Learning Leadership And The Power Of Smart Networking

The insights for this article have been drawn from the book new book is Seeing Around Corners: C-Suite Wisdom from America’s Most Insightful Leaders by Ken Banta – founder and CEO of the Vanguard Network.   An expert in leadership and change, Banta has aided numerous global turnarounds, mergers, and transformations for the likes of Pharmacia and Bausch & Lomb.

The best top leaders know they have the most to learn from people on the frontlines—in sales, making things, inventing things.  This is because these people are most in touch with current reality and with future trends. So, one great daily practice is to spend 15 minutes gaining those insights, whether by asking ChatGPT or trading emails with frontline contacts in your organization.

It can be hard to make unwritten rules explicit because people often feel they gain power and influence by keeping the rules unspoken.  One of the best ways to make negative unwritten rules explicit—and potentially shut them down—is for the most senior person in the group or organization literally to call those rules out in meetings and communications, giving specific examples (such as the conference table rule) and explaining why the rule is counterproductive.

The ability to really listen is more than a skill.  It’s a psychological state. Individuals who combine a high ego level with high insecurities will likely be very self-absorbed and poor listeners. Individuals with high levels of emotional intelligence find listening much easier.  One practice for better listening is stepping back to see yourself as others see you so you can understand what gets in the way of listening.  

Delegation, it’s been said, is the key to executive sanity. It’s also a critical ingredient in developing team members.  One way to do it is to realize that there are many ways to deliver a good result. Recognize that someone else can do the job very well—albeit differently than you would do it.  Another insight is to internalize ‘the wisdom of the crowd.’ Delegating important tasks to small teams instead of handling them yourself is not only efficient, you will gain new ways of thinking and operating that can be better than yours.”

Trust, of course, is the operating system of every good relationship and every high-performing team.  It’s vital to differentiate between assuming trust is granted, and actually earning it.  People don’t grant you trust just because of your role. You personally must behave in ways that earn their trust. You do this by acting on what they say and being consistent about things like goals and performance expectations.  Trust is eroded when a leader “blames others, becomes unavailable, and acts erratically.  By contrast, avoiding blame games, staying close to the team, and staying calm and focused in a crisis will earn you huge reservoirs of trust.

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