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Character Leadership – Audio

Hi, this is A.J., welcome to this month’s VIP lesson. Our topic this month is a great one. The VIP program is about leadership and it’s one of our main topics. Our title is Character Leadership and the question is…

How do you become a loved and respected leader?

I’m assuming you want to be loved and respected because you can certainly be a tyrant if you want to. We’ve all worked for that type of boss or leader. It’s not particularly fun to be on a team or in a group with a leader who’s a tyrant, a dictator.

There are many kinds of leadership. If you go to a bookstore or look on Amazon you’ll see endless numbers of books on leadership and everyone has their own technique, style and secret of leadership, but I divide all of these into two big categories, two main categories. On one hand technique leadership is what I call it and on the other, character leadership. Let’s talk about the differences between these two, the advantages and disadvantages of each of these very general divisions, general styles and types of leadership and then I’ll tell you why I think character leadership is the better one, and how you do it.

Technique leadership emphasizes persuasion techniques. So the key thing is techniques, all these little different methods and techniques, some spoken, some written and some using body language, psychological techniques, all of these things design to help you persuade and influence people. Let me give you a tiny example.

There’s a technique called ‘presuppositions’, which comes from NLP. That’s where you, when you’re talking to someone and you’re trying to persuade them to do something, that you do not phrase the sentence like a question. You do not use the word if. You presuppose and assume that the person will do what you want them to do. Imagine you have a situation where you want a report you want the person on your team to finish a report by Monday.

With technique leadership you would say, when you finish this Monday be sure to put it on my desk. It’s a little verbal technique. You say when you finish it, which assumes they will finish it on Monday, instead of saying if you finish it on Monday or something like that. It’s a simple verbal technique that’s persuasive and does work and there are many techniques like this.

The advantages of technique leadership where you’re using psychological techniques, verbal techniques, persuasion techniques is that you’ll have short-term success. You can see an immediate result by changing your speaking patterns, changing the little psychological techniques you use.

That’s a big advantage of this and it’s also why it’s quite popular in a lot of groups and teams, because a lot of leaders like this kind of leadership because it produces quick, short-term results. They can see results quickly using these different techniques.

Long-term, I’ve found that technique styles of leadership are less successful. For one, for the leader it’s tiring and very demanding and it’s exhausting. I think for many people it doesn’t feel natural. You have to learn and practice different techniques and methods that may or may not fit your personality. So over time as the leader/manager it’s easy to get tired of doing this all the time, constantly having to monitor exactly how you speak, constantly having to use certain phrase types, for example, using presuppositions.

I’ve done this myself at times, but it gets tiring to constantly be mentally focusing on every little word and exactly how you say something. Another disadvantage of technique leadership is that it requires frequently monitoring of your team, because you’re always having to manipulate them in a way. You have to be on top of the people in your team more often. You have to be watching what they’re doing. You constantly have to be trying to influence them, push them and persuade them to do things.

I think the worst disadvantage of using techniques like this is that it usually, over the long-term, produces resentment within team members, especially if it’s done badly. It’s quite difficult to do these things easily and naturally. It’s because team members usually feel as though they’re being manipulated. If you’re constantly on them all the time. If you’re constantly using little psychological tricks on them. If you’re yelling at them or scaring them or intimidating them.

It works in the short-term, you’ll get them to do what you want done but long-term they’ll start to resent you. They’ll avoid you and in the worst case scenario they’ll actually go against you and will begin to fight back against you. They’ll do things just to oppose you because they’re sick of you pushing them too much.

Let’s talk now about the alternative, what I call character leadership, which is a different style of leadership, where instead of focusing on an endless number of techniques and tricks and psychological tools that you use, but focuses on just being a model for your team. When I say your team that could be anyone, including your family if you’re a parent. It might mean at work you’re department. You may or may not be the official manager, but you can always be a leader, especially with this style of leadership.

So character leadership emphasizes being a model. It means you model and show the behavior that you want the team to adopt. A negative or disadvantage of this style of leadership is that it takes longer. With this style of leadership you will probably not see very quick results. If you want someone on your team to do something right now and you decide you’re going to focus on using these techniques, this method and style of leadership, you may or may not get the result you want right now, today.

The reason is that this style of leadership requires and demands deeper growth and change, which is why it’s a more long-term style of leadership. There’s a famous quote

from Gandhi that says, “Become the change you want to see in the world.” And what he was saying is if you want the world to be more peaceful than you have to become a more peaceful person first and then you can inspire others, which is how he lived his own life.

That’s the basic idea of character leadership, that you become the change you want to see. You become the person you want your team to be.

Now, there are great advantages to this style of leadership. First, this style of leadership inspires productivity and proactivity. What that means is with the technique style of leadership you have to constantly be pushing people to do things. You give them little rewards, punishments or you scare them or use a little psychological technique on them to get them to do what you want them to do. However, when you become a person that’s highly respected by your team, and you actually embody the kind of work you want your team to do, the values you want your team to have, eventually they will look to you and they will follow your example without you having to tell them all the time.

This is what I mean by proactivity. It means you help your team members become proactive. They take action without you needing to tell them and monitor them all the time. Over the long-term they’ll also get more work done, because they’re more inspired to do the work, instead of waiting for you to push them, tell them and manipulate them to do it.

That’s one of the great advantages for you as a leader is that when you use this style of leadership and you develop it over time it requires less managing. It’s easier for you. It’s easier as the leader in the long-term, because you don’t have to monitor people constantly. You don’t have to spend every minute looking over people’s shoulders, telling them what to do, being worried they aren’t going to do it.

Let’s talk now about what the elements are of character leadership.

How do you develop this? I’m going to talk generally and in a very big way, because in every organization and situation there may be specific things you want to focus on, so let’s talk generally and then you can apply these general principles to whatever situation you have in which you want to be or need to be a leader.

1. The first key element of character leadership is to be mission focused. That means to be focused on the deep purpose of the team. Deep is very important. If you’re in a company in a department and your department has a purpose, a basic purpose. Maybe you’re in a marketing department so your purpose is to write advertising or to develop marketing projects. At a more deep level though, if you really think more deeply, the purpose of that marketing department is too connect with customers and potential customers, and to build a deep and powerful love for your company or products, trust, real relationships with the customers. That’s what I would call a deep purpose. It has a more emotional quality to it.

So when you think about the mission of your team, certainly think about the obvious logical purpose of the team. Also think deeply about the emotional purpose if you will the emotional elements of that mission because that’s what really inspires people.

How many people are inspired by writing ads, for example? People are inspired by connecting with individuals, by helping other people, so you have to identify that emotional element to your team. If it’s your family I think that would be an easy one to think of, to help your family thrive and grow, to be happy, all of these types of things.

So you’re focused on the mission and once you identify what that mission is, rather than focusing constantly on every little individual goal you have or job or task, you as the leader especially you as the leader, focus on this greater mission, constantly reminding your team of the bigger purpose, the deeper reasons for what you’re doing. Yes, you may need to have meetings and talk about all the individual projects you’re doing and goals that people have. That’s all fine.

But you as the leader must constantly focus on that mission, discuss the mission and the deeper purpose. Most importantly you have to live it. You have to demonstrate to your team that that mission is what’s most important. So whatever the principles are that are important to you and your team, you have to live them and show them.

2. The second key element is to be team focused. This means that you focus more on the success and welfare of your team and the team members, rather than on your individual position or power or control. This is what I think we all can identify in bad bosses, bosses that we haven’t liked in the past, is that they’re more concerned with their own authority, their own control than with their team members and everything they do seems to be for their benefit.

These are the people who boss people around, who yell at you, who make their team members feel weaker so that they can be stronger. You have to really take this to an extreme and that means that you have to make the team more important than your position. This may even mean sacrificing your own authority and control, your own personal goals sometimes so that your team benefits. It can be tough in the short-term, but it will gain a tremendous respect from your team in the long-term. I’ll end with a short story about a job I had at Thammasat University in Bangkok Thailand. When I entered that job, one of the last that I had, I was quite sick and tired of the normal school routine and just trying to be the big boss teacher and doing what I was told. I decided at this job I was only going to focus on my students. I was just going to serve my students and do whatever I thought would be best for them to help them succeed more with English.

I did a lot of different things.

• I changed my grading system and made it much easier, so the stress of grades and tests would be reduced, so the students could relax more.

• I got rid of the textbooks I was supposed to use and used completely different methods that were more interesting, more fun and more effective.

The good news was that I had great success with the students. The students loved my approach. The students made better progress and in terms of the team I was successful, my team benefited.

However, I did pay a price because my bosses weren’t too happy with me changing everything around, so I personally paid a price and in fact I had to leave that job, because I wasn’t doing all the standard things I was supposed to do. I chose my team over my personal success in my career. In the short-term it was painful and difficult, but in the long-term it made me a better teacher and ultimately, led me to where I am now where I’m much more successful.

So the key point is to embody this kind of character leadership requires short-term sacrifices sometimes, but the long-term benefits are worth it, for yourself and for your team.

In the commentary we’ll talk more about specific ways you can use this in your own life and your own situations.

Bye-bye.