When we’re talking about the responsibilities of leadership, it’s easy to quickly reel off the really major ones. Every leader must be the public face of their company, talk to the press and present a positive, living embodiment of what the organisation is about.
Every leader must make tough decisions, prioritising between great ideas and difficult propositions. Every leader must be ultimately responsible for the hiring and firing of the workforce.
These are all well and good. But a leader also takes responsibility for a list of other factors that, while seemingly smaller and less critical on their own, are arguably more important as markers of what constitutes a good leader. No matter what model of leadership you might believe in, the need for a leader to “lead by example” is a universal constant.
Not only does this make an enormous number of other considerations part of a leader’s responsibilities, but it arguably has a more immediate presence in the working lives of the people following a leader.
Take, for example, a leader who races back soon after the birth of their child, and doesn’t take the maternity or paternity leave offered by the company they lead. They might do this believing they are demonstrating their drive to continuously be present and working for the organisation’s cause. It might appear a noble sacrifice to them, but arguably, they are also setting a very evident example about what is expected of the workforce.
Similarly, a CEO who catches up on emails at the weekend, firing off encouraging replies and asking questions of reports, might do so believing they are maximising their time and providing helpful guidance to employees. But they are also demonstrating that the lines between work and home life are blurred for them, and consequently encourage the inference that they should be similarly blurred for others.
After all, if the CEO is online on Saturday, should a manager be too?
But, you might argue, both of these examples can be seen as raising relatively soft work-life balance questions. Perhaps we expect our leaders to sacrifice more in this regard than we do of their workforce.
This might be true, but whether you want to point to softer topics such as these (and you can certainly argue they are far from soft!), or you want to point to harder ethics and values issues that could be raised, the result is largely the same.
If a leader says one thing, but does another, the implication is at best confusing and, at worst, likely to lead to employees mimicking behaviours that the business would rather not encourage.
That’s why it’s important, for example, that Mark Zuckerberg took advantage of his own company’s generous family leave policy. It showed every Facebook employee that when the company said it believed in supporting a healthy work-life balance, it really meant it.
And it’s why it’s important that leaders attend mandatory company training sessions, arrive at the office at the same times as employees, and take the same holiday allowance as the people they lead. It shows consistency, reinforces trust, and encourages employees to really believe in the direction the CEO is taking them.
In a sense, then, these “softer” leadership responsibilities are actually crucial for a leader who wants to succeed with the more evident leadership demands. Through the constant achievement of small leadership wins, where there is perfect consistency between what they say and what they do, a leader drives the kind of trust and belief that enables leaders to achieve much larger goals.
You can talk all you like about grand leadership vision and corporate mission, but it is the leadership examples employees see and hear every day that will truly convince them to follow a leader’s example.
—The writer is CEO of Knowledge Group.
