The Art of Project

Benefits of Inclusive Leadership

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Recently I went to my physical therapist, Dr. Patel. I was suffering from pain in my knee and back. Dr. Patel analyzed my body movements for a while and then explained to me how I can heal my pain without drugs. His method was simple to understand and graceful to execute. His strategy, that I finally implemented to manage my pain, was to work multiple muscles in unison, in a coordinated manner — to lower the load on my knee and back muscles. Turns out not all my muscles were doing the work to move my body in a coordinated manner. The knee and back muscles were doing more than their fair share of work, resulting in the pain. Dr. Patel taught me a few personalized exercises to “recruit” multiple muscles. We included the glutes, the quadriceps, the hamstrings, even my arms, to move my body. Once all the individual muscles worked in unison, the work of walking became efficient, engaging, and graceful. My body healed.

The physical therapy not only healed the pain but also taught me a lesson that I apply to my day to day leadership in business. When I am running a business, I need to recruit different team members and create an environment that enables them to work in unison – this is the essence of inclusive leadership. All of us are valued for our unique strengths, irrespective of our backgrounds. It takes all the team members working together to make progress on a project, just like it takes all the muscles to efficiently move our body.

In an inclusive culture, all the team members are valued, and in turn feel engaged. You, the team leader, stand to gain immensely by practicing inclusive leadership skills. You would retain team members longer, improve team productivity, and might even build a better product.

Why do I say that the team members will stay longer (than the average length of time a worker stays with a leader) with an inclusive leader? Because they will love working where they are respected for their expertise. Have you worked for a boss who did not listen to your ideas to solve a problem while the problem kept getting worse? I have. We all want respect and recognition for what we bring to the table. When your team members are respected and feel engaged at work, they are less likely to look for other opportunities elsewhere. That means they will stay with you longer. That also means you don’t have to spend time and money to hire and train new employees. Recruiting a new team member can cost thousands of dollars ($4129, according to the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM.org)). As a business leader, you are responsible for using money wisely and efficiently. Practicing inclusive leadership is a win-win solution for you, the team member, and your organization. What is not to like? 

So, how can you Improve productivity through inclusive leadership? By enabling every team member with their unique strengths to connect and coordinate well. Imagine everybody Pitching in – John, Maria, Vishnu, Jose and Lashawn. They will not only bring their strengths but also compensate for each other’s weaknesses. Your team will increase the chances to cover their individual blind spots. As the team leader, you will increase the quality by decreasing the blind spots: this is really the name of the game. The overall errors go down and the team productivity goes up.

There is a side benefit. You also grow as a communicator, increasing your ability to communicate to different team members. I will cite my own experience. I am an engineering and business management professional. It’s easy for me to communicate to the engineers and business professionals – I am on my own turf. I must work harder to explain myself to people who tend to have different communication style, say, someone from social sciences. But doing so helps me grow as a communicator. This growth prepares me for more complex leadership assignments.

An inclusive leader also enables her team to build great products for her customers. Let’s say you are a manager of a team that is building a medical device product for new mothers. The product also comes with a service component. To be successful in building a product that works, the team needs different perspectives – of a mother, of a doctor, of a nurse, of a buyer, of a health insurance firm etc. To be good in all aspects of business, you need a team that is diverse, works well together, and creates great products. Do you want to end up with a device that looks good but does not work mechanically? Your customer does not. I am sure you don’t either. We all want a product that functions well, looks good, and works till the end of its shelf-life.

Not only my experience tells me that inclusive leadership creates a win-win experience for you and your team, but research also supports these benefits. A team with an inclusive leader is 20% more likely to say that they make high quality decisions and 17% more likely to report that they are high performing (Espedido, 2019).

Some of you might be thinking it is a lot of work to practice inclusive leadership. I agree. It is a lot of upfront work. But that is true about anything worthwhile you do as a leader – to set your team up for success, to craft and communicate the vision, to course correct early when the team is not moving in the right direction. You might also think that practicing inclusive leadership is not necessary. Of course, it’s not. It is also not necessary for you to future proof your leadership career. If your current leadership role is the last one in your career, you can totally ignore my advice. But if you want to be a leader who is ready to take on increasingly rewarding assignments in the future, you should practice inclusive leadership. The world is getting more diverse, your customer base is getting more diverse; being an inclusive leadership practitioner will prepare you to take on the leadership challenges of the future and keep on growing. I am here to nudge you, to prepare for that future.

To me, it just makes sense to practice inclusive leadership – for you, your team, and the market.  It’s not easy to be an inclusive leader who creates an engaging environment. But when you create that kind of environment, the rewards are well worth the investment of your effort. When you do so, you win, your organization wins, and we all win – by bringing our best selves to work.

References

Espedido, A. a. (2019, March). Why Inclusive Leaders Are Good for Organizations, and How to Become One.

SHRM.org. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.shrm.org/about-shrm/press-room/press-releases/pages/human-capital-benchmarking-report.aspx

Leadership: the most important skills to invest in

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“The most important investment is the investment in yourself”

– Warren Buffet, Investor

Buffet is calling what you and I put into learning (and growing ourselves) “investing”, a term only an astute investor like him can coin. He is also assuring the learners that there is a return on that investment – the best one, in fact. Business managers like you and I will do well to heed his advice.

Imagine a workplace where you are given the training money to invest in yourself. The HR department does not control the training budget, your boss does not control it. You do. You get to decide which training classes you go to, which seminars you attend, and which books you read. Let’s also assume that you get to choose between two broad sets of skills to invest in – 1. leadership skills, sometimes referred to as soft skills, and 2. technical skills, also called hard skills.

As a business management professional, who believes in developing yourself, you should first invest in improving your leadership skills. Investing in growing your leadership skills will help you to do more with less, advance in your career, and earn more money.

Do More With Less

Let’s say you get better at your work and increase your individual productivity. Yes, go ahead and deploy all those productivity boosting methods, e.g. GTD (getting things done), Pomodoro Technique etc. How much can you increase it?  I would argue that you can increase it significantly, say, by 50%. That means, you can write 1.5 times the code you write now, or you can create 1.5 times the ledger entries you create now. A 50% increase in your personal productivity is good; some of you can exceed that. There is a limit to how much you can get done though.

When you grow your leadership skills and become an effective leader, there is virtually no limit to what you can accomplish. As a leader, you can motivate your team to get a lot of work done. Let’s say, you become an excellent leader and direct a team of 20 persons to achieve a goal. If these 20 persons are 10% more productive because they are more motivated, you could get at least 200% more done[1], i. e., literally 4 times the outcome of your most productive self above. 

Not only it’s a matter of simple math like I demonstrated above, it’s visible in front of us every day at work: leaders practicing leadership skills to organize, inspire and direct a team to accomplish more tasks than one person doing it alone. There is a reason this practice is so ubiquitous in organizations – it works. I am grateful to have led diverse team members, implementing more complex projects than what I did working alone.

Leadership skills can “accelerate” the effectiveness of your technical skills. Do you cook for a living? You can build a team, teach and lead them, and produce a lot more cooked food.

Increase Your Potential for Advancement

Are you interested in self-growth? I am. If I am better than my last year’s version, I am happy.

Year ago, I was a technical professional interested in a people leader role. I was becoming better at my technical programming and analysis career, but was not getting close to a leadership role. Fortunately, multiple mentors helped me “see” the value of investing in leadership skills. After developing my ability to build relationship skills and influence stakeholders, a.k.a. leadership skills, I attracted an opportunity to serve as a people leader. Since that first leadership role, I have had many more leadership assignments. If I can do it, any business professional can do it.  I increased my self-worth and value to the marketplace by developing and practicing leadership skills.

If you work for an employer, i.e. you sell your services to just one client, you can increase your options for advancement by investing in yourself and growing as a leader. Even if you sell your services to many prospects and work on a contract basis with multiple clients, developing leadership skills will allow you to sell your services to more prospects. Author and Consultant David Maister argues in his acclaimed book The Trusted Advisor that for a consultant, the key to professional success is the ability to earn the trust and confidence of clients not just the technical mastery of one’s discipline.

Leadership skills matter even for growing into a senior role without a formal leadership title. If we are going to advance you from a junior scientist to a senior expert scientist at a drug company, we would rather have the you who can collaborate with the review board, the grant owners, the product developers and the quality managers, not the you who can only work alone.

Earn higher rewards

Early in my managerial career, I started looking at senior business leaders and noticed that they earned a lot more than I did. According to salary.com data, a senior level manager can earn 2.5 times more than a junior manager. When I looked at the senior leaders I knew and interacted with, I could not find one with more technical skills than a junior manager like me. But when I observed their leadership skills in action, something became quite obvious to me: they were operating at a very proficient level in those skills and behaviors. To become eligible for those senior level roles, you will need leadership skills – even in highly technical fields like Accounting [2].

Some might argue that you should not invest your resources in developing your leadership skills. If you take that advice though, you will be putting a limit on what you can get done in your career (and life, I would argue) and the value you can create for yourself, your clients, and the marketplace. Our collective work life is much fulfilling when you can inspire others to work as a team and achieve great things together. It might make sense for someone starting in a new career to devote time to learning technical hard skills; they need a job to start their career. For most of us who want to grow their career, the leadership skills are the first set of skills to invest in.

[1] In the least improvement scenario, the productivity boost will be 20×10 = 200 times. The boost can be higher if the increase in one person is scalable and directly impacts the productivity of others on the team.

[2] Being a technician is not enough: Develop leadership and communication skills by David Maturo. The Pennsylvania CPA Journal, Jan 2007.

The art of moving people toward a goal.

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Years ago I worked for Jose, a client who received more results from his co-workers than most professionals I have worked with. Jose demonstrated a habit day after day, like a clockwork. This habit helped his team (and him) get one critical outcome at work that leaders like us strive for – progress. 

I didn’t know the name of this habit then.

Recently, I read a reporter’s tribute to Paul Ingrassia who served as an executive at Dow Jones. “Paul was one of the rare leaders who cared as much about the success of others as he did about his own,” writes the reporter John D. Stoll. How did Paul do it? Paul used to ask his coworkers, “are we going to announce this on Tuesday or Thursday?”

The tribute to Paul Ingrassia reminded me of Jose. Ingrassia’s coworkers remember him for the same habit as I remember Jose for.

The habit Jose displayed with grace in multiple settings is – the presumptive close. I still remember him asking us in a meeting, “we have a customer forum next month. Your deliverable is needed for us to shine in the forum. Can you have the first draft in my inbox, say, Wednesday?” A coworker can propose a different day, but now there is a date on her mind.

Next time you are collaborating with different stakeholders, try the presumptive close. It moves people towards a goal; sometimes that’s the most important task of a leader in charge of execution.