails, which is an opportunity to learn and do better going forward

Continuing open and honest communication is always vitally important, and even more so now. And we cannot assume what is good communication to us is what it is for others. We must ask our colleagues what good communication looks like to them.

Future working environments will likely be different. We will be wise to include our people in designing our workplace going forward, rather than by top-down directives. Our relationships, while always very important, will be all the more important. We all have to stay connected, and we want ideas to flow up. People like to be part of a community, and that will be a goal for us – though we may be dispersed, we are a community, a collaborative, supportive community!

Frequent communication, respect, and gratitude are key.