EP55 The Four Pillars of Effective Leadership for Emerging Managers

In this episode, Mike Scott shares four simple but powerful frameworks for emerging leaders and middle managers in small to mid-sized businesses. He explores the trap of chasing certainty, the underrated skill of leading up, providing clarity to those you lead, and defining the leader you want to become.

keywords

leadership, management, clarity, certainty, leading up, leading down, leadership identity, decision-making, middle management, leadership frameworks

key topics

Clarity over certainty as a leadership unlock 
Leading up and pulling clarity from your own leaders 
Leading down and providing clarity to your team 
Defining your leadership identity with three words 
Using identity as a daily decision-making filter

"The pursuit of certainty doesn't really exist." 
"Leading up means pulling clarity from your leader." 
"Before you can expect accountability, you need to provide clarity."

Chapters

00:00 The Pursuit of Clarity Over Certainty 
02:21 Leading Up: Pulling Clarity From Your Leaders 
04:34 Leading Down: Providing Clarity to Your Team 
06:55 Defining Your Leadership Identity 
09:17 Putting the Frameworks Into Practice

resources

Essentialism by Greg McKeown - https://www.amazon.com/Essentialism-Disciplined-Pursuit-Less-ebook/dp/B00X4WHP5E

Find out more about  working with me or about applying to join the ILN. 

mike@smbmastery.com.au
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeadamscott/
https://theintentionalleaders.com/

Transcript

Mike Scott (00:02.008)
Good to be back, guys and girls. All right, so last week I did a session for a client, which was for their sort of emerging leaders in the business. So these are people that are managing other people, but they're not necessarily at like a senior leadership team level or a director level. So these are people who are experienced in their roles, they've got some reports, but they've never really considered themselves leaders. And in prepping for this, there was a series of sessions. I actually got quite

deep down the rabbit hole and came up with some stuff that I really resonated with. As always, very little of what I say or do is original. I like to steal and borrow and emulate from other people. But I sort of distilled it down to a handful of concepts which I think are very useful for any leaders, but particularly if you're trying to level up your own, let's call it middle management.

Leadership level now remember my context is always small than mid-sized businesses. I'm not talking about middle management in the context of a large corporate I'm talking about like the next wave of leaders that are coming through your business. So the overarching lens here is that Looking for certainty is a trap. It doesn't really exist in business like like the pursuit of certainty in my experience generally leads to Unhappiness because it doesn't really exist but the pursuit of clarity

is absolutely where we should be looking. So it's the certainty versus clarity trap. That's the overarching lens. The next sort of piece to this, and I'll go through obviously each one in more detail, but it's the direction of leadership. Are you needing to lead up, which is this concept of followership, or are you needing to lead down? That's the second and third pillars of this conversation. the fourth pillar is articulating very clearly

the type of leader that you want to become. So it's this identity pool, right? So just putting that together, we've got clarity versus certainty. If you're looking for certainty, you're probably gonna fail. If you're looking for clarity, you get your next action. It's a positive and constructive step. The second lens is the direction check. Do you need to lead up or do you need to lead down? And the third one is the identity. So let's get into each one of them, okay? I've spoken about clarity versus certainty already.

Mike Scott (02:21.794)
This is a real unlock for anybody really in the world is the pursuit of certainty doesn't really exist. The pursuit of clarity is absolutely within your control. What's the difference between these things? Well, certainty is looking for a certain outcome. Outcomes are usually out of your control. Clarity is getting very, very clear on what you need to do. That is within your control, internal locus of control. It's getting clear on what is the next right step. Okay, now we talk about leading up.

So there's this concept of followership that I think is very useful. Like we don't talk about it enough. Like leading up is a very, very important part for anybody to master.

We've got to lead up in all sorts of different areas of our lives and businesses. But what does it mean in a practical sense? It means in a practical sense, sometimes the leadership that is required is pulling clarity from your leader, right? If you want to get to clarity, we need to know where we are going. We need to know what is expected of us. We need to know what assumptions we are making. Just today, I got off a call, a coaching call with a client of mine, a CEO that realized that he is...

He is not leading the way he needs to be leading. And it's manifesting in an inability to provide clarity to his team. He's clear, but he's been sheltering them from all this noise he's been doing, all this work he's been doing, because he thought it was noise, where actually that is the work that they need. They need that lens into the clarity. When we talk about leading up, it's pulling from your leaders. Hey, these are the assumptions I'm making. Am I correct? This is the assumption that I'm making in terms of where we're going.

Is this consistent with the company vision? These are the assumptions that I'm making in terms of the trade-offs that I need to make in my role with my team, et cetera. This is leading up. It's extracting and pulling the clarity down that you don't already have in order for you to do your best work. Then we shift to leading down, which is a bit more commonly understood, right? That is providing the clarity to the people that report to you, the people that are depending on you. This is all about

Mike Scott (04:34.327)
giving the clarity. This is all about, hey guys, tell me what you're doing. Tell me where you're stuck. Are we on the same page here? Tell me your understanding of the most important things this quarter. Tell me your understanding of the vision, the mission, all of these things. It's extracting and making sure that your people that you're leading and influencing have got clarity. Now all of the stuff is around clarity because as we know from books like Essentialism from Greg McEwen,

We know that people do their best work when they are clear. And we know that people make up winnable games when they are not clear. So the work as leaders almost all the time is about providing clarity. Sometimes you've got to extract it, leading up. Sometimes you've got to push it down, leading down and provide it. Right. The last lens is this identity lens. And this identity lens is actually very, very powerful. And the way that I'd like you to think about this is think about the leader that has

inspired you the most or the best leader you've ever worked with or been lucky enough to have around in your life and You'll probably be able to distill it down to three attributes usually so you'll say this leader was was calm this leader was decisive and this leader was I don't know Experimental right so you've now got these three words that

you have lived experience of a really positive outcome of that leader. Those three words can become an incredibly powerful North Star for how you want to evolve as a leader. So if you pick the three words, whatever they might be, you can say, I want to be a decisive, experimental, calm leader. Then in the moment, all day, every day,

You can have this up on your monitor, you can have this somewhere you can see it. You say to yourself literally, what would a calm, decisive, curious leader do now? And you do that. Now this might sound a little crazy, it might almost sound juvenile that this actually works, but it really, really does. For example, for me this year, I have a phrase which is I want to be a calm, regulated, performant leader. And in the moments that I remember,

Mike Scott (06:55.821)
to stop and say, hold on Mike, what would a calm, regulated, performant leader do now? The answer is usually pretty clear to me, whereas if I'm just trying to flap around and figure out what to do, it's usually not in line with, in my case, wanting to be calm, regulated, and performant. So we've got these kind of cascades, right? We've got this clarity over certainty. We've got leading up and leading down, and we've got the identity lens, the type of leader that we want.

to become. And really there's like a bit of a check process that we can use day to day all the time in every decision and every stuck in every challenge and every like sort of crossroads dilemma that we've got. And it's really that lens as we stop and we say, am I seeking clarity or am I seeking certainty? If you're seeking certainty, you need to just observe that and go, hold on a minute. I actually need to be okay with ambiguity here. And we shift into clarity seeking. All right, let me stop looking for certainty.

Let me actually just get clarity on the next right thing to do. That sort of lens or filter number one. The second one is directional. Do I need to lead up or do I need to lead down? Your view on this is usually around, am I clear on what I need to do? And if you're not, you probably need to have directionally up. We need to be pulling down from the leaders.

If you're going, no, no, I'm clear, but I'm seeing the people that I lead do all sorts of different things, well then it's probably leading down, it's providing clarity. And then overarching through all of this is what would the leader that I want to become do now? What would a calm, regulated, curious, whatever the words you wanna use, leader do in this moment? And then you do that. This stuff is very, very simple, as most of the stuff that I talk about is.

but it's very, very powerful. And if you take the opposite of this, you'll usually see where breakdown happens. When we're over-optimizing for certainty and not comfortable with ambiguity, that's usually where we create really mismanaged expectations and disappointment. Where we are not articulating whether this is something that we need to extract from our leaders and feel the safety and the confidence to do that, well then we just make up winnable games.

Mike Scott (09:17.025)
and then that trickles down to the organization. And usually you have an organization that's full of politics and gossip and people are just doing lots of busy work. When you don't index on giving clarity to the people that you lead, you'll generally start saying, my people are poor performers. They don't take accountability. They're never doing what they're supposed to do. But before you can do that, you need to look at yourself and you need to say, have I provided absolute clarity for the people that I'm saying are non-performant or the people that I'm saying are not accountable?

Usually you can see you wouldn't have given them clarity. And as I say to all the people that I coach, before you can expect accountability, you need to provide clarity. And then the last lens, which is an incredibly powerful lens across your entire life is, who do I want to become? What is the kind of leader I want to be? And then ask yourself, what would that leader do in this moment? And do that. This stuff is very, very powerful. It is...

This sort of architecture is designed around...

let's call it emerging leaders, but a lot of these principles are absolutely applicable to full leadership, founders, owner-operators. So very, very simple episode today. I really just wanted to share this concept, but as always, I don't like to waffle and have a lot of fluff, so this is gonna be like less than 15 minutes. There's a lot of gold in this, right? I've executed this, I've rolled this out with businesses. This is a very powerful set of frameworks, and I would really urge you to use this as a lens.

for making decisions, right? Those four questions. Certainty, clarity, directionally up or directionally down. What is the overarching identity piece with all of this? And you will absolutely get better leadership actions and decisions. So I hope this was useful. Nice and short episode today, and I'll see you guys back again in two weeks.