A Self-Study Leadership Development Guide

Introduction

Many years ago, it became clear that my career would lead to a management role. I wanted to become the best manager, and eventually leader, I could be. In 2006, when I got my first management role, I didn’t even understand the difference between management and leadership. Early on, I made so many mistakes—only focusing on the tasks and projects at hand—before I realized it was all about the people themselves and not the work that needed to be completed.

I would never say that I am a great leader or manager. This assessment can only be done by the people who worked with me that I had the honor to lead and manage. But what I can say is that I learned a lot throughout these years. I have gained more and more skills and tools through coaching, being mentored, and, as said before, making mistakes. There are so many people to thank who have given me valuable advice (and sometimes harsh feedback). While what they’ve said has been invaluable, I’ve learned the most from reading books—too many to count. Sometimes, one book led to another. Sometimes, a friend suggested a book or Amazon recommended something based on my previous purchases. These algorithms apparently do work.

What I want to share with you is not only my recommended reading list but also how all these books relate to each other, what I have learned from them, why they helped me become a better leader, and most importantly, how you can apply what you will learn from these books. Reading became a red thread throughout my career and turned into a leadership development process that became more refined throughout the years.

The best thing about reading is that you can do this entirely on your own and with limited cost. You don’t need an MBA, or an amazing coach, or a mentor—which can be hard to come by. You don’t need a crazy expensive leadership development program. Those programs, by the way, often apply the same concepts that you will learn from these books and implementation guides. All these books are easy to read and understand. Management and leadership development is not rocket science and can absolutely be learned. It requires skills and experience, but it’s not limited to people with high empathy or high EQ (emotional intelligence). These traits can help you in your quest to become a better leader, for sure, but you can embark upon and complete this path even if you are an introvert and not the most passionate and motivational speaker. What you need is a commitment to the time it will take, a passion for helping people become the best they can be, a never-ending desire for self-development, and a very high degree of self-awareness. If you can commit to developing this—or if you have all these things already—you are already well on your way.

How it all started

It was during my time at RTS Realtime Systems when I embarked on my leadership development journey. A member of the leadership team recommended “the best business book” he had ever read: Good to Great by Jim Collins. At the time, I was just starting to read business books; I would barely even consider myself a reader. But what I had was time. The commute from Aurora to Chicago was around 45 minutes, and I regularly flew between Chicago and Frankfurt on a large number of business trips. Because these flights provided enough time to pick up a book or two, I began by ordering Good to Great. While it is not a leadership or management development book, it explained all the attributes that separated good companies from truly great businesses. One of these attributes was what Jim calls Level 5 Leadership.

I was hooked. As I read more of the book and learned about Level 5 Leadership—and all the other attributes that make a company great—I saw that the best way I could contribute was to figure out how to become a “Level 5” leader myself. Unfortunately, no matter how much I loved the book, it didn’t explain how this could be done; it only provided explanations on how these leaders acted and behaved. Good to Great explained personality attributes and gave anecdotes of their careers, but it did not provide a guide that you could easily implement. So, I was left with wanting more—a lot more to be honest with you—and started my quest to figure out how to successfully become a Level 5 leader.

The following paragraphs are all describing one step (book) on my personal learning path. They don’t have to be read in this order, but after reading them all several times, this order makes the most sense to me.

Situational Leadership – Be Adaptive!

The first, and one of the most impactful books for my own development, was One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard. In this simple read, Ken describes the concepts of Situational Leadership. It explains the four different leadership styles and the importance of matching these styles with the development level of a team member on a task-basis. The book describes several situations in which the one-minute manager has interactions with different team members that have different development and experience levels in various areas.

As the reader, you are joining the manager on a normal day in his office, and after each of the conversations with one of his team members, you are reviewing his approach and why he applies it with a specific person. Matching leadership style with development level is probably the most important thing to get right, especially when you are starting out as a manager. We all have natural leadership styles that we tend to apply when we talk with people. For me, in the beginning, it was the easiest to direct and to delegate. Essentially fire and forget. Applied to the wrong person, this can quickly become frustrating. This is when I learned about the supporting and coaching management styles. While these styles require more time from the manager, I soon realized how rewarding the skills that enable you to support and coach your team members are. This also created the biggest personal bond for me with my teams. But that’s a topic for another time. In this case, I am more referring to coaching for personal development rather than at a task-level.

The first thing was to identify my natural leadership styles and then improve my skills in the leadership styles that fell outside of my comfort zone. This required some time, and I am still quite thankful to all the team members in my earlier career who gave me the chance to learn. It was not always easy for both parties. When you are a new manager, being honest about expectations between each other is particularly important, but it’s definitely not easy! However, if you get this right (and don’t pretend you have all the answers), you can avoid a lot of frustration on both sides.

But back to Situational Leadership! Once you’ve learned about the different leadership skills, you must then practice matching those skills with the development level of your team member. But how do you do this if you don’t have a crystal ball? Exactly. You do it through communication and mutual agreement. Team members develop over time. And while, initially, you can simply direct somebody who picks up a task for the first time, you shouldn’t apply the same approach after this person has developed a higher competence level but is struggling with confidence.

Visually, this is how such an approach looks. The graphic shows the four different styles of Situational Leadership and the levels of directive and supportive behavior. You can take your team member along this path with you, and once you make it transparent, it’s a really amazing program. However, learning Situational Leadership is different than being able to apply it to your team members. That’s another level of skill.

I decided to become certified in Situational Leadership to be able to train others. There were two types of training offered at the time: one to apply Situational Leadership and a second to teach it. This took a lot more time than reading the book, as well as a higher monetary investment. I was very thankful to my company at the time, OptionsCity, for paying for my personal development. The program covers a LOT more than this, such as target setting, how to have meaningful development and one-on-one conversations, how to have difficult conversations, etc. The topic of having difficult conversations is an important skill to develop—I really only got the hang of it much later in my career. We will get into that more in a later article. Now, off to the next step. I hope Situational Leadership and the One Minute Manager piqued your interest. It has become my most valued skill, still today!

First Break All the Rules – Do Things Differently Than Most

Marcus Buckingham’s book, First Break All The Rules (FBATR), which was based on the largest leadership study ever to be conducted (by Gallup), was one of the biggest lightbulb moments that I’ve ever had. After my Situational Leadership training and reading this book, things started really “clicking” for me, and I got a better hand on management—not leadership yet. That came later.

While I had figured out how people require different leadership styles based on their development levels, I still followed common practices that—contrary to common belief—didn’t achieve the best results. I got onto this book by taking the survey myself. Actually, I took it two or three times to realize what was behind it. Maybe your company has also asked you to take this survey. In my experience, it’s more effective if you explain to your team or your company why they’re taking the survey while also providing the book to read. It would have saved me so much frustration! But first, here are the questions:

1.   Do I know what is expected of me at work?

2.   Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?

3.   At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?

4.   In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?

5.   Does my supervisor or someone at work seem to care about me as a person?

6.   Is there someone at work who encourages my development?

7.   At work, do my opinions seem to count?

8.   Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel like my job is important?

9.   Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?

10.  Do I have a best friend at work?

11.  In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?

12.  This last year, have I had the opportunity at work to learn and grow?

I don’t know why, but question 10 has always rubbed me the wrong way. I was always told early on in my career, “don’t mix personal and professional life.” Why in the world would my company ask me if I had a best friend at work? It made little sense to me at the time, but there is a method to this madness. When you develop friendships at work, it forms a much stronger bond between people. Trust is established and communication and conflict management gets elevated to a higher level. Also, the retention risk decreases substanstially and people view coming to work as an extension of their personal life. Time they get to spend with their friends. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

However, rather than doing the full survey together, it made more sense to me to introduce it gradually to the company I worked for at the time.

All of this is also explained in the book. This is not meant to be a summary of the book, but I would like to highlight the key ideas of FBATR:

• The best managers reject conventional wisdom.
• The best managers treat every employee as an individual.
• The best managers never try to fix weaknesses; instead, they focus on strengths and talent.
• The best managers know they are on stage every day. They know their people are watching every move they make.
• Measuring employee satisfaction is vital information for your investors.
• People leave their immediate managers, not the companies they work for.

You might already see a connection between the points above and Situational Leadership. In particular, questions 2 and 3. The Gallup study shows that companies with positive responses to the 12 questions profited more, were more productive as business units, retained more employees per year, and satisfied more customers. Some aspects of this tie directly back to Good to Great.

One additional, and in my view, huge benefit of this FBATR is the self-development assessment (or the Strengthsfinder 2.0), which is a great tool to uncover your natural strength. These strengths are established during your younger years—not skills that are learned throughout your life or professional career. The link to the assessment is included in First Break all the Rules, and it was a very good piece of information for me to have as I tried to develop areas that I was strongest at, rather than trying to invest, or even waste, countless hours to fix my weaknesses. Later on, I read the actual book, Strengthsfinder 2.0, which added a bit more context, but it is not really needed. But enough of FBATR... onto the next part.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team - How to Build a High-Performing Team

At this point, I was becoming more comfortable working with individual team members and helping them through the tools I have learned and through the increased self-awareness I gained. However—how in the world would I get this group of people to function as a unit that performs better and better as one? I always believed in the saying that teamwork always beats individual efforts. While there are exceptions to this from professional sports that lead us to believe otherwise, my goal was not to win a trophy. My goal was to get all members of the team to the point of replicating this effort and building high performing teams of their own. And in the process, we would perform better and better and win as well.

Patrick Lencioni wrote The Five Dysfunctions of a Team almost 20 years ago. In combination with the field guide, it is still the most pragmatic, common sense, and relevant guide to building high-performing teams.

You must address all five dysfunctions one after another. You can’t achieve healthy conflict or debate if there is no trust. To build trust, you have to first learn how to be vulnerable. Then your team must learn and appreciate the importance of vulnerability itself. You climb the pyramid until you reach the peak of continuously delivering excellent results. The one thing you don’t see are skills. They can be learned, or they might already be there, but they won’t help you build high-performance teams. The sum of the parts will always be more than individually skilled employees.

This, in itself, makes for a nice read and makes sense. The value of understanding (hopefully buying into) the concept in the field guide is not only for you as the manager, but also for the entire team. I went through this process several times, and it never failed me. In the end, I didn’t apply all the structured steps anymore, but the steps to achieve high-performance teams remained the same.

Level 5 Leadership - Conscious Business

I connected with Fred Kaufman in 2013. I was still on the search for the holy grail of leadership—a how-to guide that clearly explains how to reach Level 5 leadership. To be honest, I am not even sure anymore how I found his book, Conscious Business. He had just published it that year and had only a few excellent reviews on Amazon. But something made me order it, and boy am I glad I did. I will go as far and say that anyone who is serious about his or her leadership development and, for that matter, personal development, should... no, needs to read his book.

After exchanging a few emails with Fred and meeting one of his associates, I was completely sold on his approach. He was already the executive coach to Sheryl Sandberg and Jeff Weiner. I think neither one needs much explanation, but let’s just say that some of the best leaders in the country trusted Fred with their personal development. I even tried to hire Fred for a leadership coaching engagement at my company at the time, but his daily rate was already significantly more than my monthly salary. Regardless of that, he spent time with me, explaining his coaching and development program after I connected with him on LinkedIn. I normally don’t get star struck or idolize people, but in this case, I would definitely consider Fred a leadership development superstar. I have since read his book at least ten times and recommended it to countless friends and team members. I have adjusted my own approach based on his teachings. I am not sure if I will ever fully master Conscious Business, but it has become a guiding principle to me in case I drift too far away from where I want to be. At least now, I know for myself that Level 5 leadership is something real, and it can be taught. I would go as far and say that Fred’s book has made me a better person, a better husband, and a better friend.

At some point, when Fred was working at LinkedIn, he and Jeff Weiner decided to open source his entire program on the LinkedIn University for free. It is not available anymore, but you can attend the program at Fred’s online academy (CBC - Conscious Business Center). I have not done this yet, but within the next year or two, I will definitely become a student there.

Rather than going on and on about his book and work, I would like to share his session at the LinkedIn Speakers Series from 2013. The video is a bit longer but well worth the time.

Conclusions

I have read many other books, but I have found the ones above to be the most influential for my own development as a manager and leader. I have referenced them countless times and applied or taught these methods in more than three companies. I believe that they are battle-tested and work in real life. They’re not just some feel-good books that leave you wanting for me, and you can’t only just read them once; that won’t do the trick. You will likely have to read them many times, just like I did. Maybe you will decide to try them out, and most likely, the first time will be difficult. Maybe even a failure. But guess what? Management and leadership is a lot more than just a few buzz words, making promises, and sounding good on stage and at all staff meetings. It requires skills, frameworks, planning, and, most importantly, practice. But it can be learned. I fully believe this as I did it—and have continued to do it for more than 15 years.

Thank you very much for taking the time to come along with me on this journey. I hope these pages will be an inspiration in helping you to develop your own plan to achieve Level 5 leadership, or whatever your leadership pinnacle is. Good luck on your journey, and if there is anything that I can do to help, please feel free to reach out and ask.