Want to Be a High-impact Leader?

Want to grow your company or organization with high-impact leadership? Here’s a binary question set for you: Do you have to lead by coercion, whipping people into shape to get things done? Or are your employees truly engaged with your vision and your company’s goals and reason “why”?

Harvard Business Review recently published an insightful piece titled “What Makes Someone an Engaging Leader.” It’s a short read, but like its subject, its high impact.

Allow me to share some critical highlights and commentary:

• Service to people who follow them is very high on the value chain for high-impact leaders who engage people. As HBR states: “They feel it is their responsibility to serve their followers, especially in times of crisis and change.”
• Referencing a well-known and true maxim, HBR cites one executive as saying: “People won’t remember what I did, but they will remember how I made them feel” (emphasis in the original).
• High-impact engaging leaders “step up” – they don’t wait for things to boil over. They’re part of the upfront solution.
• Engaged leaders “energize” others – full of energy themselves, their unwavering enthusiasm and encouragement keeps people focused and on task, happy to be there.
• These rare birds “connect and stabilize groups” — they are known as listeners, not talkers.  They exert calm, not anxiety.
• As mentioned above, high-impact leaders “serve and grow” — they empower and enable, not drain and discourage. They challenge and develop others, sharing ownership and victories. They create personal opportunities for growth.
• Perhaps surprisingly, high-impact leaders are humble. They practice humility. HBR calls it staying “grounded.”

Perhaps the best definition of being “meek” is possessing the inner strength and confidence to know one’s position in the world – that of being a high-performing true servant — being the best one can be — who has nothing to fear from others.

These qualities — particularly that of humility — reminds of a practice of advertising legend David Ogilvy. Ogilvy would give his executive directors a Russian matryoshka doll. As you probably already know, a matryoshka doll is actually many dolls, all encased inside one another. In Ogilvy’s gift, there was no final tiny doll. Instead, they was a handwritten note from Ogilvy himself. It read: “If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs, but if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, Ogilvy & Mather will become a company of giants.”

How does that make you feel?

Are you a high-impact, engaging leader? Is your company or organization a company of giants?

By Michael Snyder, Managing Principal, The MEK Group

About Michael Snyder and The MEK Group – As the Indianapolis Star stated in 2014 profile coverage, “Michael Snyder knows brands.” Snyder today serves as managing principal of The MEK Group, an award-winning marketing, branding and PR firm. For more information, please visit www.themekgroup.com