There may be lots of articles and books and podcasts about what it takes to be a great leader, but this audio podcast presented by Bob Sutton had some great hallmarks of great leaders.
Bob Sutton is a Management Professor at Stanford University and author of numerous management books, including The No Asshole Rule. I definitely recommend listening to the whole podcast (embedded at the end of this post), but here are a few of the tidbits from his talk.
5 Hallmarks of Great Leaders
1. Be assertive.
Great leaders are pushy when they need to be. This is key to actually moving forward, making progress, or "shipping" as Seth Godin puts it.
2. Backoff when needed.
Great leaders push when they need to but backoff when they need to as well. This enables creativity, experimentation, and freedom to fail. He gives a great example of managers actually leaving meetings to give their teams the freedom to come up with and try out their own ideas.
3. "Fight as if you're right, listen as if you're wrong."
It's difficult, when you're looked to for guidance and have developed a reputation for being right, to be open and truly listen to others' ideas. It would be a great experiment to truly try to "listen as if you're wrong" and see what came out of a meeting. My hunch is that (1) you would really hear others' ideas and (2) your team would learn a lot from the questions you ask from learning about their ideas.
4. Break down "big hairy goals."
In Jim Collins' Good to Great, he suggests great companies work towards "big hairy goals." The problem with these "big hairy goals" is that they can be overwhelming. Great leaders are able to break these high level goals into digestible tasks so that their team is not paralyzed in the face of something so large.
5. Protect your team.
There are a lot of interruptions, distractions, and obstacles that may come in the way of your team accomplishing its goals. A great manager will "play interference" and protect them from all sorts of unnecessary distractions.
Listen to the full audio podcast:
Flickr photo by athena1970
