Leadership Traits Worth Emulating - Revisited
A few years back, I wrote about the leadership traits I’d been trying to emulate. You can find that post here. I'm sharing an updated list of traits based on what I've learnt over the last few years.
1. Surround yourself with the right people – Always find talent that can challenge you, is smarter than you and talent that can complement you. Great leaders encourage opinions, are open to being proven wrong and know their gaps. If folks around you agree with everything you say and do, that’s a red flag.
When I interview people, I sometimes share incorrect statements just to check if they are willing to disagree with me. If someone won't challenge my bad/incorrect ideas in an interview, they most likely won't do it when it matters either.
2. Decisions – Make reversible decisions quickly but be careful and deliberate on consequential, irreversible decisions – I picked up this amazing insight from Jeff Bezos's 2016 letter to shareholders
"Never use a one-size-fits-all decision-making process. Many decisions are reversible, two-way doors. Those decisions can use a light-weight process. Second, most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure" - Jeff Bezos
3. Focus on high-quality problems and beware of the bikeshed effect – Avoid spending your time on trivial issues. Ensure that your organization is spending most of their time on issues of actual importance. The easier, more trivial problems are always safer to discuss — everyone has an opinion on them. But leadership teams should really be spending their time on the harder, more consequential topics that truly impact the business.
4. Learn, Learn and learn some more – No matter how further along you are in your career, have the mindset that it's still Day 1 and that you are just about getting started. LLM's now lets us explore any topic, ask unlimited questions, and learn faster than ever before – there's no excuse for not being a learning machine. Charlie Munger said it best –
"I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you" - Charlie Munger
5. Create Fast and Effective Feedback Loops
Be honest and transparent about what is working and what is not. Don't hesitate to share constructive feedback with your colleagues. Be thoughtful and kind, but don't sugarcoat hard messages.
Build a culture where sharing direct, actionable feedback – both upward and downward is the norm. In the past I've asked my teams to share feedback about me, and then have shared what I heard with the broader team, including the stuff I do poorly - which is a lot :). Note to self: Do more of this, I don't do this nearly enough. You can't build a culture of candid feedback if you're not willing to receive it yourself.
6. Be Hands-On Where It Matters
While it's important that leaders empower their teams and enable autonomy, it's also important that they stay deeply involved in areas where they can make a huge impact. Maybe it's product reviews, calls to customers or hiring. The key is being selective. Don't be hands on with everything, but complete delegation is also not the way to go about it. Be in the details of things that matter (and beware the bikeshed effect, avoid the trivial).
Great leadership is presence, not absence - Brian Chesky
7. Let the Best Ideas Win
Most organizations are still too hierarchical. The best ideas rarely come from the top, but they often die in the middle.
Build a maker culture with a bias towards experimentation. Make it clear that in your organization, the quality of the idea matters more than the title of the person proposing it.
My favorite example comes from WL Gore
“Gore’s guitar string business is an oft-told example. It got its start when Dave Myers, an engineer principally engaged in developing cardiac implants, put PTFE on his mountain-bike cables for a grit-repellent coating. Pleased with the results, he thought it might also work for guitar strings, which lose tonal qualities as skin oils build up, and decided to use his dabble time to pursue the idea, though Gore had no products in the music industry at the time. Based in a grouping of ten plants, he pulled together a team of volunteers that spent the next three years working on the idea, without ever seeking formal endorsement. That required finding low cost ways to experiment. They hit pay dirt with a string that held its tone three times longer than the industry standard. Today, Gore’s ELIXIR guitar strings outsell competitors’ two-to-one.” – From the Future of Management by Gary Hamel (more here)
8. Focus on Impact Over Happiness
Daniel Ek in an interview with David Senra (brilliant, must hear) talks about focusing on impact rather than happiness. What an amazing thought! When people create something meaningful, solve hard problems, and see their work matter, happiness follows. But when you optimize for happiness directly – with perks, parties, and feel-good initiatives – without meaningful work, you get neither happiness nor impact.
As a leader, your job isn't to make everyone happy in the moment. It's to create an environment where people can do impactful work. The happiness will follow.
Focus on impact rather than happiness - Daniel Ek
9. Invest Heavily in Hiring
Leaders should be spending a lot of their time hiring. In an AI first world, human agency will become even more of a huge differentiator. The quality of the talent you hire and the people you surround yourself with will determine how successful you will be. So it is critical that leaders get this right - not just spending the time on hiring but also perfecting the hiring process.
10. Protect Deep Work – Ruthlessly
In my earlier posts, I've written about the importance of deep work and async-first culture. As a leader, it's not enough to practice this yourself – you need to actively protect your team's ability to do focused work.
If you had to focus on just one thing to enable more deep work for your teams - it is by ruthlessly cutting out meetings and bundling meetings into time blocks. A lot of meetings should be emails or Teams/slack messages. Just by applying that mental model, you can cut down on a lot of meetings for yourself and your teams. I've written about his here and here.
11. Embrace Variance and Brilliance Over Conformity
If you optimize for predictability all the time, you end up minimizing brilliance. I've done the opposite a lot of the time. Find people who can generate a lot of ideas - most of the ideas might even be terrible but one might end up having a huge impact on your business. Find "high temperature" talent that don't conform and enable psychological safety for this kind of thinking. Celebrate the crazy ideas that didn't work. Share your own failed experiments. Variance should be valued; it's key to success.
So those are my learnings. Much like culture, leadership is always a work in progress, so I'll revisit this post every year and keep updating the mental models based on what I learn and the mistakes I make.