Top 3 Rules of Great Leadership

Twenty years ago, leaders were often judged by their knowledge and aggressiveness. Back in the days, companies were managed focusing solely on “hitting target numbers”. Despite most of the companies still are in this phase, things began to shift toward a new style of leadership during the last 5 years, where the leadership also serves the employees.

I have worked with a dozen of leaders during the last 6 years. Looking back, I gave it some thought on what makes a good leader. If you plan to work your way up, you might find my top 3 leadership rules below useful, which are applied by the greatest Leaders of this decade:

1. Leaders' TFH rule: Transparency & Fairness & Honesty

Employees like certainty. Nobody does his excellent work when they’re feeling stressed. To prevent this from happening, leaders are required to be great communicators and often being transparent, direct and honest. You need to share as much as information as you can with your team, the good, the bad and the ugly.

Give them enough information communicating within transparency and honesty framework.

Don’t forget about playing by fair rules, rationalising each of your decision. Because you’re also expected to support your employees’ growth, leading by example. Try to distribute workload, resources, attention to each team member similarly to avoid any kind of favouritism. I understand how hard it can be sometimes to avoid personal feelings, but everyone at the workplace needs to be treated the same with no exclusion.

To me TFH is the most absolute foundation of leadership. If you are not transparent, fair or honest you can’t build trust and without trust, there is no loyalty, commitment or belief in the “leader.” The rule here is simple, tell the truth & be fair all the time, period.

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2. Leaders need to own both high IQ and EQ

High level of intelligence comes with the years of experience and deep subject matter expertise. This makes others to respect you not only because they're reporting to you, but also as a mentor- someone whom they could learn something from. But....

|...Is intelligence enough to be a good people manager?

Intelligence is important, but it doesn’t make a good leader without Empathy. Leaders are expected to have emotional intelligence as well. They need to maintain balance between rationality and empathy while decision-making. Especially, for millennial generation of workers who crave for support, collaboration, encouragement - balance between EQ and IQ is the core value they’re seeking on their leaders. But...avoid being too emotional, because, as a leader you can’t be biased or can't afford to show your frustration. Try to embrace even the most catastrophic news with calmness. At first because, you have to make it safe for people to bring you bad news or make mistakes. Secondly, because, a true leader understands that, the only people that will allow the company to grow or survive during a severe times are the employees.

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3. Leaders endorse freedom

Leaders cultivate freedom amongst employees' with giving them sense of control. According to Nathaniel Koloc, CEO of ReWork, this approach increases level of productivity and engagement in the team.

Here are top 3 reasons why you - as a future leader need to encourage more freedom in your workplace:

To grow more leaders

In contrast with fear-based "command system" which develops employees waiting to be told what to do, when to do and how to do, freedom style of leadership inspires team members to act independently within job description, using their best judgement without asking for permission. If employees know that they will be supported regardless of the outcome, they will feel empowered to use their best acumen to take calculated risks when needed.

This is how leaders can train more seniors and leaders and with doing so, you will eventually be spending less time to double-check or micromanage their work.

To encourage employees to have a backbone

Freedom-inspiring leaders foster an environment where people know they can give honest feedbacks, disagree with decisions without fear of being judged or terminated. For that matter, Amazon is one of my favourite companies implementing this approach: They continuously recommend their employees not to compromise for the sake of social cohesion while decision-making.

With building such an environment, you will make sure your team can respectfully challenge your decisions when they disagree, even doing so feels uncomfortable.

To build a "learning culture"

In an environment of fear, employees often hide their mistakes and hope no one would find out, trying to fix it as best as they can. On the other hand, people who work in an environment of freedom will bring their mistakes to their manager’s attention, most likely after they’ve already solved the problem (because they aren’t afraid to take initiative to fix their own mistakes). Freedom inspires looking at failure as a learning opportunity and

this is exactly what you need to stimulate as a leader because lessons learnt from a 'defeat' are as equally important as learnings from any success.

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When all the 3 core leadership rules are met, employees should feel promoted to do their best version of work. They will down their guard, trust you which will help your organisation to improve employee retention and yourself being liked, respected as a leader as you want to become.