“Leadership is not about titles, positions or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another.”
~ John C. Maxwell, renowned author with focus on leadership
Most organisations in the late 20th century followed a top-down hierarchy model. Only after gaining a lot of experience was one given a managerial or leadership role. Come the 21st century and the traditional top-down hierarchy has started to fade out. Organisations have started moving towards flat management structures.
The 21st century has also seen the millennials come of age. A cohort who cares less about titles and more about making an impact, millennials are challenging conventional leadership wisdom and taking an unorthodox approach to creating value. Organisations are also experimenting with new leadership ideas. Titles have become less important and authority now has to be earned rather than being acquired along with a management job title. Leading without authority has become a differentiating factor for a lot of individuals who started their career in the early 2000s as organisations were becoming more flexible and open to new leadership concepts.
Given this background, the ability to lead without authority has never been more important, especially for people who have jumped into the vibrant world of start-ups. If you want to differentiate yourself in the ultra-competitive world of professional management consulting, it is also a crucial skill to acquire. It goes without saying that you need to have strong fundamentals in order to achieve technical excellence. However, is that enough to be a leader, that too without authority? The answer is ‘No’.
Let us dive into this topic to explore six ways to inculcate this skill of leading without authority.
1. Establish trust
People follow individuals whom they can trust. The logic is simple. Authority may be a short-term leadership enabler but without trust, it is like bland food, something that can get the job done but most people don’t enjoy it. Over time lack of trust tends to erode the health and vitality of a team, leading to situations where leadership is difficult to sustain long-term. If people believe in your truthfulness, reliability, and competence, then they will be more open to your ideas and willing to follow your lead in order to achieve the team’s objective. Accordingly, establishing trust is the first step to impactful and authority-free leadership.
2. Know your people
Focus on establishing positive relationships with the people in your team. Understand what motivates them and let them know what motivates you. Understanding each other will help to improve communication efficiency, avoid unnecessary conflicts, and get the team working in sync and harmony. Understanding the different points of view of people in your team is critical when it comes to impactful leadership. Once you know where people are coming from, it is much easier to understand them, motivate them, and manage them in a way that matches their personalities and preferred working styles.
You don’t need any authority to take people out for coffee and get to know them. Moreover, if people know you, they will also be able to trust you more.
3. Be solution-oriented
Being solution-oriented will help to establish a natural leader-follower relationship. Not all situations need a leader. It is mostly in dealing with complex problems or venturing into uncharted territory where a leader can have the maximum impact. In situations where there is a lot of uncertainty, a team can really benefit from a capable leader who they can trust to lead them successfully towards a solution. Being solution-oriented does not mean you have to know all the answers. Be inquisitive and ask insightful questions. Your team will gravitate towards you as the person who always drives logical reasoning and pushes reliably towards a solution.
4. Listen actively
Listening is a highly underrated skill, and one that is likely to be required in practically every situation that you will face as a leader. Listening is an active process which involves multiple aspects: paying attention, understanding content, summarising what you think you heard, asking clarifying questions, encouraging the speaker with a nod of your head or positive comment, taking the non-verbal cues, and responding in order to build the conversation towards a solution.
Leaders often play the role of coach and mentor. People go to a leader with their problems, hoping to get the right perspective and direction. If a leader responds to what they have heard too quickly, they may give advice which doesn’t really address the issues at hand. It is important to understand the issues involved, think carefully about them, and ask the right questions.
5. Strengthen your communication skills
Leadership is the ability to achieve goals with a team; this requires strong communication skills. People are much more willing to follow an individual who can articulate the big picture vision, and gain consensus on the goal and the course of action that will help the team to achieve it. All too often, this leadership responsibility is ignored and the team is expected to just deliver on the instructions provided without understanding the value of the work or how it contributes towards the ultimate goal.
If you are the one who can do this for your team, even without authority, you can raise productivity and morale by helping people understand how the current project fits into the bigger picture.
6. Be self-aware
Last but not least, be self-aware. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses will allow you to leverage and develop your strengths and, at the same time, mitigate your weaknesses. If the job requires skills in areas where you are weak, then it will help to accept the situation and get into a constant feedback loop of self-improvement. A person who knows how to work on a weakness and convert it into a strength has great leadership potential. Having learned how to lead themselves, they are then better able to lead others as well. They can be excellent mentors and help you to see unique perspectives due to their exceptional powers of introspection.
Conclusion
With the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning, a lot of skills-based jobs are at risk of being taken over by machines. However, leadership is a skill that is so human-centric that it would seem difficult for it to be taken over by a program. Looking to the future, it’s imperative that we focus on building skills that are human centric. That is the future and that is where our unique human value lies – influencing other humans and bringing out the best in them.
Vishal Agarwal just finished his MBA from Kelley School of Business, Indiana University and is a consulting enthusiast. He interned last summer with EY in their San Jose office. Before Kelley, he was working with EY and he carries 7 years of experience with EY’s International Taxation and Transfer Pricing Consulting practice.
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