08 Jan Leading Leaders: Leveraging the Assets of the Most Talented People

Leading leaders sounds rather hard but it often involves nothing more than identifying and managing other people’s management styles. In the workplace it is important to learn how to work and collaborate with people whose management style may not be your own. The first step to leading leaders is to demystify them. They are as human as you are. Whether you have had leadership thrust upon you or you were born a leader, you’re in for a whole new range of challenges when managing other leaders. Just think of the qualities that have won you a leadership role: your confidence, vision, charisma, or perhaps your experience, unique set of skills, expertise, or network of powerful allies. Now remind yourself that other leaders share some or all of these qualities with you. The leaders you are called upon to lead may be other executives, investors, highly educated experts, government officials, board members, lawyers, doctors or other professionals.

The actual or potential contributions of these elites are vital to any business or organization, while the likelihood of friction remains high if you don’t manage relationships carefully. In any case, leaders share these two main characteristics: they are people with significant resources – both tangible and intangible- and strong opinions.

We all have strengths and weaknesses, and even if we manage to work effectively in areas we are generally weak at, we don’t do so adequately to the task all the time. In an organizational leadership context, where stakes are usually high, we desperately try to avoid mismanagement. Hence, the art of crafting leadership teams or getting leadership support from team members and peers on-the-fly, is paramount. A key strategy to leading such teams is to line up talents with tasks on the leadership team, and try to manage the interactions and dynamics in productive ways.

How do you then leverage the assets of the talented and influential people while making sure their egos remain unbruised? I believe that leading talented, powerful and-very often-opinionated people boils down to 7 main task:

1. EDUCATION How do you educate people who think they are already educated?
2. INTEGRATION Leading leaders can be as tough as trying to herd cats. How do you make stars a team?
3. DIRECTION How do you negotiate and impose a vision for the company or organization that other leaders will buy into?
4. MEDIATION How do you resolve frictions and conflicts over power among other leaders so the organization can be functional and move forward?
5. MOTIVATION How do you persuade other leaders who already seem “to have everything” to do the right thing for the company?
6. REPRESENTATION How do you lead your organization’s outside constituents while still leading leaders inside?

And finally….

TRUST CREATION How do you develop and keep other leaders’ trust, the very vital capital your own leadership depends on?

If you have further suggestions or ideas on how to lead leaders or if you have experience successfully ‘‘leading’’ your own boss please contribute your comments and thoughts right below.

Best,

D.

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