BuiltEnvironment

What makes for good leadership?

Lots of people write about this subject and how it manifests in different professions, market sectors and social/political groups.

My "take" on leadership is that it has four major components, all of which are necessary for good leadership. If you are to be judged a successful leader, you must understand and excel in all four components.

My focus is on marketing and business development for the design and construction industry with all its related technical disciplines, including planning, architecture, engineering, surveying, landscape architecture, construction management, environmental permitting/compliance, and construction.

The first component of good leadership involves getting the right people on the bus, and getting each one in the right seat.

The second component involves developing and presenting goals and strategies that can succeed, and that people willingly choose to adopt as their own. Note: It is always better when everyone in a group is pulling in the same direction.

The third involves setting the right tasks to implement the strategy and achieve the goal.

The last involves follow-up activities that cement the client's understanding of your firm's commitment and help strengthen and build the client relationship.

The Right People

My reading of "Good to Great," taught me that getting the right people on the bus is the first and most important task of leadership. A good leader surrounds him/herself with folks who are even better than they are.

The second important task is getting each person into the right seat (the right role). Whether they are already in your group or you must recruit new staff, if you don't have good people working from their strengths, it won't matter how great your strategies are, or how efficient and effective your operations may be.

Marketing managers, directors or CMOs need to spend time with staff to make sure each person is working on assignments that harness their main strengths. If this is not the case, assignments can be shuffled. After this is done, a leader can see if there are still seats on the bus that need to be filled and what kind(s) of skills it will take to fill them.

The Right Strategy

Having the right strategy assumes you have a strategic plan, a set of attainable goals. The plan will set forth the strategies by which you hope to achieve those goals.

Experience helps a leader determine which strategies are most or least likely to succeed. No matter how valuable you think a strategy might prove in the long run, the only actions that matter are the ones that move your firm toward its stated goals.

If you really think that particular strategy will prove to have great value later on, you can always add one more goal to your strategic plan.

Once you have determined the right strategy, or strategies, to achieve each goal, it is much easier to determine the tactics (steps) needed to implement each strategy and assign those steps—with deadlines—to specific individuals.

The Right Operations

Someone once asked me, "If you're doing the wrong thing, does it matter how well you're doing it?"

I really hope the answer to that question was obvious!

The right operations, or tactics, are the steps that help you implement your strategies and achieve your firm's goals. Operations could range from developing solid pursuit decision methods, to committing appropriate resources to develop quality submittals, to fostering an attitude where pursuits are treated as seriously as projects.

The Right Follow-up

Follow-up involves activities that make the client aware of your commitment to being a good partner. Activities range from debriefing regardless of whether you were selected or not; visiting clients to talk with users about how a facility works for them; inviting the client to participate in conference presentations about the project, or co-author articles; checking to see if the client wants to submit the project for an award, and helping to prepare the award submittal; and a host of other things that come under the heading of "client care."

Good leadership takes all of these into consideration and instills a desire in staff to adopt, take part in and lead these activities.

How much is too much?

As many of you are aware, I am a big fan of Hinge, a branding and marketing consultancy, and their very expert researchers, writers and presenters. I am particularly impressed with their many free webinars and publications.

This noon, I participated in a Hinge-sponsored webinar about content marketing hosted by Lee Frederiksen, Managing Partner at Hinge, and featuring Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute.

Although the phrase "content marketing" is relatively new, marketers in the A/E industry have actually been engaged in content marketing for decades. So I perked up when Joe's session introduction mentioned a question I have heard many times from many new consultants:

"Why should I give my expertise away for free?"

I think this is a valid question, one that I answered for myself when I started The Siben Consult, LLC, late in 2003. And I clarified it in more detail the first time I helped a friend create her own consulting business.

As far as I'm concerned, it's all about balance. You have to figure out how much is too much to give away. In other words, how do you find the balance between demonstrating your own expertise and giving someone enough information to complete the activity on their own?

At one point in my early college career (40+ years ago), I was an Economics major (or so I thought at the time). As part of my studies, I learned about the concept of "necessary but not sufficient." This is the idea that a specific condition, or set of conditions, may be "necessary" or "sufficient" — or both — to make something possible.

For example, it is necessary that an individual be a mammal in order to be human, but merely being a mammal is not sufficient. We know of many species of mammals — ranging from bats and primates to dolphins and whales — that are not human.

So you share the information "necessary" to establish your expertise, or whatever credential you are trying to establish, but not sufficient information for the requesting party to want to attempt the task without you.

I share my areas of expertise, my training, my national certification and my approach to many of the tasks I might be asked to perform for a client. In some cases, I share my process (my worksheet samples). I also share my many publications and blog posts (more than 170 posts as of this writing).

When I share a specific process, I share the "what" of the activity, generally including all the tasks that are part of that activity. What I don't generally share is the "how" of those tasks. I don't explain in any detail how I accomplish each step, or how each result informs the next step.

I really love to share the information and expertise I have accumulated over my 37 years in the A/E industry. I want the person who receives my information to know that my expertise is real, and that I can help him/her, but I don't want to provide a detailed free consultation that puts myself and my firm out of business.

More pearls (#3 and #4) without oysters

As I've written previously, I sometimes find wonderful thoughts in the strangest places. This time, my "pearls" are from the fantasy genre. Both are from "Owlsight," a book of the "Darian's Tale" trilogy and part of the Valdemar series, by Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon.

"Parents always know what strings control your heart and soul. After all, they are the ones who tied them there."

I know a man who believed strongly that he wanted to be an architect. But his mother wanted him to be a lawyer. So he went to law school, and took a job with a law firm, where he worked until his yearning for architecture got the best of him.

When he finally left the law firm to go back to school for architecture, he neglected to inform his parents. They didn't find out until his mother tried to call him one weekday afternoon and was told that he hadn't worked at that firm for a few months.

I can only imagine the conversation that followed later that evening.

But in addition to a desire to please his mother, this man was raised to have a strong sense of his value as a person. So he made his decision and followed what he thought was the right direction for him.

"It isn't what you call me; it's what I answer to that counts."

This one is about having the confidence to follow your heart and your heart's desire. Many grown-ups and some older children have such a strong sense of self that they know who they are and what they are meant to be doing, no matter what their parents want and their schools tell them is possible for them. There is nothing their parents, siblings, friends or relatives can do that will change their course and destiny. If that person happens to enter the priesthood or become a doctor, we often call such a conviction a "calling."

There is an old Yiddish expression, "tuchus affen tisch." Literally translated, it means, "put your butt on the table." Colloquially, it might translate as "put your money where your mouth is." So it is about having the courage of one's convictions, the absolute certainty that your choice is the correct one for yourself or for a group of which you are part. It is about believing in yourself so strongly and completely that you are willing to risk all that you have, all that you are, to do what you think is best for you.

The lucky ones follow their hearts and end up not regretting their decisions. They enjoy careers they love and never want to retire. Many of them get paid very well for something they would do for free if they could afford to do so, just for the love of it.

I have been very lucky. I made two choices and have two careers that I really love. In one of them, I recently celebrated a 40th anniversary, and the other will be 38 years this summer.