While in the USA recently I watched a documentary on the leadership development programs of the US Marines. I was struck by what a senior officer described as their “leadership philosophy”: Know Yourself, Know Your Job, Know Your People.

Undoubtedly, the Marines are an elite and highly effective military force. Their leadership training must equip graduates to make life and death decisions under the most extreme circumstances. Leadership is a complex responsibility and yet they responded with a stunningly simple and potent philosophy. Know yourself, know your job, know your people.

By contrast I’m deeply concerned that so many business leaders can’t describe their plans without a 50 page document and Powerpoint slides. In complex times, every leader must choose to simplify. So here’s how to lead like a Marine:

Know Yourself
Before you assume this is the “easy one”, why not do a quick inventory of your self awareness?

• What are your top five values?
• What have been your key life-defining events and how have they shaped how you see yourself and your world?
• What are your greatest strengths as a leader?
• What are your greatest weaknesses and opportunities for growth?
• What are your blind spots and what are you doing about them?
• What makes you angry?
• What are you most afraid of?
• How do you change when you’re under pressure?
• How do others see you as a leader?
• … and we haven’t even scratched the surface.

Self awareness is foundational to effective leadership. To know yourself is a challenging mission.

Know Your Job
You cannot truly succeed in any role without understanding your job. Not just what activities are you to be involved in, but what results are you there to deliver? Clarity in understanding your role and objectives is critical, and without it you’re like a sportsperson competing without knowing the rules of the game. Lasting success becomes unachievable.

I wonder what would happen if I was to interview you and ask you to describe to your job in detail? What if I then asked your boss how he or she sees your role? And what about those who report to you? What would I get? Consistency? Conflict? Clarity? Confusion?

If you haven’t got clarity on your job- get it or get going elsewhere, because you can’t succeed without it.

Know Your People
Something I have observed often as I’ve coached individual leaders is that many haven’t made the effort to get to know the people they lead. Some believe a convenient myth about keeping people “at arm’s length”. Some have never applied themselves to understanding people with a different outlook or personality to their own. Some are preoccupied with themselves and lead people as resources rather than human beings (which is why “Human Resources” is a sort of oxymoron to me).

To my shame, I’ve led people for years only to discover later that I hardly knew them at all – that they had a painful divorce, a life’s mission, a serious illness… whatever it was, I knew nothing about it. Not because it was a secret, but because I was content with only a superficial knowledge of my team.

But the Marine Commander’s benchmark for leadership was extraordinary. “I will not let a man become an officer that I would not allow to lead my own son into combat”, he said. That’s a serious benchmark for knowing the people you lead.

Recently a friend said to me, “Criticism is the death gargle of a non-achiever”. It’s a great statement and I’ve found it to be true. Many years of leadership have given me the opportunity to see the long-term impact of different mindsets on a person’s life. The truth is that all too often those whose criticism rings the loudest are the very same people who have contributed nothing but words. Non-achievers.

It’s easy to be a critic. To pick apart what others have created. To appoint ourselves as judge and look down on those around us. To deflect attention from our own inadequacies by focusing on what we believe are the faults of others. Sadly in Australia, where I live, it is so common in our culture that we created a name for it – Tall Poppy Syndrome.

We’ve probably all sat in business meetings where the culture made being creative nearly impossible. In that environment you quickly learn that bringing an idea to the table is seen by others as invitation to shoot you down. Those businesses often wonder why there isn’t more innovation coming from their team, but they don’t recognise that their critical culture is the silent killer of creativity.

I just spent seven weeks traveling with my family. While we were in New York City I saw a subway advertisement that read “Stupid creates. Smart critiques. Be stupid”. To me it was a great reminder that there’s a certain risk of appearing stupid that comes with being creative instead of critical. But it’s the risk every achiever must take.

Does that mean that we should never be critical? Do we hold back on feedback? No, I believe it’s really about the overall balance of our communication. It’s one thing to offer suggestions on how something could be improved, and another thing altogether for negativity to be your default setting. What’s the theme of your communication? Do you tend to notice and commend what is good, or notice and condemn what could be better? When my team know I am for them and I give encouragement whenever possible I can bring criticism from time to time without becoming “the critic”.

I recently heard speaker Steve Penny say, “I would rather fail tremendously than live dismally”.

To me that’s the bottom line. I’d rather being defined by my creativity than by my criticism.

I’d love to hear your comments and feedback

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The Leadership Coach tripled in readership in 2009. Thanks to all of you who’ve helped me spread the word!

And along the way here are the 10 most read posts of the year. Feel free to add your comments too.

1. Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast
2. You Lost Me At Hello
3. What Successful Leaders Focus On
4. Who Is In Your Drawer?
5. Do You Lead Through Hindsight, Insight or Foresight?
6. Alignment Check
7. Loan Car Syndrome
8. Think Like Your Successor Would
9. The Trust Experiment
10. Unfollow: Twitter’s Reminder To Leaders

Keep an eye out for the brand new look coming very soon to www.theleadershipcoach.com

I’m not a gifted sportsman, in fact even ‘competent’ is a stretch most of the time. But one sport I picked up quickly was snowboarding. There’s something exhilarating about hurtling down the side of a mountain strapped to a snowboard with trees and rocks all around you that heightens the senses and reminds you that life is short (and could be even shorter if you don’t take up a different hobby).

Every instinct in my body led me to believe that leaning back in a defensive posture was the way to stay safe. Yet ironically, keeping your weight on your back foot is in fact about the surest way to fall. My breakthrough came when I got out of my defensive stance and shifted my weight to my front foot. My instincts told me that this was dangerous, that I would fall and hurt myself, that this was risky. The reality was that I fell less often and then relaxed and enjoyed myself. Those defensive instincts had actually caused much of my pain.

Leaders have to learn to favour their front foot. Aware of the dangers all around them and sometimes still hurting from the last fall, the leader must choose to override defensive posturing and get on the offense. Their default setting must become action not inaction. To press forward not lean backward. To push through pain and go again. In other words they lead with “front foot favouritism”.

So why don’t more leaders do it? Well for one thing it often goes against our instincts. Unless you have a natural inclination towards risk and action, it tends to be a difficult choice at first to contravene what seems like self-preservation and get on the front foot. But with time and success you slowly form a new neural pathway in your brain until eventually “front foot = self-preservation”. The other reason that leaders stay on the back foot is that once in a while that hesitation and passivity actually pays off and saves them from making a “wrong” choice. But what they don’t tend to see is the enormous opportunity cost – all the times they missed out on real wins while they played it “safe”.

The conservative perfectionist part of me can worry about making the wrong choice. The problem is that it’s often better in the long run to make more decisions, even if a few of them are wrong, than to make only a few decisions but get nearly all of them right. In the scheme of things the decisive leader actually makes many more right decisions than the conservative leader does. And the momentum from all that forward motion enables them to take a few mistakes in their stride.

So what is your default setting? The front foot or the back foot? Of course there are times when it’s appropriate to pause and assess the situation or to wait a crisis out. But for leaders those moments should be by choice, and not by default.

I’d love to hear your comments and feedback
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This week I’ve launched www.paulandrew.net – highlighting the work I’m doing as a speaker across a whole range of industries. I’d love you to take a few minutes to check out the site, with videos of me in action and testimonials from my clients.

Feel free to pass it on to anyone who might be looking for a results-oriented speaker for leaders & teams.

My friend Mark is an Optical Engineer in the Australian Army and amongst other things he calibrates scopes for snipers. You know you’re passionate about leadership when even talking about weapon calibration gets you thinking about leadership principles! One statement he made really stuck with me “Just a 1mm adjustment of a screw slightly bigger than a pinhead can cause the firer to miss their target by more than 2 metres when firing from the common distance of one kilometre. Such a small change made in the wrong direction can have catastrophic consequences”.

So when did you last fine tune your vision as a leader? In the long run maintaining the right strategic focus for you and your business will be the difference between hitting your target or experiencing potentially catastrophic consequences.

Every leader must master three aspects of visionary sight –
1.    Hindsight: The ability to reflect and learn from the past
2.    Insight: The ability to interpret and respond to the present
3.    Foresight: The ability to predict and prepare for the future

But while every leader must operate in all three aspects of vision, which focus they rely on most will have far-reaching implications for the organisations they build.

Which focus do you favour?

Hindsight Leadership: Tends to emphasise the value of experience and evidence. They look at the future through the eyes of the past. Like a lawyer they tend to look for a precedent for every decision. They’re hoping it’s true that “history repeats itself”. Although we absolutely must reflect on the past and learn the lessons it offers us, we cannot afford to become overly focused on the past in our leadership any more than we can afford to drive whilst staring in the rear vision mirror.

Insight Leadership: Tends to emphasise the value of tactics and reality. They look at the future as an extrapolation of current events and trends. Finely tuned to what is happening around them, they hope that by responding correctly now they will experience success in the future. Although they’re not spending a lot of time looking backwards, they’re also not spending much time looking ahead. The focus becomes about where we are now and what step we could take next. For this leader the old adage not to “climb the ladder only to find it’s leaning across the wrong wall” contains an important warning.

Foresight Leadership: Tends to emphasise possibilities and innovation. They look at the future as uncharted territory or a clean slate. Although they reflect on the past and respond to the present, they are much more concerned with preparing for the future. They drive their organisations with glances in the rear vision mirror and awareness of their surroundings but more than anything else they have clear focus on where they are going and what’s coming up on the road ahead.

Leaders should consider what Mark reminds himself every time he checks a weapon, “In my line of work, making fine adjustments to a sniper’s sighting system can either improve their accuracy or severely hamper them from achieving their mission”.

•    So is it time to readjust your focus or recalibrate your team’s vision?
•    Or is your leadership allowing a “Ready… Fire… Aim” approach?
•    It’s mission critical to maintain the right direction and a future focus, especially in challenging economic times.

Your comments and feedback are appreciated
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I’m writing a project about the vital differences between ordinary companies and those that become ‘something more’. Inspired by the legendary likes of Apple, Google, Harley Davidson and those rare businesses that somehow seem to transcend being just a product or a service and instead engender raw energy and deep loyalty from those that connect with them.

So what you believe makes the difference between companies and movements? If you had one chance to inspire a business leader to create something truly extraordinary what would you say?

PLEASE ADD COMMENTS WITH YOUR THOUGHTS

Here are a few that came in via Twitter @paulwandrew & Facebook

“Movement = where people are people, not a resource; where integrity & truth are inherent; vision is the culture, not a memo” Matthew D

“Movements are built by passionate people who have been empowered to believe and strive for more” John B

“Company is about infrastructure … movement is about people who take ownership of an effort” Penny H

“A company moves forward together with great momentum when everyone speaks a common language” Rebecca F

“It’s about buy-in / vision and purpose / innovation / ease of communication and interaction / future focussed / integrity” Gabriel K

“A movement is a business that puts people and their values before profit” Tom G

I love Twitter… ever present on my iPhone, my Twitter page keeps me connected. To some it’s a communication tool, to others a gossip aggregator, and to others a beloved time-waster. But I believe that the way in which Twitter works should remind leaders of some truths about effective leadership. Thankfully, in many places, the old command and control style of leadership is pushing up the daisies. As Sony puts it “we live in exponential times” and I believe these times call for a serious rethink of our leadership models.

So what can we as leaders learn from Twitter?

People follow you by choice (and can opt out any time)
There’s nothing I can do to make people follow me on Twitter. They choose. In fact anyone can choose to follow me whether I know them or not. And most importantly, they can silently opt out of following me at any time. Today’s effective leaders realise that people are following only because they choose to. Gen Y get a lot of bad press for being less loyal to their employers, but all too often they are simply leaving leaders who appear to think that they can force people to follow them.

You’re being watched
Common sense says “watch what you tweet”. It amuses me when people are shocked that some employee gets fired for Twittering that they’re at the beach after telling their boss that they’re sick. I believe true leaders understand that accountability isn’t just a fact of life; it’s something they signed up for when they accepted the role of leader. Instead of fighting that reality I want the realisation that I’m being watched to cause me to lift my life and leadership to a higher level.

Say it in sound bites
Twitter forces you to distil your ideas down to their essence – 140 characters. That’s a good discipline for leaders. As a speaker I use the one sentence test… don’t speak for one hour until you can explain your point in one sentence. In a day of overwhelming access to content, only the well-crafted sound bite has a fighting chance of being remembered… let alone acted upon.

People retweet what you say
I always think of it as a compliment when people retweet what I say on Twitter. In that moment my words are exposed to an audience with whom I hadn’t had direct contact. Of course even my misguided ideas, spelling mistakes and general ignorance can be broadcast too (think: Hugh Jackman’s tweet about the “Sydney Opera Centre”). Leaders must remember that everything they say has an audience beyond the immediate. So craft what you say with retweeting in mind.

Leaders follow others as well as being followed
My favourite people to follow on Twitter follow other interesting people themselves. By contrast we can sometimes subscribe to the stereotype of the leader that follows no-one. They don’t care what others think; the only thoughts that matter are their own. Yet the best leaders have heroes too. There may be thousands following you, and just a handful that you follow, but all the more reason why those influencers should be well chosen because…

Who you follow says something about you
I can’t choose who follows me but I can choose who I follow. Something I seem to do by impulse whenever I look at a person’s profile is to see who they are following. On some instinctive level I believe that I can tell a lot about a person by looking at who they choose to follow. So do the people you follow represent you well?

What does it take to make a New Year truly “new”? Besides the date ending with 09 instead of 08 what have you personally brought to this year that is different/ fresh/ bold/ exciting?

Why not take a quick inventory right now of the following key areas as a leader, and ask yourself this one question – “What is NEW this year?”

• New Strategies (what’s new about my strategies… for business, leadership, life)
• New Resources (like people, products, or equipment)
• New Ideas (level of thinking, creativity, possibility)
• New Convictions (shaking off limitations, negativity, poor attitudes)
• New Goals (vision, direction, values)
• New Priorities (what will I focus on, and what will I let go?)

Across the world many people brought their fears and nervousness about the state of the world’s economies into 2009… aftershocks of their experiences in 2008. I certainly don’t pretend to predict what the future holds. But I think you’d have good reason to be fearful and nervous if you weren’t being or doing anything new, while still wishing for a better outcome this time around.

On the other hand, doing something new is a natural high. It is motivating. It expands who we are and what we know. It pushes us beyond our comfort zone. In fact how much we grow and change as individuals has its roots in our willingness to embrace “the new”.

Don’t let this year be a re-run of last year. Seize the day and get passionate about pursuing new things for your life and your leadership. Take the time you need to think about your direction and get clear on priorities. Carve out the space to think bigger, to set potent goals, and to get creative around your strategies.

If it’s not really a new year for you yet, there’s no better time to change that than right now.

Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul; the blueprints of your ultimate achievements (Napoleon Hill)

What a dream team you’d have if everyone on your team was a leader. Not just the person ‘in charge’. Everyone. And by ‘leader’ I don’t mean job title, a swanky office, or the where the buck actually stops. I simply mean the sort of team where everyone takes responsibility, works like it’s their own business, stays ahead of the game, and multiplies themselves by taking people with them on the journey.

Almost everyone starts out as a ‘worker’ on a team (and just quietly, most of those who jump straight into leadership roles are really just workers with responsibility). But I’ve noticed people don’t stay workers forever.

Over time, workers become one of three things-

1. Leaders. They blaze a trail. Run with the vision like it’s their own (because it is). Their impact is measured not by personal performance but by a mass of momentum in others.

2. Leasers. Mercenaries in the workplace, they do what they’re paid to do. It’s about money, benefits, maximised comfort and flexibility, minimised challenge and responsibility. The bulk of many corporate teams.

3. Leavers. Rather than step up or step back, they step aside. And when they leave, they do not leave a hole. Except perhaps in the bottom line.

• So who are you building on? Leaders, leasers or leavers.
• Have you got the courage to lead leaders?
• Don’t forget… you get what you focus on (and reward!)