Over and over, I hear people saying “The only way through this is together” or “We stand together.” These are powerful statements during hard times. They remind us of what is most important as we go through the daily, weekly and monthly challenges and changes related to the on-going global pandemic.
As a leader, we know that teamwork is essential to our short term ability to survive and long term ability to thrive after this pandemic. When we sit down with our team to discuss daily operations or to explore strategic choices, we know that we need each member of the team to demonstrate certain leadership traits. Ram Charan in his book, Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty: The New Rules for Getting the Right Things Done in Difficult Times (McGraw Hill, 2009) writes that there are six essential leadership traits for hard times. They are as follows: honesty and credibility, the ability to inspire, real-time connection with reality, realism tempered with optimism, managing with intensity, and boldness in building for the future.
Today, I want to focus on honesty and credibility. As he explains, “This is no simple challenge. Nobody can be certain about the business environment and its direction. How can you tell people what you believe when you can’t be confident that it is right?…. The only answer is intellectual honesty and humility. Your authority derives not from omniscience but from your ability to facilitate understanding and solutions…. acknowledge the limits of your understanding and ask them for their own views. Doing this may take courage, but together you can piece together better probabilities than any one person.”
Intellectual honesty and humility is not often considered an important leadership trait at the individual or team levels. Most people want a leader who has all the answers and has figured out, in advance, all the solutions. But research and professional experience have taught me that the best leaders have the courage to know and to say when they do not have the answers. They realize that not all problems are technical and have known solutions
Instead, these leaders understand that adaptive problems are more common now and these problems have called into question many fundamental assumptions and beliefs. They recognize that adaptive problems require in-depth learning and new ways of thinking. And this will only take place when a leader is willing to accept that their depth of understanding of what is happening is limited by their access to key information, i.e. “ground level intelligence” - a Charan term from the above book, and their getting locked into only one way of interpreting this information. Being open to changing your mind is not easy but it is essential when there is so much uncertainty in the company and in the market place.
I also know that role modeling intellectual honesty and humility is powerful at the team level. As Kevin Cashman wrote so many years ago, “Leaders get what they exhibit and what they tolerate.” When we role model these characteristics, we send an important message to the team and to the company as a whole. As Jim Collins in his book, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap. . . and Others Don't (HarperBusiness, 2001) wrote about the Stockdale Paradox, namely the ability to “retain absolute faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, AND at the same time confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” The combination of these actions will only take place if a leader and their team embrace intellectually honesty and humility.
This week, strive to be the kind of leader your organization needs you to be during this most unique time period. Be a healthy role model of intellectual honesty and humility. You will be setting the tone for authentic robust dialogue and the creation of effective and resilient solutions.
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