By: Gustav Juul
Founder & CEO
AIM GROUP
“The pursuit of perfection often impedes improvement.” – George Will
Some people think a leader should have the complete set of skills, characteristics, and abilities to single-handedly handle any problem, challenge, and opportunity that comes along. To me, the “perfect leader” is a myth. I certainly don’t fit into that category. I am definitely not a perfect leader. Most of the time, I am not even a leader. I’d describe myself as someone who strives to be a well-rounded person who makes decisions through the support of a great team. Over the years, this has enabled me to take many more good and average choices than bad ones.
Almost right out of college, I was responsible for leading a team with people thrice my age and decades of experience. I had a deep-seated feeling of being an impostor. To say the very least, I was immensely underprepared for the responsibilities I had been given, and I only had a minimal understanding of the challenges I would face. Furthermore, my boss felt it was better for me to learn through “trial by fire” than for him to waste time teaching me. Fearing being exposed as a fraud, I overcompensated with a know-it-all attitude, only half-listening to those who offered their advice. What I should have done was to tell them that I desperately needed their advice, but I didn’t.
Here is a shout-out to you: I thank you for your patience and for never making me feel less, accepting the flaws I tried to hide but which must have been painfully apparent to you. Thank you for saving my ass more times than I can count, for guiding me without making it too obvious, and for giving me time to build my skills as a leader.
To you, who have taken the time to read my article, I would like to share a bit of what they taught me.
Trust, Respect, and Imperfection
Trust– I work the hardest on gaining people’s trust. I stand up for my team. I never blamed them for something I was responsible for. We share our successes. I let them know I don’t have most of the answers and show them I need them more than they need me. I am not perfect in my score, but in most cases people have rewarded me with their trust.
Respect– Through this trust, it gives us the ability to create. It is empowers us to dare try new things and, through that, do incredible things together.
Imperfection- I show them that I don’t have all the answers. I want them to know that I have made more wrong decisions than most. It is up to me to teach them where I failed, and it is up to them to make their own wrong decisions… and live with it. That is evolving. In recent years I have even become very explicit when I tell them that I want them to make mistakes. My reasoning is that it’s only teams that never push themselves are the ones that never screw up. Striving to be perfect fosters micromanagement, criticism, and stalls change. Going for greatness is only achieved through accepting that we will never be perfect. I want them to reach for the stars.
I have found that the organizations that I’ve led and the many companies I now Mentor, just work better when there is Trust, Respect, and an acceptance of imperfection.
Organizational Fairness
CEO’s are paid to decide on the organization’s strategic priorities, such as resource allocation, investments, client care service levels, employee compensation and wellness, promotions, profit margins, and as a result, shareholder dividends. What I have learned is that for an organization to be successful, it is just not possible to base decisions on short-term win-win for everyone. Long-term win-win is much more feasible, but because of the lack of trust and an ever more impatient society, people seem predisposed to expect to get the short end of the stick.
Organizational injustice is in the eye of the beholder, and leaders are scrutinized for needing to be “fair” in ways that seem unfair to me. As a young leader, I honestly worried too much about pleasing everyone. I contorted to find ways to do what was impossible to do, i.e., pleasing everyone, and I, therefore, did worse because of it. While everyone wants to be treated equally, not everyone is equal, and not every contribution holds equal value.
Comparing the first team I had with the next, the people who reported to me were my junior in many ways, including experience, executive seniority, and education. I went from a team needing very little of me to a team needing much more time than what I could possibly give. In the beginning, it felt great to be “needed,” then quite quickly, I became unable to do my own job. I had a couple of disastrous quarters and had to learn to set clear boundaries. I implemented team meetings and almost completely canceled all the one-on-one conversations.
I learned a lot from that experience too. Any team that you head should know that you are there in two aspects alone. The first thing I am always going to help them with is to make suggestions in case they encounter something they can’t make sense of. That is sharing my perspective. It is not the same as taking the decision for them. If they are responsible for the outcome, the decision is theirs to take. If they want someone else to make the decision for them, when they report to me, they will quickly find out that they are wasting their time and mine. The second is to help get cooperation flowing in case of internal unwillingness to act.
I might not be a perfect leader, but I don’t see myself as an incompetent leader; I am just an incomplete leader. I know I don’t have the intellectual capacity to make sense of everything. I don’t have the capability to foresee all the repercussions of my decisions. I am not always able to create a vision of the future that everyone wants. More often than not, I lack the experience to translate my dreams into concrete actions. Last but not least, my interpersonal skills are not always able to foster the commitment necessary to get people to give everything they’ve got.
The 4 C’s
After learning to apply different management theories and reading hundreds of books, I have arrived at the conclusion that there are four important roles that together make up a successful management team. These roles are: Creator, Champion, Custodian, Caregiver.
What I find interesting about the management roles is that I believe that no one can fill these four roles simultaneously, as they have contradicting objectives. In very general terms and only to give you a few examples: If you are quick to act, you can’t be slow as well. You can’t be creative and go “by the book” simultaneously. Some look for effectiveness, others for efficiency. There is long-term versus short-term. Perfecting my understanding of it, I feel, has made me a better support for my teams. I can now predict where I’ll need the help of others and how to better support each member of my team individually. Through this, I have learned to form successful diverse teams.
That said, I don’t feel like I am a flawless leader who has figured it all out. The more I know, the more I know what I don’t know, but the moment I figured out that it was all right to be open about both my strengths and my weaknesses, I was able to allow myself to start really relying on others to make up for my lack of perspective on certain aspects of the business. I became a better leader for it and certainly a much more successful business owner. As they say, “numbers don’t lie”.
Most leaders I support in my consulting business call me because, to some degree, they feel trapped in the myth of needing to be a perfect leader, and it’s a heavy burden that only leads to becoming a bottleneck for the business. I don’t swap them out for a “professional” management team; I teach the people already working in the company how to support the owner and the owner how to be a leader.
How many times have you felt uncertain about what the results of a decision you’ve taken will be? Have you ever felt uncomfortable because the IT or the Marketing person was using concepts that were unfamiliar to you? Would you dare to admit that you don’t have a full picture of what is going on in the organization? Do you even know the names and birthdays of all your employees, if they have children or are married? You probably did when you started your business, but do you know it now? If you recognize any of this, please send me an email (gustav@ aimsmg.com). We might have a good basis to talk. It’s time to put that myth to rest and take action, not only for the sake of frustrated leaders but also for the well-being and continued growth of your organization.
Well, I am not Superman. There is only one of those around, I am not him, and he probably wouldn’t know the first thing about running a successful business.
What I do know is that it is not possible for a person to single-handedly handle any and all problems. That being so, it takes a mature leader to realize that people need each for the business to grow.
In business 1 + 1 is not 2, it often is less, but it can be so much more.
