Becoming a great Leader ..... it takes more than just reading books!

I’ve got a lot of leadership and coaching books (approaching 100) that I’ve collected over the years that I’ve been in leadership roles. My collection is a broad church; it holds some of the more recognised leadership texts (e.g., Jim Collins ‘Good to Great’; Peter Senge ‘The Fifth Discipline’; Patrick Lencioni ‘The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team’), alongside perhaps some less well-known books (e.g., Ray McLean ‘Any Given Team’; Will Storr ‘The Science of Storytelling’; Nigel Collin ‘The Game of Inches’).

Collection of leadership books

I started reading leadership and coaching books early in my leadership career for two reasons. Firstly, I wanted to broaden my knowledge and understanding of the many different theories, views and practices for being a leader and leading teams (both good and bad); secondly, I was looking for practical tips and tricks that I could implement to help me become a better leader.

After a while, I was making progress with the first objective but struggling with the second. Most of the books that I read had great content, with fully explained theories, concepts and models, but many lacked details in how to apply them ‘in the field’. I was looking for a ‘perfect answer’ – the practical approach that I could apply immediately, and it would generate instant, positive results. It took me a long time to realise that I was chasing the ‘pot of gold at the end of the rainbow’ (in my defence, I was still a young leader at the time!).

I recognised that you don’t get to become a good leader by reading lots of books, looking for the perfect answer (‘to become a good leader you must ……’) and then just doing that. The more that I read, the more I found that there’s no single answer; as a leader, I had to find the parts of the many leadership theories, concepts and models that resonated with me to give me the background knowledge to become the leader that I wanted to be.

But even that wasn’t enough – knowledge by itself won’t make you good at anything; you need to put the knowledge into practice to hone your skills and become better at what you do. For me as a young leader, this was my dilemma – what happens if I get it wrong? I wasn’t using some woodworking knowledge that I had acquired to build a chair; I was applying some leadership models that I’d read in books with the aim of leading my team in a better way. The worst case scenario from my woodworking efforts could have been a 'wonky' chair; if I got it wrong when applying some new approach when leading my team, the outcome could be much worse!

I realised that to become a better leader, I had to become ‘comfortable’ with the potential for failure, and it is this point that I believe often holds back leaders from becoming better leaders. I was lucky – although I was a young leader in a time before the current increased focus on psychological safety, my company had a good, positive workplace culture, and I was encouraged to improve both my performance and the performance of my area. With this background and the support of my leader, I trialled/tested numerous leadership approaches, methods and techniques; some worked, some didn’t, but I learnt a lot from the things that didn’t work and ultimately, grew as a leader.

As I became a more experienced leader and had junior leaders working for me, I spent a large amount of my time encouraging my direct reports to develop as leaders and creating an environment where they felt supported and where it was ‘safe to fail’. Their development was reliant on them knowing that it was okay if something that they introduced didn’t work – our focus was on extracting the learning from these situations, so that this learning could be applied the next time.

Interestingly, this approach wasn’t adopted commonly by peers in some of the organisations that I have worked in, and its absence led to other leaders stagnating, retreating or leaving.

So, I ask all experienced leaders who are reading this…… what are you doing to generate a workplace culture where your direct reports feel that it’s ‘safe to fail’? We know that no-one gets everything right first time and that personal growth and failure are intimately linked; as Richard Branson noted ‘You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over’. As leaders, if we're fearful of the consequences from falling over, we'd never learn to walk!