Are You an Entitled or Engaged Leader?
The following is adapted from The Leadership PIN Code.
Experienced leaders share many of the same struggles: achieving alignment with their senior stakeholders, managing transitions, and introducing new business ideas or product lines. They battle silos and may have a thousand connections on LinkedIn, but struggle to extract the value of those relationships in reality.
The greatest challenge that leaders face though—and the one that’s at the core of many of these other problems—is effectively translating their agenda so that others feel engaged and mobilized. Every time a leader communicates, they are facing a make-or-break opportunity to make an impact.
Leaders who don’t embrace those opportunities have a tendency to focus primarily on themselves. They are what I call “entitled” leaders. By contrast, the most successful leaders are fully engaged with the people around them. Embracing “engaged” leadership will have dramatic effects on your organization’s success.
The Characteristics of an Entitled Leader
A leader at the entitled end of the continuum is often recognizable as a newly appointed leader who, upon coming into the role, sees a number of things to be improved upon or changed immediately. He approaches the situation with the mindset of, “My position grants me authority, power, and mandate, and I’m just going to make the changes I see fit.”
The changes may be as drastic as rewriting the company strategy, changing company goals, priorities, and organization structure, or as seemingly simple as changing the way meetings are run. Regardless of the type of changes, decisions are made and presented to the team as a fait accompli, without any attempt to gain buy-in or support from the team, nor to explain the rationale behind the changes.
Entitled leaders don’t spend any time getting to know the organization or testing the ideas to make sure they’re necessary or valid. That’s because the changes have no anchor within the organization; they are about the leader and their power to act.
The entitled leader seizes all ownership from the team, and as a result, people quickly disengage, becoming fearful and mistrustful of leadership. The leader is seen as unpredictable, impulsive, and autocratic. The sense of instability as the culture changes for the worse causes people to worry that, at best, their tasks may change or they are no longer valued; or, at worst, they’ll lose their job. Because of the mistrust and lack of cooperation, attrition will increase as people move on to a place where they feel listened to and valued rather than continuing to work at the mercy of the entitled leader.
The Characteristics of an Engaged Leader
At the opposite end of the continuum sits an engaged leader. When placed in a new position of leadership, the engaged leader harnesses as much information as possible about the organization, culture, teams, and individuals.
He seeks input and buy-in from the team and tests changes to make sure they’re relevant and necessary. He explains the motives for change, and because the team understands why the leader wants change, they become ambassadors of change acceptance to the rest of the organization.
An engaged leader is curious to find out who holds the information he needs to know. They also understand that the real influencers in the organization may not be the ones with the formal mandates or grand titles.
They know how to best handle dialogues with individual team members or key stakeholders to establish rapport, build alliances and navigate the various parts of the organization. Engaged leaders harness input, not to achieve consensus, but to make sure those who need to be involved in decision making are involved, their ideas are valued, and feedback travels both ways. Engaged leaders are curious about where resistance lies and how their decisions will affect others.
As such, they build trust through respectful dialogue with the team, and the effect is that people in the organization rally together even when bad news is shared. People will stay with the organization because they feel involved and valued. Even if their ideas don’t make the final cut, they feel party to and understand the basis for any big changes. A well-known adage states, “Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.”
The Difference Between These Leaders
Leadership is not about you as a leader, but about how you lead others. It’s about the interests of the other party and how you can meet those interests while meeting your own (and of course that of the business) so that you both walk away with something valuable.
Leaders hold a privileged position. Both the entitled leader and the engaged leader have mandate, authority, and power, but they use them differently. The engaged leader garners the best possible cooperation and collaboration for the exact same changes the entitled leader imposes by force.
Simply put: having been chosen or appointed to lead, a successful leader knows that if the people thrive, the business will also thrive.
For more advice on engaged leadership, you can find The Leadership PIN Code on Amazon.
Dr. Nashater Deu Solheim brings a new toolkit to leadership development that is backed by decades of integrated experience in the areas of business and psychology. As a former forensic psychologist with clinical research in the neuropsychology of criminal minds, she developed a deep interest in effective learning strategies for lasting success. Now, as an expert negotiator who studied at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, Dr. Solheim has combined her experience as an executive leader in international private companies and government ministries to present The Leadership PIN Code, the definitive guide for helping business leaders secure influence and impactful results.
