The 7 Perspectives of Effective Leaders by Daniel Harkavy

Author:Daniel Harkavy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Leadership;Decision making;BUS071000;BUS107000;SEL027000
ISBN: 9781493422609
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2020-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

Seeing the Team Perspective

Make getting your teammates’ perspective an intentional, prioritized part of your job. Listening to the team must make its way into your weekly schedule in a variety of structured and unstructured ways. Through a combination of sources, levels, and roles, you cull pieces of information to form a whole.

Don’t make the mistake of believing you have this perspective simply because you have access to organizational surveys of engagement, culture, and employee satisfaction. While surveys can help you determine the kinds of conversations you need to have with your teammates, surveys alone fall short. Perspective Four requires you to develop the discipline of sitting down with and connecting regularly with your teammates.

Every leader needs qualitative as well as quantitative data. Most assessments don’t provide qualitative data, which one gets only through conversation, discussion, and observation. You must make time for it and schedule it on your calendar.

Scott Roth, CEO of Jama Software, a leading technology company in the product development space based out of Portland, Oregon, knew from the beginning that his success depended on engaging with his team members and getting their perspective. “When I first joined the company, we were at about 125 employees,” he told me, “and I was committed to sitting down with each one of them individually. It took me about a month and a half to meet with everyone, but I knew it was important to get to know everybody on a personal level. I asked about their background, their experience, why they came to work with us, and why they stayed. I asked them what they liked about the company and their jobs, as well as what they didn’t like. Those interviews gave me so much insight into how people work, what motivates them, and what they see for our company.”

The meetings made such an impression on Scott that he has made them part of every new employee experience. “Within the first week of anybody joining the company, I meet one-on-one with them, face-to-face, to really get to know them,” Scott said. “And I’m going to keep doing that until someone tells me I can’t. I think that if I can prioritize it, then I can do it forever.”

This discipline and belief make Scott an extraordinary CEO. While the concept is simple to understand, in today’s times it has become very difficult to execute. Effective leaders invest time in the basic things. “Yes, that makes absolute sense,” you probably say. But are you doing it? My work as an executive coach, and serving as a CEO myself, has shown me the difficulty of prioritizing a meeting with every new employee. But neglecting Perspective Four keeps many from becoming the extraordinary leaders that they could be.

Valuing feedback from teammates enabled me, in my twenties, to accomplish what I did in my mortgage banking career. It also gave me the courage and confidence to start a company whose basic product is one-n-ne meetings. At the time, I knew most organizations did not value one-on-ones.

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