There’s No Perfect Model, Try Imperfect Leadership
Earlier in my career, I used to go into an office supply store with the thought, “If I can just find the right organizer, day planner, gadget wrangler, my work and my life would be much better organized, planned, and wrangled.” Never found it.
Earlier in your career, you might have thought, “If I can just find the right app, all my productivity and creativity will really be unleashed?” If an app did that for you, kudos.
Now we have AI and I’m blown away by how it takes all the knowledge of man-, woman-, and person-kind and synthesizes it into something potentially useful in seconds. And then…a few hours later and voila, something actually useful emerges. It only took me 15 prompts to try to generate a photo-realistic illustration of me to yell to my wife,
“Can you run this through your AI agent to see if you can make it look like me?”
A half-dozen more prompts by her and she had something half-way decent. The point is…the tools are only as good as the person using them.
Why bring this up in relation to leadership?
Because yesterday, I went to a well-polished, perfectly fine presentation on achieving the perfect organizational culture. Good principles that, if followed, would lead to undeniably good outcomes. But there’s the rub. The world and the world of work are filled with good principles that aren’t followed. So, what’s a leader to do?
Here’s what I tell the leaders I work with to start today if they really want to lead and really want to create a positive culture:
Start with the organizational values you already have – AI tells me that the five most common are Integrity, Accountability, Respect, Collaboration / Teamwork, and Excellence / Continuous Improvement. Thanks, AI, for giving me seven when I asked for five.
Pick the one you yourself are legitimately the weakest in and set it as a personal development goal. Your people will know if you’re not being genuine.
Now, tell your team, the department, and the whole ding-danged organization (if you’re the CEO) what you’re working to improve:
Team, I’ve decided I’m going to try to live up to our values better and the one I think I do least well is collaboration – working across roles and groups to move the work and our goals forward. But I need your help.
You may actually notice me not collaborating quicker than I will. If you catch me:
not collaborating, give me that feedback and I’ll thank you by buying you lunch (or a cup of coffee)
collaborating, give me that feedback, as well, and I’ll thank you by buying you something out of the vending machine
This is so important that I’m going to treat it like we do safety – i.e., “x number of days without an accident.” In this case, I’m going to try to improve so much that I make it through 30 days buying only something out of a vending machine without doing worse on the other values. When I do (or come close enough because nobody’s perfect), it’ll be time for me to move on to my next value and goal.
And, at the end of the year, I’ll award a prize to the person who has given me the best single piece of feedback this year.
Once you’ve got it rolling, have your whole leadership team do the same (adjusting the “thanks for the feedback” items according to financial means).
The real key is to gratefully accept and thank your team for all feedback whether you agree with it or not. If you start nickel and diming the feedback to save nickels and dimes, it’ll all fall apart.
You’ll demonstrate that you have the courage to genuinely admit you’re not perfect, that you care about getting better, that your employees have a role in that, and that values matter.
Now that’s a model I hope you try to perfect for yourself!